Talk:The art of Wikipedia weeding

The title of this article is the typical biased Larry Sanger pro-monoculture view. Personally, I like weeds better than grass, which is usually alien to the environments where it's introduced. This metaphor would be offensive to many.

but you show your own bias in saying you like weeds better than grass. You can't compare things that are not defined in the same frame. Grass defines several graminae, which are used by humans to make lawns. Weeds are not defined by being only unsuitable plants growing in grass. Weeds are just any plants growing in the wrong place, wrong being related to what humans are trying to do with the place. Corn growing on a lawn is a weed. But when in a corn field, corn is not a weed anymore, grass is weed then.

true - but what I am saying is in fact that when humans make these choices I usually dislike their choices! So this is an anti-human bias perhaps.

from that point of view (which is the regular definition of what a weed is :-));

yes, it is.

Wikipedia is a cultural system where unfortunately weeds grow.

That's not unfortunate if you think of both weeding and gardening as one process, where you pull something out in one place and plant it in another. "plant relocation" would be the politically correct term.

Any type of weeds. That doesnot mean Wikipedia is a monoculture, it just mean it is a system where crops are forced to grow along certain principles, for the benefit of some.

Propose a new title: "Gardening Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia as a wild garden".

this said, comparison of wikipedia with a garden is very good. the best way to avoid weeds in a garden is to take care of it. Carefully tending the garden (plants, soil, pollinators, insects...) is often enough to prevent weeds to proliferate.

very true - and it's a separate issue whether the 'weed' can live elsewhere happily.

besides "gardening" has a positive stand while weeding has a negative one.

well it is often a negative process, but not exclusively so, there's a lot of encouraging people to try again or fix something.

This sounds the most important point to me : to see the bright side of it. I propose "Cultivating Wikipedia as a wild garden" or simply "Wikipedia : the art of gardening"

just out of curiosity...does the english title "cultivating a garden" hold the same type of implication that it does in french ? Which is that work is the way to contribute to improvment and happiness in the world. That it is not necessary for someone to ask himself to many metaphysical questions for which there are no answers anyway. That it is more useful to just live quietly and somehow accept that we can't have a handle on everything. That's though we have an impact on our life, but also that life has a will that we have little impact on, so we must accept to trust providence.

"cultivating a garden" implies we must cultivate our working time, our family, our body, our brain, our feelings. And even if we cultivate a very small garden, we must try to cultivate it well, we must try to make something we will be proud of, something that will stay forever.

it's also a way of saying that work (or effort) is defining a person more on the criteria of his/her usefulness, than on the criteria of his/her birth or of his/her education.

sure has little to do with the fact of keeping some wilderness in our Garden (except that if we accept providence input, that also mean we somehow trust the life and minerals and everything around us, hence understand the need to keep it in good shape), but somehow, everything above has a lot to do with what we are trying to do, no ?

either is ok, but more alliterative constructions like "Weeding Wild Wikipedia" imply that we WANT it to stay a bit 'wild' but recognize that there is human responsibility to 'weed' what's in the wrong place - not necessarily killing what we remove, but putting it elsewhere? So that's another option.

that's hard to articulate :-) That's also a good title yes. But who decide which plants need to be "relocated" ? and why ? and where ?

Most people on earth consider a w:lawn or w:golf to be waste of space. And life.

I could be inclined to agree that golf courses are a huge waste of space and water, especially in climates that can ill afford it, but I still weed my tomato patch :-) -- Tarquin 21:48 Feb 2, 2003 (UTC)