inclusionists vs. deletionists at Wikipedia
The Economist has a good article about the perpetual battle between those who think Wikipedia ought to err on the side of including trivia vs. those who think its articles ought to be on topics worthy of inclusion in a very very big encyclopedia.
Personally, I am an inclusionist. “Wiki is not paper,” as Jimmy Wales says. The Web — including its encyclopedias — is different.
And you?
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cbaird
March 25, 2008 @ 7:55 pm
Inclusionist. This weekend I found myself turning to wikipedia to find out what a rapscallion was. If deletionists are to decide what is worthy, would rapscallion make the cut? If not, why? What about personal bio’s? How it be decided what people make the cut? Popularity? Charisma? Good looks? In my opinion the best part of wikipedia is that these questions don’t need to be answered.
dweinberger
March 25, 2008 @ 8:13 pm
In fact, there’s a whole set of criteria about personal bios. Otherwise, there would be millions of them at Wikipedia. On the other hand, what would be wrong with that?
skass
March 29, 2008 @ 9:27 pm
Put me down for the inclusionist camp as well. If articles are on irrelevant topics, who cares? With metadata and disambiguation techniques readily available, it should be easy enough to avoid such pages in the course of regular use. But they’d still be there for those times when you need to know what a rapscallion is.
kparker
March 31, 2008 @ 1:22 am
I think the problem with lots of personal bios occurs at disambiguation for common names. While there only seems to be one David Weinberger on wikipedia there are plenty of John Smith’s. So many that there is a whole sub-divided page of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith
While many of them should be on there, at some point we need a filter so that we don’t have to sift through 5 layers of meta-data to find the John Smith that we want.