On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:59 PM, David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
The argument for Savage was that an exception should be made for bibliographies, discographies, and so forth, where we would do better to provide complete coverage since it quite easy to do &something which can well be crowd-sourced, fits in with our basic mission, & is appropriate to do in conjunction with articles rather than as some sort of separate database. I opposed the Savage material as a separate article,& would still oppose it today, but I wouldn't now oppose having the material: I think the best way to do this is with subpages.
As an aside, I have played with classifying some of our non-standard article types (without judging them!) here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Encyclopedic_genre
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:30 AM, Thomas Morton morton.thomas@googlemail.com wrote:
Been there. Done that. It isn't only women's topics. Because Justin Bieber is unpopular and actively disliked by some people, (Though I guess you could argue this example relates to a topic of interest to many young girls) there was an attempt to merge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber_on_Twitter in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Bieber , with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Justin_Bieber#Merger_proposal making it clear the reason is "I don't like this." The article had about 100 sources around the time the article was nominated for merge. Lady Gaga, the most followed person on Twitter and woo hoo female to boot! has had other people ask why the article isn't deleted. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lady_Gaga_on_Twitter#Request_for_deletion:... . I have another topic I wrote on where the regional women's stuff should be generic to all women playing the sport or to the region. If neither article currently exist, [[WP:SOFIXIT]] by creating the new and relevant articles.
Information is power and what is on Wikipedia has the potential to shape greater understanding around issues. Thus, a battle for what should and should not be there.
Wow, YMMV, but I think it's really odd to have whole long articles devoted to a Twitter account. What is and isn't broken out from "main topic" articles is often controversial, whether criticism sections or detailed information on specifically consequential periods, but an article on a Twitter account is an outlier in my reading experience.
One of the arguments on the talk page for Fanny Imlay was that the sources cited included information about her only incidentally in the course of covering other people, as opposed to being primarily about her (presumably with the exception of the biography). I don't know enough about the subject or the sources to know if this is the case, but it's an argument that might apply to "Justin Bieber on Twitter." The articles discussing his Twitter usage are really about Justin Bieber and his behavior, not his Twitter account. See for example[1], a short mention in Ashton Kutcher's bio about his Twitter use. Kutcher is also among the most prominent users of that service in its history, but there is no article devoted to it. Rather than seeing the merge proposal as an example of "I don't like it," I think the fact that it failed demonstrates the power of a gigantic fanbase to distort normal practice on a wiki.
One of the problems I personally have with those articles is that it stretches to definition of Wikipedia as a summary resource. If we aim to be exhaustive, in the way those articles represent, where does it end?
As Nathan says; this is a prime example of POV pushing/distortion.
If I wrote a lengthy article about the details of messages Dudley Clarke sent back and forth to John Bevan during World War II (and article I could quite easily source) the community would, quite rightly, delete it.
Tom
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