The Battle For Wikipedia's Soul

njondet recommends an article at The Economist that sheds light on the identity crisis faced by Wikipedia as it is torn between two alternative futures. "'It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between 'inclusionists,' who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and 'deletionists' who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries."

Comments

Re:What's the deletionist justification?

[Titoxd]

More of a social concern about having too many articles; monitoring articles takes time, and having articles on topics that they consider worthless, but that still need to be monitored, causes the amount of eyes watching each article to decrease. This allows, in theory, more vandalism to sneak by, and decreases the average quality of Wikipedia articles, or so I've heard

You may want to read the Deletionism page on Metawiki for more info.

Re:Wikipedia as Advertising

[cabalamat3]

I've seen a lot of interesting pages that get deleted just for the sake of "Oh, it's not of interest to a wide enough audience" etc.

Me too, which is why I've started includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.

That's absurd - it's not as if each new page costs a significant amount of money to maintain

My thoughts exactly