[WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!

Thu Nov 30 01:36:05 UTC 2006

>> Should Wikipedia accept original research or use less-than-ideal sources 
>> in
>> cases where there is little or no existing literature? Nope: the reader 
>> would
>> have no way to establish whether they could trust an article's contents. 
>> It
>> might work if you had those articles controlled by verifiable experts, 
>> but
>> again, Wikipedia's not that encyclopedia.
>
> I feel that if I go to Wikipedia to look up something relatively
> notable, and Wikipedia's response is "We don't have an article on
> that", then Wikipedia has failed me. If Wikipedia's response is
> "GNAA's website is X, and we couldn't verify any information beyond
> that, but here are some blogs", then it has performed much better.

On a similar note . . . a fortnight ago there was a spate of AfDs for furry 
fandom articles, including a few furry conventions. Many of these articles 
were little more than "X is a furry convention in Y occuring at Z, it has 
1000 people attend each year here's their website". Nobody was actually 
disagreeing that this was the case, but there was a lot of "Furrycruft!", 
"Wikipedia isn't a dictionary!" and "if you can't find a reliable 3rd party 
published source, you must convict!" flying around.

What I ended up doing was creating [[furry convention]], which is 
essentially "[here's all the stuff we know in general about furry 
conventions from the reliable sources], if you want to know more about 
PafCon in particular, you want to go look at their website and at WikiFur, 
which is an encyclopedia that can contain original research and unverifiable 
material".

Of course, PafCon doesn't have a website because it's a fictional 
convention, but you get the idea. If Wikipedia doesn't want to write about 
topics, a good alternative is to do some kind of portal to direct people to 
those who *do* want to write about it, as long as they are doing so 
competently. That's helpful for the user because they get the information 
they're looking for, and it's helpful for Wikipedia because it avoids 
repeated creation of pages about "non-notable" topics (which inevitably 
result in a certain proportion of angst-filled AfDs that burn some of our 
most dedicated contributors out).

---
Laurence "GreenReaper" Parry
http://greenreaper.co.uk - http://wikifur.com 