Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and consistently, or is there some bias which betrays their supposed NPOV (Neutral Point of View)?

Seriously, there are some AMAZING encyclopedias which consist of material that is 99% unsuitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. I'm thinking of things like snopes, tvtropes. etc...

The community that cares about DWM, FVWM, Compiz, lwm wm, xwm (all of which I've used at one point or another, and, only half of which are currently in wikipedia) should do likewise, create their WM Encyclopedia - (wmipedia? wmtrove?) and just tell wikipedia to go stuff it.

The question as to where to draw the line is a little gray - I _personally_ think that all widely deployed (That is, more than a couple thousand users) systems like Window Managers, Linux Distros, Applications, should have a home on wikipedia - My home town of Lumby only has a population of 1800 people, and it managed to get an article - why is a window manager that is home to 10s of thousands of people any less notable?

I think every release of Linus's linux kernel should have its own page on wikipedia. (Check out "http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges and tell me that each release isn't notable).

My only requirement is that it have _some_ breadth of interest beyond the author who writes the article, and that the material maintain a high level of quality, NPOV, and citation.

But, I'm clearly one of those lumped in the "Inclusionist" world - which is clearly a direction the English Wikipedia is not going.

Why are things like tvtropes not suitable for an Encyclopedia?

I mean, you take it as obvious that such material is not suitable for WP, but I wonder why? It's not clear to me.

tvtropes _is_ an encyclopedia.

Re: material not suitable for WP - most of it fails the notability clause. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia

Well, it might not belong in its present form—but, since they're compatible and cite each other fairly frequently, it'd be nice if the entirety of other encyclopedias could exist "attached" to Wikipedia somehow, so that any archival efforts going into Wikipedia would bring them along as well. Since wikis are usually "flat" namespaces, perhaps as subgraphs (that is, subdirectories)?

There are so many wikis that are basically "Wikipedia, but for this particular topic that on its own isn't notable enough"—if these could all be merged into Wikipedia this way, the ecosystems of both Wikipedia and its offshoots would probably be a lot better off. The members of each wouldn't be tending only their own own walled gardens, but rather crosslinking and cross-editing more heavily—and putting things where they really belong, instead of trying to justify their inclusion into their own project of residence!

They wouldn't even need to exist "within" wikipedia physically; perhaps Mediawiki could adopt something that works for articles like Trackbacks work for blogs, where all articles from all "public encyclopaedia of [topic] project" Mediawikis show up in one another's indexes?

A limited form of what you are describing already exists. MediaWiki supports something called 'interwiki links',* so you can write e.g. [[TVtropes:PlotThreads]] to link directly to the Plot Threads page on TV tropes. In this way many disparate wikis can be wired together quite simply, if desired. I don't remember if the software supports shared indexes or backlinks or anything of that kind, however, although that is available between sister projects (such as Wikipedia and Wikitionary).

Culturally, however, Wikipedia seems to frown upon using this kind of link to external encyclopedias. If information is notable, it should be included in Wikipedia or one of the sister projects; if it is a source, it should be referenced as such. Any kind of 'more information' external page doesn't really have a place in such a system. So we're back to needing to 'fix' Wikipedia.

* See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map for the current list of supported interwiki prefixes.

Why is the current notability clause the right one for Wikipedia? (I don't think it is. I think it's needlessly exclusionary.)

"I guess the question is, are the administrators applying the rules fairly and consistently"

The answer to that is pretty much no. But it's against WP policy to point out inconsistencies.

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