[barnabee]

The idea of an encyclopaedia that only includes topics with significant mass media coverage is both incredibly crass and extremely depressing.

If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.

[thrdbndndn]

> an encyclopaedia that ..

Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.

[barnabee]

Because it is a much tighter “standard” than it needs to be given the constraints.

It is depressing to think of all the effort that people put into writing articles that no one can ever benefit from, knowing there’s no good reason for their work to be wasted in this way.

[bazoom42]

Maybe they shouldnt write these articles on Wikipedia then? Make your own website or wiki and nobody is going to delete it.

[barnabee]

Alternatively, critique threads like this and overall community discussions might eventually lead to a change of policy.

They also might not, but it's both a lot less work than your suggestion, and if succesful would lead to a better overall outcome.

[bazoom42]

So the problem is it is easier to edit wikipedia than creating ones own page or wiki? In that case, this should be adressed by better tools instead of convincing wikipedia to accept anything.

[barnabee]

Perhaps! I also believe Wikipedia would be a better encyclopaedia and a more useful resource if it relaxed the notability requirements.

But it’s true that in the absence of that, the alternative is indeed to create a page on a different wiki/web publishing platform or one’s own website, or even to create another wiki, yes, and improving the tooling for that would also be great, of course.

Maybe it’d even be better if we used Wikipedia for less and brought the whole web closer to its original vision.