Is There a Place for Deletionism in Wikipedia?
Just dipping a toe in the water with something too big for Twitter, but that I definitely have a few thoughts on which I am willing to pitch out onto the internet.
Yesterday evening and this morning I watched (Or overheard? No idea what the appropriate term here is...) an exchange over Twitter between Tim Bray and Jeff Atwood about "deletionism". Tim's thoughts on the matter were apparently too strong to be held within the restrictive confines of Twitter and so he wrote a strongly worded post on his blog as well.
The post is obviously... passionate. But putting aside the bulk of the post that simply expresses that passion, he makes a couple really strong points.
The first point is that deletionists are just your garden variety elitists.
The other point really could have comprised the whole post and, IMHO, would have been a sufficient argument all by itself.
This, to me, undermines the deletionists' whole platform. That is what Wikipedia was supposed to be: a new model of information archival. A model not subject to the sensibilities of some authoritarian arbiters of what is "notable" or "interesting". And the deletionists are unequivocally trying to undermine this goal, by deciding what "deserves" to be archived.
I say, if they want to take that old dead-tree encyclopedia model and just port it to the web, they can go find their own site, and their own content, to do it with. I've even got a couple recommendations for them.
Yesterday evening and this morning I watched (Or overheard? No idea what the appropriate term here is...) an exchange over Twitter between Tim Bray and Jeff Atwood about "deletionism". Tim's thoughts on the matter were apparently too strong to be held within the restrictive confines of Twitter and so he wrote a strongly worded post on his blog as well.
The post is obviously... passionate. But putting aside the bulk of the post that simply expresses that passion, he makes a couple really strong points.
The first point is that deletionists are just your garden variety elitists.
"the arguments from the deletionists are jargon-laden (hint: real experts use language that the people they’re talking to can understand)"
The other point really could have comprised the whole post and, IMHO, would have been a sufficient argument all by itself.
"What harm would ensue were Wikipedia to contain an accurate if slightly boring entry on someone who was just an ordinary person and entirely fame-free? Well, Wikipedia’s “encyclopedia-ness” might be impaired... but I thought the purpose of Wikipedia was to serve the Net’s users, not worry about how closely it adheres to the traditional frameworks of the reference publishing industry?" [emphasis added]
This, to me, undermines the deletionists' whole platform. That is what Wikipedia was supposed to be: a new model of information archival. A model not subject to the sensibilities of some authoritarian arbiters of what is "notable" or "interesting". And the deletionists are unequivocally trying to undermine this goal, by deciding what "deserves" to be archived.
I say, if they want to take that old dead-tree encyclopedia model and just port it to the web, they can go find their own site, and their own content, to do it with. I've even got a couple recommendations for them.