[WikiEN-l] Unnecessary fork update

Tue Jan 17 00:04:45 UTC 2006

David Gerard wrote:

>
>I should add: it's distinctly odd and disquieting to see so many people
>reacting to this with apparent denial - claiming it couldn't really be
>because Wikipedia has places that threat people badly enough that outsiders
>don't want to risk it any more, it must be some other barely-plausible
>reason. (I remember geni trying to make this out to be the case with the
>Comixpedia fork even when it was explicitly because AFD were being complete
>arses.) This is actually a problem and I submit that it's a serious one.
>Is two enough? Will it be a problem with three or four? It's not the fact
>of the forks, it's the reason for them.
>
I submit that the AfD situation with respect to forks is a symptom
of our lack of consensus on WP's desired scope and depth. For
instance, I and others can (and have) written articles on plants and
animals for which the Google hits are down in the teens, and for
which there may be only a handful of mentions in print. Arguably,
these species are only of interest to specialists, and not appropriate
for a "general encyclopedia", but rarely do they get listed on AfD as
non-notable. Conversely, a doll manufacturer with a half-million
customers could easily get listed. Is the obscure species really
more "notable" then?

As long as the definition of notability gets left in the hands of AfD
habitues, that's what outsiders are going to use to determine whether
their interest falls inside or outside WP's scope. I don't think all
forks are avoidable, for instance if specialists want to build a wiki
that is used for research and thus mixes up published and original
material. But right now outsiders have no page they can look at that
will clearly tell them whether their planned level of depth is
considered appropriate for WP, and so AfD ends up being a sort of
crude measuring tool.

Stan