User:Tom Morris/Wikiphilosophy

If you hang around Wikipedia long enough, you eventually start having views about how it ought to be run. Here are some of mine.

Inclusionism v deletionism
I like to think I'm neither an inclusionist nor a deletionist. About articles that ought to be deleted, I'm a deletionist. About articles that shouldn't be deleted, I'm an inclusionist. Most importantly, I think articles deserve a fair chance in the deletion process. What WP:AFD needs is more people who don't have an “–ism”, whether inclusionist or deletionist, who are willing to make calls on the basis of policy: actually evaluate topics on the basis of WP:GNG and other similar notability and inclusion guidelines.

Featured articles
Featured articles aren't that interesting to me. The problem with the Featured article criteria is that it encourages extravagant levels of depth on minutiae, but the reward structure of the featured content process doesn't reward people who improve and work on very general articles. As we've seen with hurricanes, US roads, X-Files episodes and the like, it's possible to get something very specialised through FA, but to get Philosophy or Physics or Politics through FA would be impossible, even though ensuring we have better quality top-level subject articles on broad topics would actually benefit readers far more than ensuring that an article on an individual episode of a TV show gets to FA.

Now, writing an FA is hard. It also doesn't benefit readers much. Compare the traffic statistics of Common Firecrest, an FA that was on the Main Page back in 2011, with Uni Lad, a stub I wrote a while back. The former got 1,088 views in the last month at the time of writing. The latter got 955.

If featured articles were to disappear tomorrow, would the majority of Wikipedia readers notice? No. Would they care? No. They are too busy reading about Justin Bieber to give a shit about our quality content processes. Our quality processes should be given more credence by our readers: whenever I speak to people about Wikipedia, I tell them to look for the "star in the corner, that's a featured article; and the green blob with a plus in the middle, that's a good article—keep an eye out for them". God knows if they listen.

What's more useful to Wikipedia: ensuring that 50 stubs on a topic you care about are well referenced or getting one of those fifty stubs up to featured article? I'd have to say the former. And that's not because I don't enjoy reading featured articles. Do we give the same respect to the gnomish people who dig out obscure sources for articles the same respect as we do the heroic FA writers? No. Should we? Obviously.

Community buy-in
I'm broadly very supportive of GLAM initiatives and think Wikipedians and Wikimedia chapters should try and do more of them.

But I think controversies over things like Gibraltarpedia show that we need to work harder to get community buy-in on outreach. Wikipedia isn't a democracy, but Wikipedia bureaucracy needs to be accountable to the community.