Bloggasm

Nicholas Carr has a poignant post about the two dividing parties in the Wikipedia debate. On one side, we have the “deletionists,” who think that Wikipedia should be monitored for irrelevant material that should be deleted, while the other side is made up of “inclusionists,” who think that anything is fair game to be included in Wikipedia.

The rules that govern how the popular online encyclopedia works are set by its community of contributors - the so-called wikipedians - through a process of argument and consensus-building. But the community has begun to split into two warring camps with contrary philosophies about Wikipedia’s identity and purpose. On one side are the deletionists; on the other are the inclusionists. Between them is not a middle ground but a no-man’s-land. As one Wikipedia observer recently put it, “The inclusionist versus deletionist debate is as firm and strong as the abortion debate, gun control debate, or the death penalty debate.”

If I had to pick a side I’m on, I’d say I’m an “inclusionist,” simply because we’re talking Wiki here, and being an inclusionist seems to be the very heart of what a wiki is. Also, what would be the factors involved when considering what we should delete and what we should keep? If we were to go the way of the deletionists, the debate wouldn’t stop, it would just continue to go on over what should be deleted. If we go towards the inclusionists, then the debate theoretically stops, since there is no bar to be set based on imaginary standards.