From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com>
Let me get this straight: Wikipedia is the one place in the world where plagiarism is not only ok, but required!
Like other encyclopedias, it's a place for review articles about other people's work. I suppose if you quote someone directly you're supposed to use quotation marks.
I try not to waste my time & my readers' time by repeating stuff other people have already said much better than I could.
You might preface this, "As a content creator,..." To use a term of the derivative metapeople. It seems to me an encyclopedia is mainly for people who don't know the literature on the subject they want to read about.
Perhaps Wikipedia isn't the place for me?
Not for when you want to contribute original work. Wikipedia is for people taking the role of encyclopedia review article writers.
From: Dave Dyer <ddyer@real-me.net>
One of the things "the rules" try hardest to prevent is anything that could be construed as self promotion. Unfortunately that rules out a lot of useful content along with the meaningless drivel that is it's target.
Yes. Looking at this tradeoff two ways, 1) Wikipedia doesn't aim to be a repository of useful content, it aims to be an encyclopedia. 2) by using a rule like this, they definitely filter out a *quantity* of useful information but probably improve the ratio of useful to useless. Another cost of a rule is the work required to make the call, counting hours spent by anyone disputing it. If the filtering weren't simple, filtering wouldn't get done. Also, if it weren't simple, readers wouldn't have a reliable way to know what to expect about the quality. Impartiality per se isn't what I want as a reader, but simply-enforced "impartiality" is a lot easier for me to base my expectations on. It's more informative *about* the quality. If Wikipedia were interesting to a lot fewer readers, then it would also be interesting to a lot fewer writers, and the quantity would *also* go down, regardless of the rules. Interesting having the flip of the conversation about whether Wikipedia must suck because they let anyone come and write whatever they want. --Steve