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I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if it doesn
by sytelus 13y ago
I've burned enough midnight oil trying to add content in Wikipedia just to discover it frequently gets deleted next day. The worst part is that even if it doesn't, it always feels like that it's a question of when rather than if it would get deleted. And I'm not talking about silly content. For instance I tried to add content on properties of different grades of gortex material and someone deemed it not useful on the page about gortex!
Lot of restrictions, if you think about it, are silly. Why can't I create a wikipedia page about my mom or my high school teacher? Why can't I add interesting details on techniques to solve high school math problem or even add exercises like textbooks? However "non-useful" it is, it's still information and it's all electronic. Why wikipedia should restrict itself to articles of types that only traditional paper-based encyclopedia would potentially allow (well, mostly)?
Would it be so hard to design it so we can add ~infinite amount of information on any given topic while allowing users to dive in from 10ft to 100,000 ft level? My dream would be to have wikipedia or an active website like that which catalogs almost every imaginable information available to any human at any point in time. May be they can add "draft" mode for content that is not fully baked yet. Or pages that are only visible if you opt-in. There has to be better way than enforcing silly bureaucracy.
- e12e 13y agoI'm not a "wikipedian" -- but I do think the focus on sibling-projects, allowing wikipedia to be an encyclopaedia, is good. Contribute to wikibooks if you want to write text books (on math or some other subject) -- I don't think it makes sense for wikipedia to host all content everyone ever wants to create. That's what the Internet is for. It shouldn't be the goal of wikipedia to be the wiki to end all wikis. More wikis with different focus would be more manageable, I think. Both wrt quality control and translation. Text in a wikipedia is much like source code for a program -- it will be read many times more than it is written -- and after a certain point, it should largely stop changing, unless bugs are found. "Bugs" in the case of text are the obvious: grammar/spelling, somewhat subtle: use of language, wording (contrast eg: articles written in "simple English" wikipedia vs "normal" English) -- and external change: Hiroshima has lots of beautiful wooden houses > Hiroshima is one of two cities to have ever been bombed with a nuclear weapon (For a rather grotesque example).
- lttlrck 13y agoI've often wondered this. There are many article categories that I'm unsure belong in an encyclopedia. - Telecoms and networking protocols articles that I feel go into far to much detail, they are like abstracts of the RFCs... - The same goes for programming languages. - Do ( e.g. web server) comparison tables belong in an encyclopedia? I guess it's a hard line to draw though.