Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Wikipedia Struggles With What Direction It Should Go

A bitter battle is being fought on the internet today, more specifically on Wikipedia, between a group called "inclusionists" and another called "deletionists". The center of this debate is described in this Economist article as Wikipedia either striving "to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source." The real problem being if things are deleted, what kind of guidelines will be followed in this deletion? In the past Wikipedia's choice about what to keep and what to delete has come under scrutiny as the article describes. Which side are you on?

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