User:Carbon-16/Avoid presenting Wikipedia as anything but an encyclopedia
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New contributors, often well-meaning, often contribute articles about their band, forums, website, or what have you, take as literal Jimbo's statement:
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
![]() | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
![]() | This page in a nutshell: Presenting Wikipedia as anything other than an encyclopedia, specifically as a database dump of human knowledge, may be unintentionally misleading, as well as serve to undermine the efficiency of both the public's open editing and the Wikipedia community. |
While this obviously has its limits, statements such as these, as well as the general downplay of the -pedia part of Wikipedia in the press, unknowingly undermine Wikipedia's credibility and view to the public. When User John Doe hears "the sum of human knowledge", he immediately, and not always with promotional intent, creates an article on his favorite website. Immediately the site is hit with a db-web tag. He is only perhaps notified that the article doesn't meet notability standards - a NP patroller must keep up with the constant flood of articles like this, and then later come back and notify the user of the speedy tag.
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Ad_Encyclopaedia-Britannica_05-1913.jpg)
In a situation where the user is not notified, said user is, at the least, discouraged from editing anymore. In the "best-case scenario" (as far as that notion can be applied here), the user may be turned off to the project completely, and stop editing. In the worst-case scenario, the user may come back and vandalize for fun or revenge. For example, they may remove the speedy tag, recreate the material, or so forth. Admins are exhausted, the user is angry, and the community's time is wasted on something that could have been nipped in the bud much, much earlier. In a situation where the user is notified, the above may still happen. However, the user is still confused - wasn't it supposed to be the sum of human knowledge, "notable" or not? Obviously, this still causes problems for all involved.
In either of the two situations, the user may become so frustrated as to rant against Wikipedia on his or her blog or on anti-Wikipedian organizations or forums such as Wikipedia Review. A potentially good faith user, by simply being misinformed, is now discouraging their friends or colleagues to contribute to the encyclopedia.
The purpose of this essay is not to attack Jimbo for making the statement referenced above, nor is it to attack anyone for that matter. It is something I've grappled with, come to terms with, and wish to warn others about. I am not rallying against Wikipedia being an encyclopedia. I am a hard line deletionist. These non-notable articles should definitely be deleted as soon as is humanly possible. What I am arguing is that stating that Wikipedia is simply a knowledge directory serves no purpose than to undermine the new page patrollers deleting this crap, the users posting it in good faith and becoming alienated from the project, the admins that have to go through speedy, and so forth simply because their friend told them it'd be cool to add to Wikipedia by mentioning their forums (because it's a directory of everything).