[Web4lib] The battle for Wikipedia's soul - The Economist on the future of Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Excuse me for following up on some old posts.
On March 10, Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt wrote:

> These notability "rules" (which are interpreted every which way) are
> what stops Wikipedia from reflecting the work of independent artists. 
> This means artists whose work is directly on the Web as well as off it.

I don't understand this.  If an "independent" artist gets featured 
in a magazine, there's nothing in the "independence" (from large 
recording companies, I presume) that stops them from being 
considered notable.  But an artist that never gets featured in any 
magazine, what kind of an artist is that?  Is that any different 
from me and you singing in the shower?  And we don't get 
encyclopedic articles for our performances.

Please understand that Wikipedia has become an extremely popular 
website (that was not the intention, the intention was to write a 
free encyclopedia), and that there is a big and growing problem 
with all people singing in the shower who want an article about 
themselves. There is a real need for a tool to weed them out, so 
Wikipedia can remain an encyclopedia and not just a public 
noticeboard.  If you don't like the notability rules, you need to 
come up with an alternative solution.  The floodgates aren't just 
going to be removed.

> The work of the "deletionists" around the whole topic of web 
> comics is an extremely visible case for this.  A few years back 
> you had articles on just about every Web comic existing.  Now 
> the pendulum has swung in the other direction and it's nearly 
> impossible to put an article on a Web comic in there.

Look at any library.  The section for encyclopedias is a tiny 
fraction of that.  They are supposed to cover all topcis, but none 
in great detail. Encyclopedia Britannica is not Contemporary 
Authors.  Nothing stops you or anybody else from creating a 
specialized directory of web comics.  But it isn't necessarily 
part of Wikipedia.

> The sad thing is that the work of the deletionists is not 
> focused in a general way on maintaining a good level of quality 
> or "notability" on all types of articles .  It's focused instead 
> on a limited set of popular topics, or "dangerous" political 
> topics.

So, given that there are and need to be rules for notability, it 
is certainly possible that they function better or worse in 
different subject areas.  It would be interesting to see a deeper 
analysis of this.  That would be useful for fine tuning the 
balance.  But as of now, all critics sound exactly like the people 
who had their articles on shower singing removed.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se