[WikiEN-l] Juvenalia

Fri May 20 00:08:56 UTC 2005

I'm thinking out loud, and I am not making any specific proposal or 
coming to any particular conclusion.

I haven't been following the recent school brouhaha, but it seems to me 
there's an aspect to the school issue that people have been tapdancing 
around.

In addition to the general encyclopedias, there are a host of 
single-volume encyclopedias on limited topics. The Encyclopedia of 
Chicago. The Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Encyclopedia of Western Railroad 
History. The American Horticultural Society A to Z Encyclopedia of 
Garden Plants. The New International Encyclopedia of Bible 
Difficulties. Donna Kooler's Encyclopedia of Crochet. The New 
Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. The Star Wars Encyclopedia. The 
Comic Book Encyclopedia.

My guess is that I would personally accept 99% of this material as 
being "encyclopedic," even if much of it is on material I personally 
have little interest in. Why? Because to me, encyclopedic does not mean 
"of personal interest to me." It means "having _some_ reasonable level 
of thoroughness, accuracy, and scholarship." An article _needs_ to have 
these things if it is to serve the reader.

But Wikipedia is an all-volunteer contribution. That means that it also 
needs to serve contributors. But there has to be some kind of balance.

A vanity page is an obvious example of a page that is out of balance. 
It serves _primarily_ the ego of the contributor.

Now, what happens when someone wants to contribute to Wikipedia, but 
doesn't really have the skill set to do so?

I suspect that a lot of the arguments about certain classes of article 
are really related to age-specific interest, and to age-related levels 
of skill and maturity. I sometimes fancy I hear in these debates the 
voices older siblings putting younger ones in their place. Articles 
about Pokemon are baby stuff--wait until you grow up and can write 
articles about _serious_ things like Harry Potter. Harry Potter 
articles are cruft--they're not _important,_ like Hilary Duff, or 
Britney Spears, or Justin Timberlake.

I sometimes fancy that when people say "let _articles_ undergo organic 
growth," which is nonsense because article do not grow, people write 
them, what they are really saying is "don't discourage young 
_contributors_" (who certainly will undergo organic growth).

The problem with high schools has little to do with notability. It is 
that the people most likely to be interested in writing articles about 
them are people of high-school age, who _for the most part_ tend not to 
have the skills to write very good encyclopedia articles. These 
articles tend to be out of balance: they mostly serve the needs of the 
contributors, rather than the needs of readers.

Now if, in fact, we actually have a crowd of serious worker bees who 
really will swarm around all the little irritating particles of school 
substubs and deposit the nacre of scholarship on them until they become 
sparkling crystals :-) then there's probably no harm in them...

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/