Inclusionism is 9/10ths of the problem of WP Options Rating

[JohnA]

I wrote this in the middle of another discussion but I thought it deserved its own thread.

For the inclusionists (who I take to be those people who think bandwidth and server space are infinite, especially if they're not paying for it), I would say this:

Fine wine is a distillation of grape minus the crap. If you dilute it, there comes a point where it is no longer classified as wine. Take it further still, and it is not classified as anything but water.

Encyclopedias are not and never have been about "the sum of all knowledge". They are a distillation of knowledge. Knowledge where more and more trivia is added to, stops being an encyclopedia. Take it further still, and it no longer qualifies as knowledge. It is all trivia.

I read Britannica as a child, and I can certainly testify that the point of Britannica was to get me to check facts and read books that underpin Britannica.

I have read a large number of articles on Wikipedia (probably 40-50,000 articles) on a wide range of subjects. Most of the time Wikipedia forces me to question Wikipedia's presentation of facts and how much a subject has been screwed with by ignoramuses.

Occasionally there are great articles, but I feel sorry for the poor bastards who created such great articles whose work can be shat upon literally by anyone with an Internet connection at any time day or night. You know what? After reading Wikipedia, I don't feel like checking sources, because if they're as badly written as the text, I don't want to waste my precious lifespan on it.

Most Wikipedian articles are badly written, syntactic minefields of poor reasoning which can only derive from the multitudes of people for whom English may be their only language but its not the one they're comfortable expressing themselves in.

Tenses are usually the first sign that articles have been written by two or more people. Subjects having no object and objects without subjects are usually the second sign. A taste for sensationalism over comprehensiveness pervades Wikipedia, as well as something I call "fashionable nonsense" - the idea that if a proposition is held to be true by some academics or other self-important people and hyped by celebrities then it must be true regardless of the evidence.

So in conclusion, and to shorten the post to a nice point: Fuck inclusionism. Inclusionism to Wikipedia is what causes most of the problems.

Just imagine if people didn't have the right to create new articles unless the article subject was first passed by a responsible editorial board - Wikipedia would be a lot smaller and the articles would be a whole lot better because with a limited supply of articles, the premium would be on quality and completeness. Imagine if the Wikimedia Foundation stopped all creates unless 95% of current articles passed stringent quality checks - so its either get the article right or if that can't be done, AFD the crap with gusto. The same with BLPs - can't write a biography? Then don't write one at all.

[Amarkov]

There is nothing wrong with wanting to include lots of articles. Part of the allure of Wikipedia is that you can find information on pretty much anything; if you can't, why not go to Brittanica or something? At the very least "inclusionism" in that sense is arguable.

The problem is with the people who want to include ANYTHING that someone feels like writing. Someone writes a page on themselves? "Okay", they say, "that looks like a valuable resource!" Someone writes about the hill behind their house? "Well, that's a geographical location, so an article on it is acceptable!" (Yes, I have actually had someone tell me this.) Their philosophy is "to hell with accuracy; we need to cover everything that exists or is claimed to exist!"

But very few people are actually inclusionist in that way.

[everyking]

There is nothing wrong with wanting to include lots of articles. Part of the allure of Wikipedia is that you can find information on pretty much anything; if you can't, why not go to Brittanica or something? At the very least "inclusionism" in that sense is arguable.

The problem is with the people who want to include ANYTHING that someone feels like writing. Someone writes a page on themselves? "Okay", they say, "that looks like a valuable resource!" Someone writes about the hill behind their house? "Well, that's a geographical location, so an article on it is acceptable!" (Yes, I have actually had someone tell me this.) Their philosophy is "to hell with accuracy; we need to cover everything that exists or is claimed to exist!"

But very few people are actually inclusionist in that way.

To the extent that anyone actually holds such a viewpoint as that, I think they must be newcomers or people not seriously invested in the project. It's not a problem because it's not remotely significant.

Inclusionism is the essence of Wikipedia. It's what gives Wikipedia a purpose, the potential to be an impossibly vast, unmatched collection of knowledge.

You mis-spelled "Pokemon". But you knew that, didn't you?

Aren't you aware that nearly all the Pokemon content is gone? Deleted by deletionists? Wikipedia was a pretty good resource on Pokemon a year ago, but not anymore. I mourn the death of all that content, but it would be nice if, as a consolation prize, deletionists could cease the jabs about WP being the world's biggest Pokemon encyclopedia and so on.

This post has been edited by everyking: Tue 22nd April 2008, 5:16am

[taiwopanfob]

Aren't you aware that nearly all the Pokemon content is gone? Deleted by deletionists? Wikipedia was a pretty good resource on Pokemon a year ago, but not anymore. I mourn the death of all that content, but it would be nice if, as a consolation prize, deletionists could cease the jabs about WP being the world's biggest Pokemon encyclopedia and so on.

My memory is not failing, and Doc Glasgow's answer checks out. I clicked in 10 pages of hits and it was solid wikipedia articles all the way down. Each one different and unique. If "nearly all" of it is now gone ... well, I can't help myself but quote a long section of a piece of fiction, of all things:

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

The CIC brass can't stand these guys because they upload staggering quantities of useless information to the database, on the off chance that some of it will eventually be useful. It's like writing down the license number of every car you see on your way to work each morning, just in case one of them will be involved in a hit-and-run accident. Even the CIC database can only hold so much garbage. So, usually, these habitual gargoyles get kicked out of CIC before too long.

Man, how did Stephenson nail it, and nail it 16 years ago?

Anyways, the opposite of inclusionist is not deletionist: there is more than one dimension.

[Milton Roe]

Aren't you aware that nearly all the Pokemon content is gone? Deleted by deletionists? Wikipedia was a pretty good resource on Pokemon a year ago, but not anymore. I mourn the death of all that content, but it would be nice if, as a consolation prize, deletionists could cease the jabs about WP being the world's biggest Pokemon encyclopedia and so on.

I don't know what you guys are complaining about. Wikia is there to siphon/harvet cruft from Wikipedia in just this way. The fanboys exist to create it, the deletionists exist to clean it out, and Wikia exists to make use of it for its proper function: ad platform to make money for Jimbo in the way he kicks himself Wikipedia isn't.

http://pokemon.wikia.com/wiki/Home

There you are. Nothing wasted. But this stuff is seeded with the labor of people who really did do it (and some of it on Wikipedia) for the good of fandom and not to make Jimbo money. If you're looking for hypocrisy, here it is. But don't complain that this stuff gums up WMF and Wikipedia, and that Jimbo makes money from it, too, when it's siphoned off to Wikia. You can't have it both ways.

Myself, I'm an inclusionist. I think the fact that Jimbo lives off this kind of thing is a little like the Matrix, but real. However, it seems to disturb other people very little so who am I to care? I don't write it.

This post has been edited by Milton Roe: Wed 23rd April 2008, 5:04am