On Mar 7, 2008, at 7:00 AM, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
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.
I think the better concept than notability is interestingness.
Material is encyclopedic if people would find it interesting. It is
*clearly* the case that most of our pop culture ephemera is
interesting to people. It is far less clearly the case that people's
unsigned garage bands are interesting to anyone but themselves.
Again, for the most part this is an interface problem. The problem
with a massive summary of a television episode or a detailed account
of everything a Pokemon has ever done is a problem for us because we
still have articles formatted such that we could print them out and
bind them if we wanted. That's a ridiculously old media solution -
there will never be a paper volume of Wikipedia.
Accordingly, it's OK to have articles structured in a more branching
fashion so that chunks of the article that are mildly esoteric or
primarily masses of data are hyperlinked expansions of the article.
Whether this requires coming up with a new namespace for sub-articles
and expansions that we can use or not, this seems to me like a very
good idea.
In literary studies we'd call all of these things the paratexts.
That's probably not a good name for these things, but it's a concept
we'd do well to have all the same. What should we call the chunks of
an article that would best be treated as a break-out, hyperlinked
extension of the article? Once we have a name it's a heck of a lot
easier to begin thinking about the category meaningfully.
-Phil