[WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[wjhonson at aol.com]

The way I would phrase it, there are those who believe the policy pages 
are "given down from on high" and there are those who understand that 
those same pages were "created from below".  That is, I believe 
tantamount not to "rules can be broken" but rather to "rules can 
change".  I never advise people to be bold *against* policy, but rather 
to go to the policy discussion pages and see whether or not their 
situation might be an exception that we'd like to include *in* the 
policy.  It's happened dozens of times, just within my own memory, that 
situations of this sort, get resolved by clarification and modification 
of the policy language.

By the way, I dispute that notability guidelines were laid down to 
prevent "advertising, spam and original research".  For example I think 
in the Porn Actors notability it states something like that they must 
have appeared in at least five films or something of that sort.  That 
seems more about setting a bar so we don't get people who have a 
trivial set of appearances i.e. they are "notable" in their field.

You can certainly create a list of porn actors who have only appeared 
in a single film *without* doing any original research.  Remembering 
that source-based research is not "original" just because it's "new to 
a major publication".  Original research involves the *creation* of a 
new fact, not just the re-reporting of it no matter the source, 
provided it's been published in some format previously.  A video box 
cover is a publication format.  So reading names off it, is not 
original research.


-----Original Message-----
From: Surreptitiousness <surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com>
To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tue, Aug 18, 2009 2:01 pm
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
> It's a question of the amount of coverage we want to give to fiction
> details.
> Let's say we have an article on Superman, and also on each of the 
various
> Superman comic runs that have appeared in the past 50 years.
> Now make an article on *each* comic issue, and then in that article
> describe the plot, characters, moral, date, number of issues, etc.
> *Now* for each character make an article for them, describing each 
issue
> they were in, with the plot details, and link them all together.
> You'd have something like three to twenty thousand articles on  
Superman.
> Many people would see that as overwhelming in scope and most relevant 
for a
>  specialist work.
>
I've always found it to be a question of how hard people are prepared 
to
look the other way, or perhaps look hard enough to find a problem.  We
seem to have lost sight of the fact that notability guidance was pretty
much drawn up and widely accepted to prevent advertising, spam and
original research.  It's now being pushed places it doesn't need to go,
by people who don't really understand what we're about. Some devoted
souls seem to treat these policy pages as "The Word", almost 
sacrosanct,
which is starting to create real tension with the notion that they are
descriptive and that consensus can change.  I think the current battle
is not between "inclusionists" and "deletionists", but between those 
who
believe rules should be followed and those who believe rules can be
broken. That we have a rule which says we can break rules makes for the
most perplexing conversations. I can't help but wonder, in amusement, 
if
it isn't possible to fork the encyclopedia from the rules in some way.

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