On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 11:12:26 -0800, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
This is one of those so-what articles. I would have no interest to go there in search of information; it's fundamentally useless. Still, I'm not about to complain about it, and there are ways of dealing with the how-tall-is-tall criterion. There are people who love to play with this kind of list, and I am glad to see these eager little minds diverted into harmlessly useless endeavours. What we end up with is a handful of old-fashioned school principals who have forgotten their principles and a bunch of kindergartners who are learning through play. The rest of us are learning or teaching somewhere else in the school; we don't directly give a damn about what's happening in the kindergarten. For us, Wikipedia's reputation does not depend on self-righteous principals suppressing kindergarten activity. We mostly don't get involved in specific deletion arguments; that would be too time-consuming. But we do resent being assumed to belong to some imagined consensus.
That's terribly harsh. Your analogy is also flawed, because the kindergarteners here are learning through play (using someone else's toys) that original research is just fine, making up your own subjective criteria is no problem and all you need to do is gather together lots of people to shout "I like it!" and it gets kept regardless of failing core policy. I fail to see how this is good.
Plus, I am advocating replacing it with a verifiable and objective list, which they can still play with, just not adding their favourite basketball star. They might have to do some research. Something they could - you know - learn from.
Guy (JzG)