On 2/24/07, Philip Sandifer <sandifer(a)english.ufl.edu> wrote:
I just had dinner with [[Scott McCloud]], and,
unsurprisingly, the
conversation turned to webcomics, and, eventually, to Wikipedia's
treatment of them. (This was partially spurred by the Kristopher
Straub debacle, about which I will say only that it demonstrates the
degree to which the bias is overwhelmingly towards deletion across
many areas of Wikipedia right now)
As a general rule attempting to prove anything from an n=1 sample is a
really really bad idea.
If we accept those I can show that people are adding webcomic articles
to wikipedia in order to promote them.
McCloud is somebody who knows comics. He quite
literally wrote the
book on them. In the course of the conversation it became clear that
he was pretty well completely fed up with Wikipedia. And it should be
noted, this comes from someone who has been on the forefront of
digital technology debates several times. He makes clear his
admiration for the concept of Wikipedia. He makes clear his
admiration for how Wikipedia got started. His problem is with how it
works now.
His problem is that wikipedia isn't what he wants it to be. Wikipedia
is the second or third to document things not the first.
The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the
arbitrary and
capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.
Treating those outside wikipedia as a single homogeneous group is
illogical. Different groups will have different views about whether or
not certain guidelines make sense. can find plenty of groups that
think including any webcomics at all make us inferior and think that
our inclusion of such non entities as penny arcade.
See also Timothy Noah's recent article on Slate
for this - it gives a
good view of how notability guidelines look to the outside. In this
case, it's how they look to the subject of the article, but I assure
you - they look similar to people who are familiar with the subject.
In short, they appear a Kafka-esque absurdity.
Almost any set of rules can be made to appear that way.
This is a new problem - these are major figures who
are sympathetic
to Wikipedia but fed up with its operation. And I can tell you, the
tone among people I talk to in that real life thing I maintain is
pretty similar - great respect for Wikipedia as a concept, reasonable
respect for Wikipedia as a resource, no respect for Wikipedia as
something anyone would ever want to edit. The actual editorial
process of Wikipedia is rightly viewed as a nightmare. Hell, I view
it as a nightmare at this point - I've given up editing it because
the rules seem to have been written, at this point, with the
intention of writing a very bad encyclopedia.
No they are written with the objective of avoiding an extremely bad
encyclopedia.
Our efforts to ensure reliability have come at the
cost of a great
deal of respect - and respect from people we should have respect
from. We are losing smart, well-educated people who are sympathetic
to Wikipedia's basic principles. That is a disaster.
You would have to show that we would not have lost respect from them
anyway and that any net change in respect levels is worse than what
would have happened if we had not taken steps to try and ensure
reliability.
And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely at
the feet of the
grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
good articles into crap,
systematically?
and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
in turning bad articles into good ones.)
Various articles with fridge fanatics would be an example.
--
geni