Essay talk:RationalWiki's mission and content

Mission tagging

I think your interpretation of the mission statement is somewhat too tight. Here are some pages you have listed for mission-tagging that I think are on mission:

• Hoover's "rugged individualism" relates to a period of political dispute in which authoritarianism was a decided factor.
• The article on the bandwagon fallacy is equal in relevance to all our other pages on logical fallacies.
• Paracelsus is indisputably related to the quack scene.
• Human Rights Watch certainly relates to authoritarianism, as do bigots.

ListenerX^TalkerX 05:33, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I may have been wrong on Paracelsus and the Human Rights Watch. The problem with rugged individualism is that in itself it does not further the mission. If included as a section in an article on the Great Depression or fascism, there would be no problem. Blue (is useful) 05:55, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

By those tokens it would not be appropriate to have an article on President Obama, instead mentioning him only in the articles on the various authoritarians and/or fundamentalists who screech themselves hoarse about him.

That actually reveals an additional danger: there are some people who would believe that an Obama article is on-mission under those circumstances, as they believe that he is an Islamic socialist. If there are any similar differences among our editors on other points, trying to tighten the standards could send the Wiki to HCM — and that is before one considers certain trolls who appreciate using the mission statement to game the system. ListenerX^TalkerX 06:18, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Personally I would prefer to see a tighter definition but we have debated this before which produced the current mission statement on community standards. The relevant expansion is:

• RationalWiki is not a general encyclopedia; it does not require articles on every known subject. However, the wiki's mainspace welcomes many articles that do not relate to the primary missions of RationalWiki providing that they are factually accurate and of interest to the community at large. These include articles on general science, historical events and important individuals throughout the world.

You would really need to go to community standards to re-open the debate to get a stricter interpretation again.

On the other hand, even with that broader definition, we could probably prune some of the things you mention.--Bob^{Spring is sprung!} 12:51, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

It would be good to put that clause either on the {{Mission}} template or prominently on the /doc. Also, yes, I will be mission-tagging some of those anyway. Blue (is useful) 21:22, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

150

Using Special:Random to get 150 distinct articles I got this. I got a repeat of Nancy Pelosi, and Dana Ullman's contributions to Wp, which I did not list. Тиранес^{An rickety, yet recollect amplifier?} 14:51, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

OK, but that's just a bunch of categories & numbers. It doesn't really tell us anything about how many of the 150 pages you looked at were on-mission. The missions aren't just "write about X, don't write about Y" - they're about "analyzing and refuting . . . Documenting . . . Explorations . . . Analysis and criticism". I.e. it's what you say, not just what you write about. If some articles are off-mission, they should be handled on an individual basis, based on their content, not dealt with en masse based on what categories they fall into. The attitude that, for example, all articles about countries are just about geography, or all articles about musicians are just about entertainment, is really destructive. Wèàšèìòìď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 21:56, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I, for one, only put articles into the "clearly off-mission" category if they were truly (IMHO) off-mission. Keep in mind that my objective in this essay was not to declare "EVERYTHING OFF MISSION MUST GO!", it was (and I explicitly stated this) to begin a conversation about what types of articles which do not directly pertain to the mission statement are helpful and good, and which we'd rather stay away from. For example, Andorra; obviously not directly mission-related, should we encourage that type of article? Blue (pester) 22:06, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

We have a ton of useless articles back from the early days about such useless things as Albuquerque and obscure jokes. I am not even going into the madness of funspace, I once encountered an article that was just a picture of a tree. Why?(this one I believe has since been deleted). Conservapedia space also has references to musicals and television shows about it. Тy^{An forgotten, yet baste electric seat-warmer?} 22:11, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with articles about countries. If we're going to cover authoritarianism & fundamentalism, then we need to cover politics, & if we cover politics we should cover countries & their governments. Ideally, we should have an article for every significant country in the world & that article should have some mission-related content in it as well as a general (& snarky) overview of the country. In some cases, the mission-angle isn't immediately obvious, so some country articles are bound to be a bit off-mission, but it's still good to have them when looking at the big picture.

CP-space & funspace have all kinds of trash dropped in them, a lot of which should probably be deleted. The missions don't really apply to those spaces, & there's not much quality-control, although there are a few gems among the junk. They're likely to remain low-priority spaces. Ŵêâŝêîôîď^{Methinks it is a Weasel} 22:27, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with a Geography project. And yes, some parts of funspace have caused me to fall out of my chair laughing. But there is a lot of stuff there that is trash. And we have articles on a lot of basic scientific principles I learned in high school. Speaking of which, I have a problem with the math level templates, they seem to have grade inflation, but that is me, maybe they teach math later elsewhere. Тy^{An pocket-sized, yet detect lighting?} 22:37, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

(EC) I assume you have read some of our articles about countries. There is not an iota of mission-related content in many of them. Again, I do not intend to argue for mass deletion of everything off-mission. But we should have something less murky than the clause in CS, which can be read for almost any point of view. Blue (is useful) 22:41, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I could expand the country articles, eventually. I don't have much to do in the latter half of this week, but over the next two days, I am going to be busy. Also, if we deleted all "off-mission" articles, we would be quite a small wiki. The fact that a grand total (as of this writing) of 5 editors have made comments(and one is the author) should tell you about how the CP crowd feels about this, but if we started deleting everything even they might notice. Тy^{An pocket-sized, yet deconstruct cockroach?} 22:48, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Social solidarity

Links from other pages to the deleted article on Social solidarity have been removed or de-linked. I let it remain here as an example in the "Debatably on-mission" section. Sprocket J Cogswell (talk) 23:20, 2 March 2011 (UTC)