User:Brain

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Hello; they call me Brian Doom or simply Brain. Among other things, I write and direct films.

[edit] Do You Wonder Why Wikipedia Is Slowing Down?

I used to edit Wikipedia a great deal... now not so much. I considered Wikipedia potentially the "last encyclopedia" - a reference that could contain all fact. However, overzealous editors have deleted a great deal of my text when they decided something wasn't "notable" enough. A performance-art group here, a television show there. Usually it was because the editor in question had simply never heard of the topic.

All the zany "Facts" in Mel's Hole are gone. I had summarized the complete saga, dozens of hours of radio. Now, due to editing, the only way to get that information is to listen to all the radio again. Everyone already knows Mel is a complete con artist... but that is what makes the story of Mel's Hole interesting. Now it's all gone. All these editors are doing is eliminating information sources that now people will have to find elsewhere. In this particular case, the "elsewhere" is the original radio shows!

My point: Notability is not a valid metric for a digital encyclopedia. With a print encyclopedia, sure-- paper costs money and takes up space. But for an encyclopedia that can have an article about everything without being more inconvenient to use? PUT IT ALL IN.

My other point: Wikipedia could be Google for organized topic summary. Google is great for finding all the pages about something. But it's still not good at giving a top-level summary of a given topic, or a context-based list of related topics. That is the niche Wikipedia can fill.

My last point: Competing with print Encyclopedias is a stupid goal. You know what is not a growing industry? Print encyclopedia publishing. Just as copying someone's startup is usally a huge waste of money (you can almost never implement an idea as well as the originator), trying to make a digital encyclopedia "just as good" as a print encyclopedia is an effort with a flawed premise.

[edit] To Do

Bored?

More directed:

Articles I referred to which do not (yet) exist:

  • Revisionism in Star Wars
  • yogashi
  • kook sul

[edit] Misc

There's an ongoing, very old joke amongst enthusiasts in broadcast technology (ham radio builders, television experimenters, radio and TV industry engineers) about the name of RKO- their films opened with the phrase "An RKO Radio Picture." This brings up the question, "what is a radio picture?" - the joke being, that "radio," being an audio medium, does not carry pictures. I have honestly no idea how to work that into any article, but there you have it. brain 14:07, 19 January 2007 (UTC)