[Wikipedia-l] A parallel World Wide Web?

Sat Jun 5 00:47:52 UTC 2004

>>>>> "J" == Jared  <redjar at redjar.org> writes:

    J> This thread seems to have gotten stuck on what is appropriate
    J> and what isn't appropriate for Wikipedia content.  There is _no
    J> way_ everyone will ever agree on that and it seems sort of a
    J> pointless argument.

It's not an equivalent question at all. "What are our goals?" "What
are we making?"  "What belongs?" and "What doesn't?" are pretty
logical and reasonable questions to ask for the creation of any body
of text.

If the answers were, "We have no goals, and anything goes," we'd have
a real shitty encyclopedia. We _do_ have goals, however, and some
pretty consistent standards of what belongs.

I know it may seem like we'll never agree, but we _have_, in a lot of
cases. These things have been decided over the course of this
project. We don't include original research, we don't do biographies
for non-famous people. We don't have dictionary definitions or copies
of public-domain text. We don't have opinion pieces or soapbox
rhetoric.

    J> We might as well try to determine "what is art?".

Not equivalent at all. It's not a semantic distinction about a single
word, but a question of the content of an encyclopedic work.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org>
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