HerscheltheHerschel wrote: ↑December 12th, 2023, 9:25 am
"document each other's discoveries" I didn't document any of Haycat's discoveries, neither did I edit the pond fuse page anytime.
Also, this thread makes me want to be able to dislike posts.
Sorry to hear that. It's always difficult to handle these communications -- all the options are kind of bad. I'll adjust my statement in case it wasn't clear: if one person who doesn't understand LifeWiki notability criteria makes a commitment to add another person's non-notable discoveries, that's really just an attempt to dodge around the notability rule; it's just as much counter to the spirit of the notability rule as someone adding their own discoveries.
There are people around here who have been working on the LifeWiki for a long time and have put a lot of work into it, sometimes over a decade.
Generally those people would really like their work to not be wasted, which means they'd really like the LifeWiki to remain somewhat recognizable. The notable information that they carefully documented in the LifeWiki should remain easy to find.
If a whole lot of non-notable details get added, the notable material gets lost in the clutter. Even if the LifeWiki gets, say, twice as big as it is now, with most of the new stuff not matching up with the community consensus of what "notable" means ... then suddenly there's a problem: the LifeWiki becomes
no longer trustworthy.
People wouldn't be able to look something up on the LifeWiki with the reasonable expectation that the details there are good, carefully curated information. They'd have to second-guess everything, or check the article history and see who added what, and memorize a list of what authors have a conservative idea of what "notability" means and what authors have decided to add things like pond fuses the moment that they get discovered, even though there are thousands of them, with mostly none of them having any special claim to notability.
That doesn't work -- so when people start adding non-notable articles to the LifeWiki, the articles generally get deleted -- hopefully in a polite way, with a really good effort being made to explain the notability problem ... but still, the articles have to get deleted.
A forum thread is a much better collection point for things like the pond fuses I've seen so far, than a LifeWiki article would be. Maybe that might change, if for some reason a much wider community interest develops having to do with pond fuses.
But ... basically, it's usually safer to wait a year or two before creating an article about something new -- just to see if enough community interest does develop. There are exceptions to every rule, like new big discoveries that are nominated for Pattern of the Year, but that's a good rule of thumb.
