[Wikipedia-l] Biographies of unimportant people (was: "In memoriam")

[Lars Aronsson]

Axel Boldt wrote:
> Like I just did: a person is unimportant if his or her biography
> is interesting/useful to almost no one.

If a contributor finds it worth the while to write a bio on a person,
then that person is apparently interesting to that contributor.

I thought that Wikipedia would be self-regulatory in this liberal
manner, but the flood of messages on this list in the last month has
focused on what should *not* be in the Wikipedia (stubs etc.).  I
think this is sad and destructive.  I wanted the liberal approach,
where anybody could write what they liked as long as Jimmy could
afford the disk space.  Wikipedia is a radically new approach to
creating a useful knowledge resource, but everybody seems to be fully
occupied with reaching some obsolete 19th century ideals of what an
encyclopedia should be.  I wouldn't be surprised if next week somebody
suggests that Wikipedia articles should be arranged in alphabetic
order (yet another obsolete notion). I think putting "pedia" in the
name was a mistake.  This could be the Memex or project Xanadu or
your own Interpedia, which should be so much more than an old printed
encyclopedia.  Wikipedia should not be compared to Britannica.  We
should aim for 100 million articles, not 100 thousand.

Some new ideas that are coming out of the deletion discussion are
really useful, such as deleting a single version of an article rather
than the entire article.

However, I don't want to be the one to just complain.  I run my own
wiki in Swedish, completely liberal, without the pedia ambition and
without "pedia" in the name.  Now in its 11th month of existence, it
has become the world's 3rd biggest wiki after the English Wikipedia
and Ward Cunningham's c2.com, with 10,000 articles (comma count) out
of 16,000 pages.  In August it had 112 logged-in active contributors
to 11,000 edits (minor and major).  Page deletion is not allowed, and
nobody urges me to implement it.  Edit wars are under control.  It
gets media attention and everybody thinks it is fun, relaxed, and not
overly serious.  I've had no problems with copyright violations, which
is probably explained by the fact that file uploads are not allowed.
I have no mailing list, so discussion about policies and software are
kept to a minimum, and everybody can focus on writing articles.

Mine might be the world's 3rd biggest wiki, but my other website is
ten times larger, with 100,000 web pages full of Nordic literature,
and ten times older, since it started in December 1992.  Still, that
is a small hobby website with only 300 electronic books, only 100 of
which in facsimile, when compared to the big American "digital
library" websites.  We're only seeing the beginning yet.  This should
not be the time to discuss how to reduce the amount of contents.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  tel +46-70-7891609
  http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/