4 ms·

Great, and even if you are the secondary source as recommended they will just delete your content (as you noted) for niche articles. I just dont understand why

• derefr 8y ago
  You're still coming at it with the mindset of a contributing editor. Most people who edit Wikipedia are not contributing editors; they're just plain editors. They fix spelling mistakes and re-arrange paragraphs to make the text flow better, for fun. They could be (and many are!) professional editors for publications. Editing Wikipedia is good practice for being a professional editor. People who come to Wikipedia wanting to make some text be in the article are going to come away upset. People who come to Wikipedia wanting to make the article the best article it can be—and in the process, discover some citable sources and decide that the article would be improved by a new sentence containing a gloss of what one of those sources says—are going to enjoy their time. You don't edit Wikipedia to get new information into the encyclopedia. You edit Wikipedia to improve the quality of the encyclopedia-as-encyclopedia. (Maybe, sometimes, by improving articles into existence. Maybe, other times, by improving articles out of existence. Maybe by making the article longer; maybe by making it shorter. One of these states† is optimal for the people looking for an encyclopedia article on X. The editors want the article to be in that state.) If you look at it as less like a content-aggregation activity (like submitting and titling Reddit posts)—and more like the activity of a group of cloistered monks excited to work together to make a the best darn illuminated manuscript they can make—I feel like the Wikipedia community and its foibles makes perfect sense. † And yes, that means that sometimes readers will come away empty-handed for their query. Often that's for the best, especially if an existing Wikipedia article on X would just bump down a much better Google search-result for X (say, that of a niche-content encyclopedia) to #2, such that fewer people are using that excellent resource. There is a reason Wikipedia doesn't have articles for every existing Pokemon—and that reason is that Bulbapedia exists, and Wikipedia doesn't want to try to pretend it can beat Bulbapedia at being Bulbapedia. People compare (an offline copy of) Wikipedia to the emponymous Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it's not; a true HHGTTG would look like a copy of Wikipedia stapled together with copies of all the niche encyclopedias it intentionally defers to.
  • dTal 8y ago
    >You don't edit Wikipedia to get new information into the encyclopedia. Uh, how does new information get in the encyclopedia then?
    • derefr 8y ago
      You don't edit Wikipedia with the intent of putting new information in there. The culture of Wikipedia will notice you as a foreign presence and push you out. You edit Wikipedia with the intent of improving Wikipedia. When you do that, some of your edits will add new information to Wikipedia as a means of improving Wikipedia. But that addition will have been a tactic for satisfying your terminal goal of improving the encyclopedia, not a direct attempt at satisfying your terminal goal of having this information be in the encyclopedia. The community can tell the difference. By analogy: a small farming village has a commons. Someone who grazes their cows on the commons, then sells the milk and meat to the townsfolk, is just participating in the economy, and the townsfolk are fine with that. Someone who herds their cows in from the next town over, grazes the cows on the commons, and then herds the cows back home—and never otherwise interacts with the community? Not okay. That's sociopathic behavior. They're not a member of the community; they're just taking advantage of it for their personal benefit. Wikipedia's editors are smart enough to recognize what someone looks like when they're just trying to take advantage of Wikipedia for their own (PR) benefit. The edits might be the same, either way (just as both farmers above graze their cows in the commons in the same way, either way); it's the context that determines whether the edits are acceptable.