Politics in Wikipedia?
When you picture Wikipedia, you don’t really think of a political battle. However, recently the “admins” are having battles among themselves as to what the direction of Wikipedia should be.
Open ‘em up & knock ‘dead
Some are falling on the side of letting most everything fly. With the obvious exceptions to spam and totally worthless articles, these folks would like to provide a wealth of knowledge on everything from Maywood City, CA to the White House.
They would rather leave in place the current system of calling an unfinished article a “stub,” which encourages further research and development on a particular subject.
For example, a few Wikipedia Administrators (which apparently is a rather coveted position that takes an awful lot of contribution to get into) will hack down articles on people and places they don’t see relevant.
Some take offense to this and question the mission of Wikipedia. If Wikipedia really is to become the world’s best source of information and act as an enclyclopedia these folks would like to see it spread out and cover just about everything.
On the other hand, others hope to see Wikipedia curve back towards the core of articles already established and exapand upon current topics rather than trying to cover the obscure issues. This isn’t to saw that new articles would not be added, but the focus would be on improving current content rather than spreading resources over more and more pages.
It’s an intersting debate that provokes the old debate: Quality or Quantity?
Some say you have have both, while others are afraid Wikipedia will lose even more of it’s crumbling reputation among academics.
