[WikiEN-l] Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Taking your eyes off the ball

Mon Oct 3 15:13:07 UTC 2005

geni wrote:

>On 10/2/05, Tony Sidaway <f.crdfa at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>This isn't a problem. It's what has made English Wikipedia one of the
>>largest reference works in the English language.
>>    
>>
>It is a problem becuase you run into the issue of not very good
>articles. Your proposal won't work because only a very small number of
>people want to work on subjects they are not interested in when they
>could work on subjects they are interested in.
>
It's only natural to work on what interests you, and that's fine.  It 
does mean that some areas get less attention than they should, but very 
few people are able to write a superior article outside of their 
interests.  They're often lacking the general background.

>Most people have two driveing factors.1.) the desire to write stuff
>2). the desire to write about stuff they are interested in. Now lets
>see how inclusonism and deletionism work on this two factors.
>Inclusonism plays to both factors but results in a large number of
>articles that only one person cares about. Works against the second
>but gains the advantage of encourageing colaberation since  A space is
>smaller it means that editors are more likely to interact. This means
>that the mean number of active editors per article increases. This
>increase the mean amount of editor energy per article which in turn
>increases their quality. Sure in time you may exauste A space at which
>point it is time to enlarge it but until then there is no need to do
>so.
>  
>
The deletionist's anomaly is that he is often nominating articles that 
are outside of his interests.  If a candidate article comes up in his 
own field of interest he is in a better position to improve it.  I don't 
have a lot of interest in rock bands, so apart from a very few very big 
names none of them are notable to me.  Taking that further, even if I 
were interested in such music how could I possibly evaluate the local 
scene in some other large city.  Of course, if I participate in the vote 
I expect my vote to be counted even if I have no idea WTF I'm talking 
about.  If it's a matter of rock bands (and similarly for other 
subjects), perhaps a vote should have less value if the person has done 
no editing in that subject area.

Ec