[WikiEN-l] Re: Why is this an emergency?

Sun Sep 25 21:53:53 UTC 2005

On Sun, 25 Sep 2005, Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:

> Oldtimers: is the school struggle just par for the course, or does it
> represent an emerging and deepening _lack_ of consensus on important
> issues?
>
Well, about the only people who still post here when I started at
Wikipedia (October, 2002) are Ed Poor & Maverick, so I'll take the
heat & offer my opinion on the matter.

I think the "school struggle" is a result of three or four principles
present in Wikipedia, & that have been interpreted in numerous ways
by various partisans:

* Wikipedia is a collection of knowledge. This ideal has been expressed
in a number of ways, & Jimbo is not the only one who gets quoted about
this, but in its most sucinct phrasing, the Wikipedia community does not
want to exclude any information that might be reasonably useful to
someone.

* Do not datadump. In the old days, the immediate goal of Wikipedia was
to attract enough contributions to reach the tipping point where
the non-Wikipedians might actually bother to use what we created. (At
some point before I landed here, the joke was that Wikipedia was the
site that was mostly about Ayn Rand.) But when that tipping point was
reached -- & passed -- & people actually considered Wikipedia useful,
we started to get picky about what was in Wikipedia. (I suspect that
is part of the ongoing controversy with the contributions of Daniel C.
Boyer.) To repeat what I wrote in another email, many Wikipedians
beleive that there is some kind of threshold beneath which we should
not accept articles.

* Notability is a subjective measure, & often faddish. I happen to
own a one-volume encyclopedia that was published in 1920, & I find
it interesting to see which authors from the 19th century they have
listed as notable. I consider myself informed about the period, yet
this book both mentions authors I have not heard of (e.g. Margaret
Fuller Ossoli & Stephen Collins Foster), while omitting authors I
believe any current work of reference would include (e.g. Emily Dickinson
& Theodore Dreiser). My point is that far too often something people
assume one day that is not not notable, tomorrow another generation
wishes we had taken the time to document more fully.

* With all honesty, few high schools are worth a Wikipedia article.
As I write this, I have to wonder if this is just another version of
David Gerard's observation about Geogre & alternative rock bands:
because they are familiar, we depreciate their value. However, the
high school I attended is in no way notable: none of the
faculty has done anything worthy of especial attention; few of the
former students went on to do world-changing activities (with one
exception -- who is not me); even the building is, architecturally
speaking, nondescript. The fact that it has a Wikipedia article I
find embarassing.

Having an article about any person or place endows it with a certain
amount of fame. And there will always be a certain number of subjects
which people will think does not deserve the attention a Wikipedia
article gives it -- even if that fame or attention is "not that big
of a matter" (to paraphrase Jimbo out of context).

Geoff