Bernd Kulawik wrote:
A) ARGUMENTS FOR A "BIOPEDIA"
A.1) The main reason to start this is: There is a "market" (=
interest) for something like this - or what do you think why there
are all these "national Biographies" written - in dozens of volumes
over decades - like the "Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani" or the
"Deutsche Biographie"? There are generations of people (historians
and other researchers) working on such projects. - Some of these
projects, like a database on historical persons offered by a German
publishing house (in fact, they only seem to bundle data collected
from different scientific sources, most of them created with public
money ...) are very expansive to users: up to 5.000 Euro per year,
for instance, for the access to about 5.000.000 entries ...
There is definitely a growing "market" for the (scientific) use of
databases on persons.
All of these would probably already fit within most Wikipedians' views
of notability. It is material that should be available for free.
5,000,000 entries is a lot of work. This alone is more entries than are
already on Wikipedia for all languages combined.
A.2) In addition, there is a similar
"market" for genealogical data
and research: Recently I read, that genealogy is the second largest
"hobby horse" in the USA...
Agreed. Some kind of genealogical skills would probably be needed to
keep it all organized. The work of the LDS (Mormon) Church alone is
enormous; their genealogical library in Salt Lake City is an impressive
resource, and they have very liberal policies about public access to
this material. How can our efforts best complement rather than
duplicate their work?
A.3) Finally, such a project could help to record
"oral" tradition by
and about persons: Only a few years (or, maybe, very few decades)
before, historians started to realize, that oral history of personal
memories about a persons ancestor generations could be interesting as
a "correction" to "official" history - normally written by the
"winners". And such "data" are not only interesting for historians:
Only remember the success of such family histories like "Roots" (as a
book and as a movie - but the book found millions of readers before
the movie was made ...).
Personal memoirs are indeed important resources. They give unique
insights, but much of them are completely unverifiable. No original
resaearch and verifiability policies would need to be modified.
A.4) If Wikipedia is really about collecting the
information and
knowledge everyone of us can offer - why should it (or rather:
Biopedia) not be interested in the persons themselves? Many people
may know something about the law of Gravity, and this information may
be virtually congruent in most cases - but the interesting different
views on the world come from personal experience, ... this is the
reason why people rather read novels, not of telephone books :-))
A.5) Another special useful feature of such a database, IMHO, would
be the possibility to make records of all the - innocent - people
murdered by politics in our time who otherwise may have no chance to
be remembered and find some sort of "justice" just by being
"recorded" somewhere. - On the other side, personal relationships of
"mighty" persons could be explained to the public. I know, there are
already examples of both - databases of holocaust victims as well as
databases of (US-american) politicians and their relationships to
corporations, for instance. But they are virtually unknow.
Wikipedia, with its already incredible strong position in the
"information market", could help a "Biopedia" to be the first place
to look for information about such persons.
So, there IS an interest in people, and not only in "important" people.
By the way - who would like to decide who is "important"? A
grandfather who fought as a worker for better living conditions in
his small hometown may be important on the same historical level as
the capitalist on the other side of the figth, even though there are
streets named and statues only for this one ...
It is this chance to make recordings of "normal" people - who might
be interesting once in the future or who lived a "normal" life - that
would be a strong support for the idea of a Biopedia.
By developing this as an independent project using MediaWiki software
your own servers it will allow you and those interested in this project
the freedom to develop the policies that you need to make it viable
B) "BIOPEDIA" AND/OR/INSIDE WIKIPEDIA?
B.1) And I do not see a big problem in "separating" the data related
to persons from Wikipedia into a "Biopedia" mentioned here.
After all, persons are not really what is to be expected in an
encyclopedia at all - I would rather expect it to contain information
about notions, objects or events - things that could/should be
learned ... just because "pedia" means that IIRC.
Technically IMHO it cannot be a "big" problem to "load" the data
from an entry in the "Biopedia" into Wikipedia when they are
requested by a user there. Entries in Wikipedia are connected by
links - it should be no problem to load "external" documents/entries
from another source in a "transparent" way like it can be done with
images already in HTML.
B.2) Then, why not include the Biopedia into Wikipedia - there are
already thousands of articles on persons? Because - if the Biopedia
really tries to collect information about living (and dead!) persons,
it would simply "blow up" the Wikipedia with its potentially billions
of entries. In fact, I think there should be a more restricted form
for entries (= biographies) on persons in the Biopedia which could
allow to reduce the amount of storage needed for a single entry, to
"pack" the data and to make them searchable in an especially easy way.
If you put your Biopedia under a GFDL licence there should be no problem
in copying material between the two projects.
C) PROBLEMS?
C.1) The question if a person is "real" is not really a problem IMHO:
On one side, there may be a lot of people searching in the database
for "persons" like "James T. Kirk" -- and then be astounished, that
he was _not_ a living being, but is a fictional character. But there
is some useful information about this "person" - without any doubt.
In other cases, the fictional character may have interesting
relations to "real" persons, e.g. Anna Karenina or Effi Briest.
On the other hand, there could be entries about historical persons
that are impossible to verify - it might even not be clear if the
person really existed (Zarathustra, Lao-Tse ...). But if s/he is of
importance for other people today, there simply should be an entry.
I did a quick search using the Yahoo! People Search. It gave me 17
people in the United States with the name "James T. Kirk"
C.2) Would the "Biopedia" explode because of
entries about persons
like "John Doe", "Schnippi Schnappi", "Hutzli Putzli" etc.?
Not
really. First, there is hardly a chance to stop people when they want
to create such entries in Wikipedia today. Because nobody could
really "watch" all the new entries all the time. But these entries
will "dry out" because of lack of interest - and if they are
interesting to other people, then they have a right to exist like any
other entry interesting for a group of persons.
So, this too, is not really a problem IMHO.
Many of these weird mames DO belong to real people. They won't dry
out. They will probably be added in proportion to the more "serious" names.
C.3) Privacy.
This is the only real and a VERY BIG problem, that I see. Though
persons of public interest like polititians, artists, jet-set people
... may not be able to block entries about themselves - simply just
because they ARE of public interest, normal people could and should
be able to do that. Therefore, there should be a mechanism to avoid
that people create entries about other people without their
permission. If someone does not want to be listed with personal data,
there should be no such entry.
By the way - the same mechanism could be used to reduce the number of
entries on fictional persons, too :-)
Even with a very conservative policy on privacy the excludible list will
remain very small. No-one will be able to complain about a shortage of
work.
Ec