User:Teratornis/Outplacement

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[edit] Proposal: start a Wikipedia outplacement service for deleted articles

From my experience advising disgruntled editors on the Help desk, I'm becoming more convinced that Wikipedia isn't doing enough to account for its honey trap nature:

• Wikipedia attracts millions of visitors who have never heard of wikis before.
• Many people actually think "wiki" is a synonym for "Wikipedia."
• Wikipedia makes it so easy for anyone to edit that for many people, this is the first wiki they try editing on.
• However, what isn't initially apparent is just how demanding Wikipedia's editorial standards are. The result is that Wikipedia lures a steady stream of new editors, some fraction of whom may have very little chance of ever agreeing with Wikipedia's goal to build an encyclopedia. Even those who do contribute some encyclopedic content may still want other outlets for their non-encyclopedic expressive urges.

Now, Wikipedia is not a Web directory nor a mere promoter of other people's sites. This principle is valid in general, but if applied in such a way as to make it harder for new editors to become aware of alternative outlets for their non-encyclopedic edits, may work against Wikipedia's primary goal of building an encyclopedia. Specifically, I'm thinking edit wars and deletion debates may become unnecessarily heated when authors see someone threaten to delete their work altogether. I think it is often much less threatening merely to see one's work moved to another wiki.

By systematically identifying and cataloguing enough of these alternative outlets, such that we build up a comprehensive outplacement directory (that is, a directory of alternative outlets that collectively would accept most of the material Wikipedia currently deletes), I believe we can minimize the waste of editor time that currently goes into unnecessarily heated deletion debates. By freeing up everyone's energy to focus on the primary goal (which is to build an encyclopedia, rather than have fights about it), such a directory would more than justify its seeming violation of the "mere" Web directory principle.

Most people are not naturally NPOV in their thinking. They may find it easier to restrict themselves to NPOV on Wikipedia if they concurrently indulge their POV urges on other wikis that share their biases.

In any case, such an outplacement directory would not need to be an exhaustive list of wikis such as the one in WikiIndex. Instead, we would only need to list the wikis which had actually been found useful as outlets for Wikipedia's article rejects, arranged by topic.

In a few cases, groups of Wikipedia editors who shared a topical interest set up their own wikis to publish the non-encyclopedic content they had a tendency to write on Wikipedia, alongside the encyclopedic content. Wookiepedia is an example; many of its editors contribute to Wikipedia, and their edits on Wikipedia are better because they have an outlet for their non-encyclopedic work. That's an excellent model for calming nerves and making Wikipedia more productive.

I would go so far as to suggest that many if not most WikiProjects should identify, and promote, alternative outlets for non-encyclopedic content in their topical areas, as a way to help their members have a more productive and enjoyable Wikipedia editing experience. For example, in Wikipedia:WikiProject Cycling, I suggested using Bicycling Wiki as such an outlet, because most of the people who edit cycling-related articles on Wikipedia also want to share lots of information about cycling which is unlikely to be encyclopedic (such as information about the local cycling they actually do, most of which is non-notable, but ironically is far more relevant than reading about the elite Lance Armstrongs of the world). That soon led to a productive resolution of one article deletion debate. It was easy to build consensus when we had a way to divide the encyclopedic from non-encyclopedic content, and send each to its appropriate place.

Simply deleting people's hard work seems to contradict Wikipedia's long-standing policy of allowing anyone to edit. If we invite everyone to edit, then I think we owe it to them to make a good-faith effort to find welcoming homes for the articles we encouraged them to start, if we decide their articles aren't encyclopedic enough. With so many newbies having little or no idea that other wikis exist, we should at least make them aware of that fact, so they choose to edit on Wikipedia because they share Wikipedia's goal, not merely because it's the only wiki they know about.