Wikipedia talk:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Core topics/Archive 8

Ensuring sufficient notability for the Core Topics

Since my previous attempt to point out what a surprisingly large number of marginally essential articles are still lingering on the Core Topics list was entirely ignored, I've analyzed every currently-listed entry in more depth: I've given a numerical, 1-10 notability rating to every article here, based on how essential (hence food is more important than optics), broad (hence art is more important than australia), and generally encyclopedically necessary for a very limited listing of Core articles, each of the entries that have thus far been selected are. The page is at User:Silence/V1b. If anyone disputes any of the ratings I gave to any of the entries, please feel free to say so; I'm completely willing to change any of the entries if reasoning is given for including (or not including) any of the pages in question. And, in fact, if anyone has as much time to waste as I, you could give similar ratings to all the articles on the list and we could compare our interpretations of the criteria and priorities for this list. But going that far isn't necessary if ye aren't up for it, what's important is that we open up a real discussion of the articles we currently have, so we can start getting rid of the ones that clearly don't belong, and thence begin considering other ones that clearly do (but haven't yet been added). -Silence 17:36, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Wow, good work. I will review it just give me time (I have pathology exam :) ). NCurse _work 17:47, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Sure, no rush. To reiterate what I mentioned above, this evaluation list is only a "rough draft", an initial assessment subject to lots of change if new information arises about why a certain article is (or isn't) Core. I put my assessment in numbers as a convenient method for comparing all the articles in a simple and compact way, not because I'm not willing to change my mind with discussion. However, I think that most of the ratings are pretty accurate, and merit consideration in deciding on certain articles to remove. (I'm also working on a list of 150 top-level articles on User:Silence/V1, but that list is more in-development, and has more holes and inconsistencies, being a much more ambitious endeavor.) -Silence 17:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for putting together this table. Can I recommend you review the archived discussions (you can skip the ones on top-level categories, which got extremely long)? You will see that sometimes core topics were changed from things on your list to the present listing for purely pragmatic reasons- the original choice was only a stub, but the replacement was more well developed. I also think your ratings are no less subjective than those of the people here, for example placing Fungus as 7 but Botany as 4 seems very odd to me, and likewise Light as 9 but Optics as 3. I think you raise some good issues, but I for one support the inclusion of the major world religions and the major world continents in the core (I'd put them as around 8 on your scale). IMHO things like biotechnology, festival and hobbies are about a 6-7, but plastic, paper, fire and speed are about a 4-5. I would probably put mathematical proof at about a 5, level with infinity.

We always run into problems with general vs. more specific, as with the religions and the continents. I think you need to balance the "theoretical top level" with the "most likely top level accessed." There are two reasons not to include the top level article: (1) If the article is Stub or Start (which it often is) and (2) that a typical user would not look there. For example we got rid of watercraft because someone is much more likely to look at Ship, which is also a much more developed article. At the same time, we can't include specific topics for everything (as with hobbies (which I believe make up about 15-20% of all WikiProjects, if you include sport).

I also notice some bias in your selection away from "popular" choices such as football (soccer), festival, and hobbies, towards more academic choices such as emotion and infinity. To dismiss the world's major sport as "not even close" seems very odd, when even one football match (the world cup final) is almost guaranteed to have TV ratings far in excess of anything else on TV in the last four years. I recall a poll in England (I can't provide a source, sorry!) where people chose the England World Cup win in 1966 as the most important event in England of the 20th century - you can't ignore such feelings, even if you think they are silly! Football is the major sport (or close) in virtually the entire world except the US, Canada, Australia, India & Pakistan, and is a business worth many billions. You seem to dislike including western civilization, yet at many US liberal arts colleges undergraduates are required to take a course in it, it is regarded as one of the cornerstones of a liberal education. I believe that some slight bias towards the English-speaking world is appropriate in the English language version (though if a good article on Eastern civilisation existed I'd support its inclusion too). If this were the Chinese version, I'd have Confucianism as a core topic, if I were Nigerian I might include Colonialism as core, etc.

I think, though, that when I get some time to go through your list in detail, there are some I would like to support as core such as light, chemical element, star and death. We should probably include most in the Core Topics Supplement, if they don't qualify for the main core topics list. We have some new blood in the project thanks to WP:V0.5, perhaps they will have some suggestions too. Thanks, Walkerma 06:23, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

• "the original choice was only a stub, but the replacement was more well developed." - If an extremely important article is only a stub, then Version 1.0 should be used as an impetus to improve that article. It shouldn't simply leave vital topics in the dust because they haven't already, by the whims of editors, randomly been adequately improved. We already have plenty of projects that seek to verify the quality of articles, from GA to FA. What we don't have, and what we need for an article-selection project like this, is something that lists the importance of certain topics, regardless of their current quality, so that we Wikipedians have a better idea of what articles most need improvement before we can release a decently expansive and consistent paper or CD version. But by conflating importance with quality, and thus frequently sacrificing more important topics for topics that have already gotten more attention (often due to Wikipedia's systemic biases, which are not something we should be going out of our way to show off!), we render the Core Topics listing almost entirely useless. Article quality fluctuates enormously more than article importance does; a year from now, none of the articles on the Core Topics list will have changed in terms of subject-matter importance, but almost all of them will have changed in terms of quality, thus dating this list entirely and leaving it useless as an actual "Core" of articles from which we can build outwards. I realize that for practical short-term purposes, it makes sense to choose a higher-quality article over a lower-quality one for putting on an Alpha or Beta CD or something like that, but in terms of practical long-term purposes, it makes much more sense to work on a list of article topics that are highly important regardless of their current condition than to worsen Wikipedia's uneven coverage by ignoring articles that have been unlucky enough to not receive sufficient attention.

• "I also think your ratings are no less subjective than those of the people here," - I never said it wasn't. I never claimed that my list was objective: that's why I welcome other users to either dispute any of the ratings I've given, or to make their own, complementary lists, whichever they prefer.

• "for example placing Fungus as 7 but Botany as 4 seems very odd to me," - Fungus is a Kingdom of organisms, along with Bacteria, Archaea, Animal, Plant, and Protist. It is thus one of the most major and important groups of living things in existence, and I was actually more worried about the bias involved in making "bacteria" and "fungus" lower-ranked than "animal" and "plant" (which are both 8s), though I've accepted that this is workable. :) Your comparison of fungus to botany seems bizarre to me: "botany" is merely a subfield of biology, the study of plants. It is no more important than zoology, the study of animals, which noone's ever listed on the Core Topics. I find it bizarre that you seem to think that "fungus" and "botany" are on the same level of importance, when clearly "fungus" is to "plant" as "mycology" is to "botany". The mere study of an organism is a less important topic than the thing being studied itself. I'd certainly concede to you that "plant" is more important than "fungus", but to argue that botany is comparably important seems utterly bizarre to me. Certainly, if we had to choose between including fungus on Core Topics and including botany, we'd be better off including fungus, as more important information is provided there and we can simply mention "botany" in the biology article if it's that necessary. However, at this point I'm not sure it's necessary to include either on the list.

• "and likewise Light as 9 but Optics as 3." - What's strange about it? On the "importance" level, optics is merely a recent scientific field of study, whereas light, the visible electromagnetic spectrum, is an absolutely key aspect of everyday human life. Light is tremendously more important than optics for the same reason that Universe is tremendously more important than physical cosmology. Furthermore, since you're so fond of judging a topic's importance based on the quality of its article, the light article is clearly many, many, many times better than the optics one—the latter consists almost entirely of lists! However, if you think "Optics" is more important, I'll raise it to a 4 for now, though I'd also appreciate clearer explanation for why you think they rank as they do. If you explain why a certain article should be ranked lower or higher (rather than just juxtaposing certain articles), I'll be able to understand better where you're coming from, and either change the article accordingly or explain why I disagree. More interesting either way. :)

• "but I for one support the inclusion of the major world religions and the major world continents in the core (I'd put them as around 8 on your scale)." - A 7 on my scale means "probably include", and I feel that's the best way to rate the individual continents, considering that we're dealing with a list of the 150 most essential and basic encyclopedic topics in existence. On a list of 200, I'd be more likely to agree with you that they're 8s, but on a list of 150, some corners will have to be cut if we're going to be fair. However, I think it's much clearer that the individiual religions don't belong on a list of the "top 150" articles. They simply aren't general enough; putting five specific religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism) on the list makes absolutely no sense when we refuse to include even one specific philosophy (like humanism or empiricism), one specific political ideology (like conservatism or communism), or one specific secular organization (like United Nations or European Union) on the list—not to mention that fact that clearly the individual major religions are much less basic than the individual food groups (like meat or fruit) and individual animal classes (like bird or fish) and countless other basic individual things, which are similarly excluded! Including all these religions is not only biased (why Judaism and not Shintoism, for example?), but also really not at all necessary or helpful. Surely you would agree that it's more important for a general-use encyclopedia to have an article on Fire than an article on Hinduism? Well, I can provide dozens of other examples of articles that clearly outweigh these specific religions in essentialness, just as Fire does.

• "IMHO things like biotechnology, festival and hobbies are about a 6-7, but plastic, paper, fire and speed are about a 4-5." - Hm. That's interesting, but it does seem about as backwards as can be to me. You can hardly get more basic than fire, which is an essential aspect of both the physical world and day-to-day human life and society, whereas biotechnology is, though important, a highly specialized field, and hobby is just plain trivial. Not to mention that, on the basis of article quality (which seems to be biasing several of your ratings), clearly biotechnology, festival, and especially hobby are very, very poor choices if we're trying to show off Wikipedia's best work, much less comprehensive and polished than paper or plastic or fire.

• "I would probably put mathematical proof at about a 5, level with infinity." - Even if infinity was purely a mathematical concept, I'd probably put it at least 1 or 2 levels above "mathematical proof". But the ubiquity of infinity in philosophy, theology, popular culture, etc. elevates it pretty high above "mathematical proof" in terms of "Core"-ness. Even small children use the word "infinity" casually, whereas "mathematical proof" is a subtype of a subtype—and a mediocre article, and bizarre to include in a list that doesn't even mention axiom or theory (both dramatically higher-quality articles and more important topics).

• "I think you need to balance the "theoretical top level" with the "most likely top level accessed."" - I agree entirely. That's exactly the line of reasoning I used in arguing against including articles like earth sciences in the "top 150" list. Reread my rationale for giving those articles a 5: although theoretically high-level due to their overarching categorization, in reality the concept is pretty trivial, and doesn't need more than a sentence or two to be explained thoroughly (which can easily be satisfied by a mentioning on the science article). The philosophy that "broader isn't always more noteworthy" is one I drew on heavily in constructing my list, and (long-term) practicality was always my guiding mantra in selecting ratings (though I'm not saying that means I got all my ratings right; two people can agree entirely on the general philosophy of a project, and still come to wildly diverging results in practice, so feel free to continue criticizing various ratings, as I find it interesting and useful).

• "For example we got rid of watercraft because someone is much more likely to look at Ship," - I don't necessarily disagree. That's why I didn't jump to suggest we add watercraft, even though it makes perfect sense analogically to aircraft: although in an ideal world "watercraft" would be a commonplace term, in reality it is not, so I find it reasonably acceptable to just include ship instead, if anything (though I think it's wasteful to include both ship and boat, plus "boat" is much lower-quality than "ship", since that seems to be such an unfortunately large concern here). Of course, I didn't give any specific form of transportation (except automobile) a ranking above "7" because they all are less integral than the concept itself, transportation.

• "I also notice some bias in your selection away from "popular" choices such as football (soccer), festival, and hobbies, towards more academic choices such as emotion and infinity." - And I notice a massive bias in your listing away from blatantly basic, simple topics like fire and life and emotion, and towards academic (especially economics- and mathematics-related) topics that are clearly too specific for a list like this. In fact, if anything I think exactly the opposite bias is present: while my list is fairly neutral with respect to academic and nonacademic topics, the current Core Topics list is clearly extremely biased towards more technical and academic terminology, as shown by the inclusion of biology, but not life, physics, but not universe, economics, but not money, geology, but not Earth, etc., until I showed up to start making the list much more essential and widely-accessible with additions like the above. Based on apparently isolated examples (only 4?), you completely misconstrued my reasoning for removing those topics as being because they're "not academic enough", and demonstrated a lack of understanding of what it means to be "academic" by assuming that a topic like emotion, arguably one of the least academic topics anyone has ever recommended for this list, is "academic". (Very, very weird stuff.) My actual reasoning for giving those articles low ratings is simple: they aren't basic or important enough. Football (soccer) is an arbitrary, specific sport that clearly doesn't belong on the list of "top 150 most important Wikipedia articles". (In fact, it seems to demonstrate a remarkable bias and lack of common sense to have this article listed where it so clearly doesn't belong: I'd have been less suspicious if we'd included a specific sport/game article like Chess, which is both a much more noteworthy topic and a much better article (it's featured), but to pick this specific one just reeks of bias and inconsistency.) I love soccer as much as the next guy (in fact, I've played it more than any other sport in my life), but placing it above articles like death and love and metal in terms of importance is just plain insane. Likewise, hobbies (actually a misspelling, the correct article is hobby) is not only an exceedingly mediocre article, but also a very trivial topic when you really think about it: is "hobbies" really more basic than behavior, or belief? You could make a stronger case for raising festival to a 6, but I still don't see it while we're not including more basic things like ritual or, again, belief. It slips through the cracks too easily in a list of only 150 articles. Anyway, I'm still trying to overcome my shock at you labeling "emotion" as an "academic" topic. Please tell me you were joking, or at least explain how you arrived at this gross misconception; is it now suddenly "academic" to have feelings of fear, happiness, anger, sadness, hate or love? News to me.

• "when even one football match (the world cup final) is almost guaranteed to have TV ratings far in excess of anything else on TV in the last four years." - And I rated television itself at only a 7, yet you didn't object to that. By the same logic, we should be considering adding American Idol to the Core Topics list because it gets record-breaking ratings, and consider adding nose-picking to the list because it's an even more ubiquitous human behavior than the sport of football/soccer. Weak, weak, weak reasoning. If we were discussing a list of 1,500 articles, you'd be making a fair case; on a list of only 150, "not even close" is putting it lightly. How can anyone keep a straight face while placing a soccer game at a higher level of importance or essentialness than water itself?

• "I recall a poll in England (I can't provide a source, sorry!) where people chose the England World Cup win in 1966 as the most important event in England of the 20th century - you can't ignore such feelings, even if you think they are silly!" - This is another absurdly weak argument. A poll for a single country (yet England itself isn't on Core Topics) about a single century (yet 20th century isn't on Core Topics) for a single sports event establishes that sport's importance to a greater degree than the moon landing, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Industrial Revolution, etc.? (Not to mention every other event in the entire history of humankind!) This is rapidly becoming very, very silly. The double standard being utilized to keep such an out-of-its-league article on this list is appalling.

• "You seem to dislike including western civilization, yet at many US liberal arts colleges undergraduates are required to take a course in it," - Liberal arts isn't a Core Topic. Neither is college. Neither is United States. Neither, for that matter, is knowledge. Your arguments are anecdotal and powerfully weak, demonstrating more bias ("if something is a required course in a specific type of college in a specific country, it must be one of the 150 most important topics in existence!") than careful analysis.

• "it is regarded as one of the cornerstones of a liberal education." - Good for it. Liberal education isn't a Core Topic. (In fact, it's a substub.) God is one of the cornerstones of most Western religion, yet we don't have God on the list. My biggest problem with the inclusion of Western world, of course, is that it's so absurdly, explicitly biased to include it while excluding Eastern world. Incidentally, I find it hilarious that you just finished criticizing me for being "too academic" in my inclusion criteria, then 5 seconds later turned around and explicitly argued for including a topic on purely academic (and Eurocentric-academic, even worse) grounds.

• "I believe that some slight bias towards the English-speaking world is appropriate in the English language version" - Then you are incorrect. No bias towards the English-speaking world is appropriate in the English language version. We are "en.wikipedia" because English is the language we're written in, not because we should go out of our way to worsen our systemic bias towards English-language topics. You should reacquaint yourself with core Wikipedia policies like WP:NPOV; there is no policy or guideline anywhere on Wikipedia that condones (much less encourages, as you are advocating we do) bias towards the English-speaking world. Not to mention that there are plenty of people who speak English in the "Eastern world", contrary to your assumptions.

• "(though if a good article on Eastern civilisation existed I'd support its inclusion too)." - I hope you realize that you (and the Core Topics list itself, to anyone who views it in the future in its current form) are coming across as holding the assumption that there is no civilization in the East, only in the West (or that Western civilization is somehow more important than Eastern civilization), which would be beyond horrifying in its cultural ignorance. I recognize that this is not your intent, but you have to realize that it is nonetheless the first thing anyone seeing "Western civilization" in the list of "Core topics", with no corresponding "Eastern civilization", will think. Incidentally, your inability to find the correct article is simply the result of linking sloppiness: there is no article on "Western civilization", that's simply a redirect to the correct article, Western world. Thus, of course, its counterpart is Eastern world, not "Eastern civilization". By the way, "Western world" is a pretty mediocre article too, though it's in better shape than "Eastern world" simply because the East/West "world" dichotomy originated and flourished in the West. How convenient. :)

• "If this were the Chinese version, I'd have Confucianism as a core topic, if I were Nigerian I might include Colonialism as core, etc." - Then you would be incorrect, for the same reason that we, the English Wikipedia, do not have American Revolution as a Core Topic, and would be just as off-base in doing so as the Chinese would be for listing Confucianism as one of the "top 150" articles.

• "there are some I would like to support as core such as light, chemical element, star and death." - I'm glad we agree on that much, at least. Feel free to browse through the list at your leisure. There is no deadline here.

• "We should probably include most in the Core Topics Supplement, if they don't qualify for the main core topics list." - I agree, though that should be of secondary concern for us. We should worry more about fixing bias (like Western world), and remedying glaringly inconsistent exclusions (and inclusions), on the main Core Topics list, before we get too deep into fiddling with the Supplement. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to explain some of your rationales for including (and excluding) various articles, that helped clarify a few matters for me, and I hope we can continue this fruitful discussion when you finish wading through this overlong post of mine. XD My apologies. -Silence 08:46, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

On the whole, I agree strongly with Walkerma. I will try to avoid repeating most of his points.

There is no consensus for an overhaul of the current core topics.

Anyone is welcome to suggest small changes. A number of these have been considered and accepted in the past.

If anyone feels that a lot of major things are missing, those items would more appropriately be added at the Core Topics Supplement.

The core topics is list is not an end in itself. The fact that any given item is not included on the list does not indicate that it would be included from anything else. Maurreen 20:15, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

For the third time, am I to be ignored in pointing out, not that the list is missing key topics (though it is, that's just less important than the main issue), but that the list currently has a great number of amazingly trivial and unnecessarily low-quality pages, seemingly for completely arbitrary and unjustified or out-of-date reasonings. That is my main purpose in the above critiques: I care less about which specific articles replace the current ommissions, as I do about at least ensuring that we don't come across as ridiculous by excluding pages like water, life and color in favor of pages like publishing, football (soccer) and oceanography. Whether we actually end up including "water" or "life" or whatever is much less significant than whether we are neutral and self-analyzing enough to remove the improperly non-Core topics.

I'm rather surprised at how many times I've now had to point this out without getting any real reaction; this project seems depressingly stuck-in-the-mud and arbitrarily skewed beyond salvation, and, worst of all, it's so proud of its own failings that it refuses to do the one, most important thing for any such endeavor to be remotely reliable: to change and adapt to new ideas, criticisms and information. In its current form, this is largely a useless project. My only interest in coming here to try (and repeatedly fail) to discuss and contribute to this list was to make it a more useful and balanced page, but apparently I made one crucial mistake in the process: I didn't build a time machine and travel back to when this page was first being created. Ideas here are apparently judged not on their merits, but on how long they've lasted without anyone bothering to remove them from the page. Such an ultraconservative and blind endeavor, and especially one so prematurely conservative (before it's even rigorously analyzed its own entries to the extent that it would be remotely justified in relying on them as flawless creations), is doomed to fail. Or worse yet, doomed to pollute the rest of the project with bias. This is regrettable, but it looks like my hands are tied; if you aren't interested in help, help cannot come. Seeya. :/ -Silence 20:28, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I think the main import of Silence's criticisms need to be addressed here -- for the good of the project. I agree with the main points, which are similar in substance to points I made a few months ago. (Ps. I've been very busy last few months.) Talk to you later. --Vir 13:10, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting, Vir, I was hoping you'd look at this discussion. I think Silence does make some good points, and I have to say I have found it analysis of how to think about core topics helpful. I don't agree with all of his points, but can see we need to discuss them. I don't like everything on the list, but I don't think anyone does - it represents a list we can all live with. I personally reviewed every single article proposed by Vir and Silence during March/April, and I even added a few of my own, then we debated which of those to include in the core and which to place into a newly created supplement. Some of Silence's, some of Vir's and some of mine ended up in the list, and we got rid of some that we considered marginal. The purpose of creating the supplement (Vir's idea, thanks for that!) was to help accommodate a large number of important topics that were omitted from Core Topics but more important than many on the VA list.

The problem is threefold:

1. We have in effect moved beyond the "development" stage of this project into the usage stage - all the debates about what goes in or out were mostly done last year. Granted, everything here should always be up for change, but we're now using the Core Topics for things like WP:V0.5N and (soon) WP:V1N to want to start going back and changing everything we're using. All across Wikipedia you will find projects saying "This article in (Maths, Art, whatever) has been chosen by the Wikipedia 1.0 people as a Core Topic, we are making it a priority to work on it (take a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Wikipedia 1.0 for a typical example.
2. Partly because of no. 1 above, I'm busy with Version 0.5 and Chemistry at the moment, and I can't put in a lot of energy and time into reviewing this list yet again. Meanwhile the person who originally created this project (and championed it single-handedly for about a year without anyone's help), Maurreen, is busy with her job at the moment and unable to participate. Vir is also very busy. That makes it difficult for us to come to a useful consensus for a major change in the list.
3. It's very easy with a list like this to get into endless debate about things. Which is more important, sport or art? How do we balance general vs. specific? Do we consider the quality of the article? Do we consider the likelihood of someone actually searching on the topic?If we carve up a field like chemistry, do we break it into sub-disciplines (inorganic, organic, physical), or by matter (chemical substance, chemical element, chemical compound) or other sets of concepts (like chemical structure, chemical bonding, chemical reaction). Do we use physical concepts like thermodynamics and kinetics? If you got 100 chemists in a room, they still wouldn't agree by the end of the day. I think it's the same here. I think we could each spend 12 hours of our time debating, ranking, disagreeing, compromising, and our core list would still not be much better than the one we have here. Nor would we all be happy with the list.

This is a project that has to produce results, or it is a failure. Wikipedia ran on hot air for about two years, producing 36 pages (I printed them) of discussions which did not produce a single CD, or even a glimmer of a CD. I want to make sure we don't take our "eye off the ball".

I also think that for the purposes of Wikipedia 1.0, it doesn't make too much difference if something is in the core topic list or not. Football (say) would be certain to be on the CD anyway. The core topic list only affects things when the article is poor but the concept is important, and it being Core may help it get on the CD anyway. When the original CD was put out by SOS children people, they didn't even bother with core topics at all, they looked only at what were both important specific topics that had good article level or better. If this project has ideas going beyond the CD - which it may well do, as Wikipedia evolves - then certainly our rough list should be thoroughly reviewed in the way Silence suggests.

The way that has worked best in the past is to make incremental changes. If there is a particular article or two that bothers you, let's debate that specific topic on its own merit. I think we can debate one or two even when we're busy, and agree on something. If at some point we get a lot of active, enthusiastic people here, then we can do a wholesale review. Does this sound reasonable? Walkerma 16:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

• "I don't like everything on the list, but I don't think anyone does - it represents a list we can all live with." - And the point is that the list isn't something everyone can live with—not yet. My efforts have not been an attempt to just try to push my opinion of what is or isn't important onto the list, but rather, have been an attempt to make the list something that most people will probably find acceptable. The current list is far from reaching even that minimum standard, with articles like oceanography and biotechnology included in place of truly "Core" articles like color and life. Therefore I have made my various proposals in the hopes of remedying that, even if that meant individually discussing every single proposed change I'd made. I've been disappointed so far because I haven't gotten either a wide-scale change or even a little-bit-at-a-time one: rather, my suggestions have been dismissed out-of-hand en masse as being "too late" for consideration, which I'm sure anyone who'd spent as much time analyzing and critiquing the list as I have would find quite frustrating. I'm fine with disagreement, and fully expected at least a fair number of my proposed changes not to be accepted, but see no logic at all in not even being willing to discuss whether or not something should be added!
• "Some of Silence's, some of Vir's and some of mine ended up in the list, and we got rid of some that we considered marginal." - Yes, and I'm glad we made that little bit of progress, adding articles like Universe and Earth to the list. But I'm very disappointed that we've come to a standstill in trying to continue that progress past the first handful of articles. What's the point of having a list that's half-Core, half-non-Core?
• "The purpose of creating the supplement (Vir's idea, thanks for that!) was to help accommodate a large number of important topics that were omitted from Core Topics but more important than many on the VA list." - And I think the Supplemental list was a fantastic idea. But I think it's been very poorly-handled in that it's not being used as a "list of articles that are somewhat less important than the Core Topics", but rather as a "list of important articles that weren't proposed soon enough to be added to the original Core Topics listings". The Supplemental list should be an opportunity to save great article suggestions that didn't quite make the cut; instead, it's being used to not even bother reviewing or considering any of the new suggestions! As a result, the "Supplemental" list is actually causing harm to the Core Topics list at this point, whereas if it were used properly and consistently, it could be a very useful tool. I very much hope that this problem can be resolved in the future, and we can return to genuinely considering new suggestions and critiques of the Core Topics list, rather than dumping them all indiscriminately into the "Supplemental" page purely as a time-saving measure.
• "We have in effect moved beyond the "development" stage of this project into the usage stage - all the debates about what goes in or out were mostly done last year." - Which is indeed a very big problem, because the list is not yet high-quality enough to be remotely useful for such a stage. That makes it all the more vitally important than we make the needed improvements before the many unacceptably biased and trivial entries in the "Core topics" list infect other Wikipedia Projects with their blatantly warped assessments.
• "Partly because of no. 1 above, I'm busy with Version 0.5 and Chemistry at the moment, and I can't put in a lot of energy and time into reviewing this list yet again." - I understand that you're busy. I don't meant to put extra pressure on you: I'm 100% willing and able to take up the extra workload needed to bring this listing up to snuff, even if it takes many hours of work (as it already has, for me). I can be a very valuable tool for keeping this listing up-to-date, consistent, and accurate if you simply allow me to. I'll gladly (indeed, joyously) discuss any of the changes I've recommended, make compromises wherever needed, and do my best to benefit the project, and Wikipedia in general, with all my changes, but I can't do any of that if you keep my hands tied out of fear that I'll violate the Sacred Version of the Core Topics listed (i.e., the random one that happens to currently be on the list).
• "If we carve up a field like chemistry, do we break it into sub-disciplines (inorganic, organic, physical), or by matter (chemical substance, chemical element, chemical compound)" - I know your question was meant to be rhetorical, but: the latter. The distinction between organic and inorganic compounds is largely an arbitrary one, more a matter of convention than of anything inherent to the chemistry itself. See Organic compound. Anyway, sorry for the tangent...
• "This is a project that has to produce results, or it is a failure." - True, but it has to produce good results, or it's worse than a failure: it's a disaster. That's why it's important for us to discuss these things; I understand and sympathize with your point that we shouldn't waste too much time on discussing this, but in the last few months we've barely spent any time at all discussing anything directly related to the list! Surely both extremes, over-discussing and under-discussing, are equally harmful. I propose that we strive for the happy medium, rather than overcompensate against the chance of wasting time on too much talking and revising by stifling all communication and change whatsoever, which is what's been happening lately.
• "If there is a particular article or two that bothers you, let's debate that specific topic on its own merit." - If that is necessary, I'm OK with that, as long as we make those changes. But wouldn't it be better to discuss the changes where we disagree, rather than wasting time discussing every single one where there's no significant disagreement at all? You yourself said that you agree with a lot of my recommendations, so why not just make those changes (or better yet, let me make them), and then tell me which ones you'd like to discuss before I change anything—and we can be incremental and thorough about those. Preventing all progress whatsoever is neither efficient nor productive, and is exactly the cause of both the stagnation I'm criticizing and the "endless debates" you're criticizing. Sometimes, when a change is really needed, it's just got to be made, even if some bureaucratic red tape has to be snipped in the process.
• "If at some point we get a lot of active, enthusiastic people here, then we can do a wholesale review." - But there is one problem with this: if we refuse to allow any significant change or discussion while there aren't many people here, the number of people here will never grow! Why would anyone want to waste time here when their ideas are all going to be ignored and thrown into the "Supplemental" dustbin regardless of their merits? The pace of (much-needed!) progress and improvements lately hasn't been "incremental", it's been nonexistent! Can't we at least wait until the list is at a decent level of quality and consistency before we start restricting major changes to the list? Most of its current failings are quite obvious, even if I'm the only one who's gone to the trouble to explicitly list them in so much detail. And when we find a failing or problem, surely we should fix it, not ignore it because of how long it's been around! -Silence 04:50, 17 June 2006 (UTC)