User:Shii/Food for thought

Inclusionism from the Top Down

Here's an old-fashioned Wikipedian philosophy essay. I wrote this so that I can think about it and come back in a year, and see if I was right. I haven't actually announced this essay anywhere so if you're reading it you're among a select few. Enjoy.

You might like to know that when Wikipedia was founded, it took a while for people to realize that it was different from a regular encyclopedia. Look, for example, at the old article about astronomy, which angrily informs you not to make articles about petty subjects such as eccentricity or rotation because "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" (a frequent complaint circa 2001).

Then Lee Daniel Crocker pointed out that Wiki is not paper. What he wrote, and the ensuing discussion, is rather prophetic:


 * Why shouldn't there be a page for every Simpsons character, and even a table listing every episode, all neatly crosslinked and introduced by a shorter central page like the above? (Crocker)


 * This might make it very difficult to use the search function of Wikipedia, because any simple search would return a vast number of results. If there were a way to meta-tag articles with keywords, this would help, but there is currently no way to do that. (TimShell)

That's what it means to gather all the information in the world. Now, take an example of what happens when stuff that gets deleted. Let's say Joe wants to make an article about the latest episode of Kids Next Door, which is a totally worthless Saturday morning cartoon. A bunch of people recognize that this is a silly idea for an article, and it is deleted on AfD. What happens next?

"Hmm," goes Joe, "they don't want me to write about this sort of stuff." So he runs off and posts his episode summaries somewhere else, probably on a BBS, and that information is lost in the mists of the unorganized Internet. Or he heads over to a TV show wiki, and Wikipedia has to balance out its own information with some other site that's got all the little details. Alas, for we are no longer a total collection of all human knowledge.

The inclusionist view says, "Isn't this going against what we're aiming for? When someone wants an episode summary of Kids Next Door or any other information at all, Wikipedia should be the first place they check. We shouldn't be shoveling accurate information out the door." Of course this only goes so far-- imagine, for example, listing all the CDs ever produced by "Various artists", and who those various artists were. Or listing every fake word that kids make up in school one day. Or including the full text of copyrighted books. We can't have everything; that's both a hopeless cause and will lead us directly into chaos. So what inclusionism really means is having nearly unlimited tolerance.

But nearly unlimited tolerance is no good. We don't want Wikipedia to be a one-stop source for the entire Star Trek universe, even though people are interested, because nobody from outside the Star Trek fandom will find these tiny little one-episode details useful. That's "fancruft". So, forking that group of fans into their own wiki is a good idea. Fandom wikis include Comixpedia, Wookiepedia, WikiFur, and so forth. No matter how good WikiFur's article is about the Vixen Vending Machine (and it is rather good!), only those within the fandom will find it useful. A frequent argument against forking is that no lay person is interested in obscure mathematical concepts. But if we can write really good articles about those, so everyone can understand this crazy theoretical concept, we can explain something useful. So we have to keep those.

So now we're asking for some sort of sanity check on inclusionism, and the big question is what does "useful" mean? Yeah, what now, huh? Well, the answer is that nobody can agree, and that's why we have WP:AFD rather than a bunch of firm policies regarding what makes an article useful. But this is relativism, which is what the meta article about deletionism describes. Relativism seems nihilistic, and I don't want that. Wikipedia is too important for a term like "deletionism". Hence the association of
 * Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article,

WP:WEB, WP:CORP, and so forth are nice rules of thumb, but the thing about notability is "I know it when I see it". So if you do go ahead and make Broad Judgements about the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, one day you're going to see an utterly bogus piece of spam or fancruft up on AfD which fits your standard. If you vote to get rid of it you are officially a capital-H Hypocrite. I don't particularly mind that but then I'm wondering why you made that judgement in the first place if you were just going to go ahead and ignore it.
 * and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles,

This bit reluctantly acknowledges that some stuff is just crap and it needs to go.
 * but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist

Yeah, I want to get rid of stuff. That's how we keep this place from being an indiscriminate collection of information. But deletionist is a bad word to use even in jest, because the big thing about Wikipedia is that we can write everything that will ever be useful here.

The name is really long because shortening it to "wishy-washy" is like putting your entire political view on a bumper sticker. Also, it's funny. Ashibaka tock 07:01, 15 January 2006 (UTC)