User:WMMartin

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[edit] A Philosophy for Wikipedia ( prototype )

I think of Wikipedia as being rather like a superbly well-read and educated friend - the kind of person you might call for the $1,000,000 question on a game show, but also the kind of person you'd happily invite for dinner with your family. In a sense, I feel Wikipedia should contain all the information that I'd like to know myself, had I but brain enough and time.

Wikipedia is about knowledge, not information. There are a thousand websites where I can get precise information about each sports game in a series, or each school in a state, and there's no need to put them here. My well-read friend will know the result of the latest World Series, of course, and if there was a particularly unusual or interesting game he'll be able to call it to mind when I ask him, but I don't expect him to sit down at the dinner table with me and give me a ball by ball account of the last 10 years of some bush league pitcher's career. Likewise, I expect him to have heard of Groton or Eton College, and to have some idea of their histories and alumni, but I don't expect him to list every school in Peoria.

I expect Wikipedia to be broadly spread - well-read, educated, cultured, and perhaps playful. A well-read man has heard of Pikachu, but he can't name every Pokemon. An educated man is familiar with the Flavian Dynasty, but he doesn't know my family tree. A cultured man can recount the principal events of Wuthering Heights, but he can't recite the plot of every Mills and Boon romance. A playful man can remember who Spock was, but he can't name every red-shirted actor who was ever "... dead, Jim".

In short, what I hope is that Wikipedia will be discriminating.

[edit] Mnemonics

To express e, remember to memorise a sentence to simplify this.

[edit] Deletion Debates

Lately I seem to have found myself spending a lot of time on deletion debates. There are probably a couple of reasons for this: the time I have available, and my temperament.

I tend not to have time to research and make large-scale contributions to articles, so haven't been doing much of that recently. Very often I have time to look at Wikipedia while an automated process is running in the background, at which point I can take a break for a cup of coffee and a Wiki-session. It takes time for me to get into "article editing" mode, so the easiest way for me to make a practical contribution is to pick a short task ( an AfD debate ) and make a contribution to that. As you'll see, sometimes I just give a quick opinion, but on other occasions I give a couple of paragraphs outlining my reasoning. I generally run through as many AfD debates as I can before I have to get back to other business.

The other reason why I spend a lot of time looking at AfD debates is pure temperament: I'm more a critic than a creator. My own opinion ( biased, of course, but I think it still has some validity ) is that being a good and fair critic is just as valuable a skill as being a good creator. It's easy to pick holes in an article you disagree with, but it's much harder to be fair to an article whose content you particularly dislike. I try to be fair, and if you read through my contributions to deletion debates you'll see that my contributions bear this out. I should also say that I think the argument that says "you can't criticise something if you can't do it yourself" is spurious and ill-founded: when I listen to a violin being played I can tell when it's being played well and when it's being played badly, even though I don't play the violin myself.

Inevitably, articles being reviewed for possible deletion tend to be the poorer articles in Wikipedia, so I certainly support deletion for some articles. Please understand that if I seem to be negative about a particular article it's because I have the best interests of Wikipedia as a whole at heart. It's nothing personal, and I almost always welcome re-creation of deleted articles if this leads to better quality contributions second time around.