Wikipedia & Journalism
Wikipedia & Journalism
cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/49807850
8 comments
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Wiki discussions are a source everyone in university should check.
wiki is great when diving into a new topic, but the "talk" discussions are great to see where's the debates in the field, new reach, controversies... then you can apply critical thought and do really well on reports.
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It has been my experience, anecdotal as that may be, that a considerable portion of Wikipedia editors are fervent deletionists about anything not found in a paper encyclopedia, Molly White's impression notwithstanding. The mind-set is, that at some point in the future, Wikipedia will actually be printed out somehow, and any extraneous pages just add more cost with no redeeming value. My own vision is more along the Encyclopedia Galactica line - the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind - where notability is a very low bar, as opposed to the current policy. Should there even be a deletion policy? Why? Maybe a better system would rank the topics by page views and surface the better ones. Why are some editors gatekeepers about public knowledge with their speedy deletion trigger happiness? That's not the way it works in science publications - ooooh, I guess we need more that one Wikipedia to make that work.
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I mean, if you let the Internet have their way with a knowledge base, it will quickly be filled with nonsense. You have to curate it manually if you want any kind of quality control
Whether they're too quick and loose with the deletes or not is subjective, but Wikipedia is pretty reliable
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For me, the most important thing about notability is not treating it as an end in and of itself, but as it relates to other important Wikipedia policies, like Verifiability. A lot of non-notable topics will be full of Original Research or otherwise unsourced, which is a huge no-no on Wikipedia.
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8 comments
I've (fortunately) never seen such a story. What sorts of things are usually reported on being considered for deletion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_BFDI_not_on_Wikipedia%3F
I imagine the deletion is usually when there are two articals or perhaps a dissertation on a subject is condenced to a paragraph. But I'm sure it's rare or administrative in nature.