Verifiability, inclusionism, deletionism and POV

Andrew Lih posted on Facebook a link to an interesting article published in The Economist with name “The battle for Wikipedia’s soul” (no, it is not about Danny-Jimmy events). Finally, one journalist expressed a deep knowledge of Wikipedian community.

However, his deep knowledge has some limits…

First: Even there are some real inclusionists and deletionists, keep-delete game is usually a war between POV pushers.

Second: A popular approach to Wikipedia is a dilema between keep and delete. Encyclopedic approach is about verifiability. Usually, a lot of prejudices and emotional positions are crucial for the decision to keep or to delete some article: “relevance” is the strongest bias on Wikipedia. And such biases are changing through the time. For example, a description of one small dialect wouldn’t pass even it has relevant references and even it is a regular scientific field — if there is no description about its own super-dialect. But, when “time comes”, when a super-dialect is described, article about that small dialect would be kept. Implication is that a lot of knowledge is constantly removed from Wikipedia because “time doesn’t come”.

~ by millosh on March 7, 2008.