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A comment on Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash. Parent comment

Re:Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash by owyn on Monday February 14, 2011 @02:27AM (#2215798)
It's just an encyclopedia, not a replacement for the internet. That's all I'm trying to say. I've never heard of nemerle, and I'm not a wikipedia editor, so I have no opinion about it's notoriety. In general, the categorization of knowledge is a hard problem, and a lot of people prefer to spend spend time organizing things rather than writing new content, and this just seems like one of those examples.
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Re:Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash by srean on Monday February 14, 2011 @03:21AM (#2215916)
Not anymore. It is no longer "just an encyclopedia" and yes for many things it is very close to being the "replacement for the internet". What with spam and ads cluttering the web up. I think that precisely was the reason for the uproar.

I do not belong to any of the language communities involved, and neither do I depend on those languages for my day to day work. But languages interest me, though I am not a PL person. That is why Wikipedia is an important resource for me to come in contact with these languages. Yes, the content might exist on other parts of the web, but here it has already been collected under one umbrella. The quality on average is good, the site is speedy and without distracting cruft.

So of course that is one of the first resource I will turn to, and I have often been plentifully rewarded. Google is not the internet, neither is Wikipedia. Nevertheless if I want to search for something I will go to Google and if I want to browse something I will go to Wikipedia.

So, what these deletions mean to me is someone is destroying the value that Wikipedia has for me. I am sure many people feel the same way and hence the outrage.

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Re:Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash by chc on Monday February 14, 2011 @04:05AM (#2216021)
It doesn't seem like that to me. Organization creates sense out of chaos. Deleting useful information just destroys things. Categorizing and organizing knowledge are hard and important problems, but going Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is not a good answer to those problems.

Personally, I really think Wikipedia has developed a culture of fetishism around the guidelines that violates their spirit (e.g. ignore all rules) where the wikilawyers chase away the real contributors — and I don't like the "take it to Wikia" suggestion because it just creates a financial incentive for Wikimedia to ignore the problem.

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