V8rik

Beware of the NOR police

The self-proclaimed managers that have infested Wikipedia have found yet another tool to beat up innocent Wiki editors with. Anything not simply copy-pasted from an existing source but the fruit of creative thinking is labeled by them as original research and ruthlessly and mercilessly deleted. Quite a sight. The NOR police is easily recognized as any manager is: they hardly contribute any creative content to Wiki but have a taste for deletions (see below) or busy themselves moving around existing content. For those of you in the science community there is a way to beat them of: Wikipedia:Scientific_citation_guidelines. It works like a talisman, just point it in their direction and they will scurry back into their holes. For those outside the science community: alas there is no hope......

On deletions

Wikipedians never seem to stop discussing vandalism, how terrible vandalism was or gets etc. personally I can live with vandalism, it is annoying but vandalism is quickly spotted and dealt with. The thing that annoys me is not unmotivated vandalism but motivated deletions of Wiki material. What arguments do wikipedians have when they propose are downright delete content: - it must be irrelevant or it is not proper for an encyclopedia or it is too technical or the article already contains too many examples.

Take the segment Fullerenes in popular culture in the fullerene article. Scrapped some time ago on the grounds that only chemists would be interested in reading the fullerene article (not exactly streamlined with Wiki guidelines), material then rescued to a separate article and sometime later merged again with the article where it started out originally. So there we have 10 people investing a lot of Wiki time moving around a piece of text and getting nowhere.

Why not delete:

1. Wiki has no space limitations, Wiki's one millionth article was an article on a Scottish train station, one of 39 train stations in Glasgow one of many cities with train stations in Scotland one of many countries in the world. Try also bus stations.
2. deleting content does not help the quality of articles when different point of views conflict. Better to allow the pros and cons to have their say than censoring one of the parties.
3. there are a number of strategies for downgrading content rather than deletion: move content to bottom of page, move content to separate article or move content to a footnote.
4. often in current events spectacular news makes headlines on page one and when a few days later that news turns out not to be that spectacular or perhaps even totally untrue you will find the news report on page 11. Would that be a good reason to scrap the editing in wiki as a result of the original article? That would be a bad idea. One year down the road people tend to remember just the original spectacular report and forget about the second. Wiki should have the story on both but when it does not the original untruth remains.

On Stubs

I am opposed to placing stub notices and here is the reason why:

1. editing wiki content is implied, it is the whole basis of Wiki. You are not supposed to edit an article when the stub notice is missing?
2. you are doing a disservice to Wiki contributors, the stub notice is generally regarded as a caution to readers that the article is not worth reading and to move somewhere else.
3. articles do not have to be long! some articles have content that help understanding a concept but not a lot can be said about it.
4. wiki content gets inserted into third party applications such as stand alone PDA's and other electronic devices other than Internet. In order to filter out the crap and save on memory, stub articles will not make it into these applications. Wiki editors efforts wasted.
5. stubbed articles will also not make it into Wiki 1.0, the uneditable definitive Wiki version, again a disservice
6. exactly what is a stub anyway, this is perhaps clear in English wiki but stubs appear to have a whole different meaning in other languages, say for instance in German: Dieser Artikel ist sehr kurz und möglicherweise inhaltlich unvollständig. Hilf Wikipedia, indem du ihn erweiterst und ihn jetzt bearbeitest! it means that the article is possibly incomplete meaning that it is possibly not worth reading. In French the stub message reads This article is an outline to be supplemented which is more to the point. It is more neutral and does not make a statement on quality. I wonder how stub gets translated into other languages.
7. in other languages the use of stubs is also much more restricted, why is English Wiki so preoccupied with stubs?
8. it is not my experience that new users actually get involved with Wiki when using stubs. On the other hand I do see that new people will get involved when new article names are left in red in an existing article. If you just create a starting point for a new article new editors will be happy to jump in. So if you want new people involved in Wiki and expand Wiki, this strategy is more successful than placing stubs.

On mergers

Wikipedians just love to merge articles, I think that it is not always a good idea

1. merge notices often concern two articles not with identical content but related content. By merging them the related topics will be harder to find in the categories and also by the search engines. Humans are intimately linked to planet earth but this is no reason to merge the humans and earth articles.
2. all too often a related topic is explained in an article only in relation to the main topic and still lacks a concise definition. Also the requested topic has to be located in the larger text in the first place.
3. articles can be small, especially on specialised topics and there should be no need to merge them only in order to get larger articles
4. merging impedes multidisciplinary approach. When topic A is relevant to B as well and gets merged with C which is unrelated to B then the reader if B linking to A is forced to read C material not of interest to that reader.
5. merging two articles creates a larger article and that is when editors start scrapping material for various reasons one of them being that in general large articles are not well liked. The larger article gets continuously downsized and its content stays mainstream but not very original and without much added value. In keeping the related but not identical articles separate, it is more likely to expand with more creative content.
6. an alternative to large articles explaining multiple content is Wikibooks. This Wiki format offers much more freedom to explain topics in context of other topics without the constraints of a encyclopedia format and is more suited to readers unfamiliar with a general topic. I would not expect a wikibook article and a wikipedia article to have identical content.
7. Specific to chemistry: have a look at the IUPAC Gold Book, this is a reference in true encyclopedia style and unbeatable.