Low-relevance Wikipedia entries (was Re: Ceqli)

Hallo!

On Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:11:45 -0600,
Muke Tever <hotblack@...> wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:28:08 +0100, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
> >> Yeah, Wikipedia really isn't the place for stuff like that. Unless a
> >> conlang develops a community of speakers, or is used in a published work
> >> of fiction, or makes some sort of impact beyond simply existing that
> >> would make it an encyclopedic topic, it really doesn't belong on
> >> Wikipedia. Some editors are quick to put anything that looks like a
> >> vanity article on VfD.
> >
> > My first reaction on seeing Philip's mention of the VfD status was
> > annoyance at encountering yet another instance of the insufferable
> > and ignorant disdain with which conlangs are widely treated.
>
> It's not just conlangs.  Wikipedia has this attitude towards all kinds of
> small-scale projects--the issues I've run across most often are
> conlangs/concultures, micronations, and garage bands.
I think the problem with such miniscules is their sheer mass.  One or
two brief articles about unimportant conlangs, bands or whatever
wouldn't hurt, but what if people uploaded an article for every single
conlang and every single garage band?  Wikipedia would be clogged
with thousands, if not millions of articles of relevance only to
their authors and their friends.  And if a few random unimportant
conlangs or bands have Wikipedia entries, every unimportant conlang
or band will want to have one.  We have a saying in German,
"Kleinvieh macht auch Mist" (`small livestock also makes dung').
So the Wikipedians have good (or at least, understandable) reasons
to weed out low-relevance entries.

>       This issue is just
> now being raised on the sister project Wiktionary, where the effect is
> different:  instead of an arguably negligible one-page description, you
> get an effect covering possibly hundreds of pages, incorporation into
> translation lists, and possibly a whole stack of meta pages (an
> Interlingua-clone called Romanica wedged itself in this way awhile back).
> This isn't, of course, necessarily a bad thing...
Again, the problem is the sheer mass of low-relevance entries that
soon overgrow the more relevant ones if every single mini-project
is included, and thus deteriorate the performance of the system.

> Anyway, personally I didn't feel my conlangs belonged on either
> project[1],
Nor do I.

>      and that's why I set up the wiki on frath.net -- for people to
> present such things (well, not garage bands) in a similar environment.
> Since it's not an "encyclopedia" or a "dictionary", you can do more stuff
> with the wiki format: detailed grammatical description, phrasebooks,
> tutorials, whatever you're comfortable with.  </hype>
Yes.  I will put my conlangs on my own website as soon as I have one
(I don't have one yet, but I am planning to set up one), but I am
definitely *not* going to add pages on them to the Wikipedia.

Greetings,

Jörg.