On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 09:13:50AM +0100, Michel Vuijlsteke wrote:
On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Ian Woollard
<ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer
<snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I will repeat my conviction that our notability
guidelines are the
biggest PR blunder we engage in.
An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants
to add it would rapidly descend into farce.
Yes it can, and no it wouldn't. You're thinking of Wikipedia as if it were a
printed set of volumes. If it were, the mass of pop culture related content
would stick out. As it is now, it doesn't. Nobody reads wikipedia from cover
to cover.
You're totally free to go about adding content to the Bismarck-Napoleon-Hans
Delbr?ck side of Wikipedia, while someone else is adding biography stubs
about every single character in Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. Or, you
know, TV's Seventh Heaven. :)
It does no harm to have loads of articles on things that do not matter to
you and that would never ever be in the crosshairs of Brittanica. Neither
you nor I have a crystal ball and can predict what will be relevant in twnty
year's time; if we continue as we're doing right now, we're doing ourselves
a huge disservice.
So what if there are 500 Pok?mon character biographies? They're not harming
anyone.
Notability is harming Wikipedia. There is no absolute notability, and we
should stop trying to autistically cram everything into neat little boxes.
Let history sort things out, not bots and singe purpose accounts.
I sort of agree with this. However, we do want to stop some stuff
getting in, like total crap that was dreamed up by some dud before
breakfast and he added it to WP before lunch. We avoid the notion of
adding what is "true" but have reached a compromise that we add stuff
with sources. However, we are more and more deleting stuff that could
have sources added. People work on deleting it, rather than working on
finding sources or just leaving it for others to do that.
Brian.
Michel
_______________________________________________
WikiEN-l mailing list
WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
--
Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au
[[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia.
Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity