[WikiEN-l] Re: Resolving content disputes

Wed Oct 29 00:36:16 UTC 2003

>Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>I think that deletionism forgets that Wiki Is Not Paper, and that
>>completionism is likely to lead us to a better final article.
>>
>>
>The problem with this approach is that while Wiki is Not Paper, readers' 
>attention spans are limited.  If I want to read an overview of Mother 
>Theresa's life, I most certainly do not want it to be 20 pages long.  I'd 
>much prefer a more summarized (dare I say, "encyclopedia-style") biography. 
>  If the rest of the information must be in Wikipedia, it'd be nice if it 
>were factored out into separate articles (maybe "Criticism of Mother 
>Theresa" and "Reasons for Mother Theresa's Beatification" or something 
>similar).  Generally if a Wikipedia article is so ridiculously long that 
>nobody not doing a thesis on the topic would want to read it, it becomes 
>much less useful to the general public.
>
>-Mark

Absolutely correct. Encyclopædic articles are not simply limited by paper 
but by a range of other issues; readability, context, comprendability, 
communicative structure, layout, etc. Extraordinarily complex topics need a 
lot of space; World Wars I and II, Vietnam War, intellectual concepts, major 
historical facts, etc but except in extreme cases we need to keep 
biographies readable, not turn them into theses simply because we don't have 
a paper usgae limit. Saying 'lets get everything we can in because we can' 
isn't encyclopædic, it is amateurish. Encylopædias communicate themes, 
movements, contexts, relevances, not a 'fling the whole lot in' approach. We 
have books to do that. An encyclopædia fulfils a different educational role. 
And all producing articles of mini-thesis size will do is frighten away 
readers, because people don't come to encyclopædias for that sort of 
information, which they can get, written by professional 
sociologists/historians/academics on the shelves of their library. If they 
can get a five paragraph summary in Brittanica, and a good book in the 
library they will do it, in preference to a 32K article whose reliability 
they cannot vouch for because they don't know how qualified the authors were 
to write about it or how much is someone's personal agenda, on wikipedia. We 
need to remember what an encyclopædia is and is not, what we can do well and 
by our nature we cannot do well. And in depth NPOV is not wikipedia's strong 
point given that it does not go through independent assessment but is 
produced in a free-for-all writing spree. (Often that free-for-all approach 
produces superb stuff. All too often it doesn't, as the embarrassing article 
on Mother Teresa, which not a single solitary person hasn recommended in 
preference to a better, more NPOV version by Adam Carr, is the embodiment 
of, showing what happens when an article goes seriously, embarrassingly and 
indeed almost comically wrong.)

JT

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