[WikiEN-l] GNAA Deleted!

Thu Nov 30 16:32:21 UTC 2006

I for one think it's pathetic that Wikipedia is giving up on the mission of
being a complete encyclopedia because there exist specialty sites on
particular areas of knowledge.

On 11/29/06, Laurence Parry <greenreaper at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> 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
>
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