[WikiEN-l] To: Jimmy Wales - Admin-driven death of Wikipedia

Sat Jun 10 01:04:46 UTC 2006

On 6/9/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/06, maru dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's close, but not quite it. I think what it is more about is that
> > previously encyclopedias were written by fairly homogenous "elites",
> > if you will, and that the inherent economic limits meant that they
> > were forced to stay within the area of "no-brainers", subjects which
> > were to them obviously encyclopedia-worthy, which they could easily
> > reach consensus on, being fairly homogenous elites. But by the same
> > token, that means that they never had to grapple with any edge issues,
> > whereas we do, as en has by and large exhausted a good many of the
> > obviously encyclopedia-worthy articles (though not all, or else we
> > wouldn't have the missing encyclopedia article project), and so must
> > confront the margins; and of course, Wikipedia is hardly written by a
> > fairly homogenous elite, regardless of whatever it may have started
> > life as, or the realities of its power structure.
>
> Also, we have large numbers of people extremely willing and ready to
> write detailed articles on topics of dubious interest. We have
> articles on every single episode of most major TV shows, and lots of
> minor ones. You would never see that in any encyclopaedia.
>
> Steve

Well, that's sort of what I meant. The usual run-of-the-mill elites
would not concern themselves with such things (although I have heard
of *some* encyclopedias of TV shows and such starting to emerge in the
past half-century), and being homogenous, there would not be a
subfaction interested in such things. Whereas we...

~maru