2009/9/18 Steve Bowbrick <Steve.Bowbrick(a)bbc.co.uk>uk>:
BBC Radio 4 is making a big 100-part radio series
called A History of
the World in 100 Objects.
The production team would like to write a new Wikipedia entry about the
series. Chris Thorne explains below why he thinks we need the article.
You'll see that he references the new system here that uses Wikipedia as
a controlled vocabulary for category and topic pages.
Would it be legitimate to create a Wikipedia entry for the series? The
series starts in the new year but is already moderately notable via some
newspaper articles and information on the BBC and British Museum web
sites.
What do you think?
Yes, it sounds notable. The key issue I can see is that, if it is the
BBC writing it, there is a real danger of original research.
Everything that goes in the Wikipedia article needs to have been
published somewhere else first (that radio series itself is a
publication, although you need to be careful when using primary
sources like that).
If someone from the BBC does write it they need to make it very clear
they are from the BBC - I suggest a note to that effect on their user
page and on the talk page for the article. Ideally you should request
that someone else write the article and just list the sources they
should use.
PS the reason why im asking is that there is a new
tagging system
coming, whereby you can only tag episodes with terms that have a page in
wikipedia. We want to be able to tag episodes with 'A history of the
world in 100 objects' therefore we need a page creating in wikipedia.
Unfortunatly, because it takes a while to get the wikipedia articles to
generate tags, the sooner an article can exist, the better.
I'm not sure I like the sound of that. Wikipedia in an encyclopaedia,
our articles are about encyclopaedic topics. I can't see any reason
why your tags should be exclusively encyclopaedia topics. I rather
suspect this is a case of using the wrong tool for the job.