On 7/8/07, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/07/07, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/7/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
One of my old favorites is up for deletion right now, for the fourth time, and looks likely to go the way of the dodo this time around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_Prime_%28person%29. Just in
time
for the release of the new Transformers movie, too.
It was heavily referenced, non-controversial, and a fun little piece
of
trivia. I really don't understand why some editors feel the need to
get
rid of such stuff. There are days that Wikipedia makes me depressed.
Why can't it be heavily referenced, non-controversial, fun little piece of trivia in the article for the character? Why do we need an article just for him or for every fun little piece of trivia someone comes across?
Trivia is by definition... trivial. Do we want a trivial encyclopedia? I would say not.
You can imagine information like a web, with connections between pieces of information. In this case the web only connects to Optimus Prime, the toy so it's sort of like a dead end in terms of the connections; because the person probably isn't otherwise notable. I could understand if it was in the Optimus Prime article, but even then it's still essentially trivia.
I think we mostly want an encyclopaedia with articles with lots of connections between things; something that is fairly cut-off like this is probably not notable.
Absolutely. I think that those who argue anything backed by reliable sources ought to be kept have forgotten that an encyclopaedia has a specific purpose, and that Wikipedia is not the only project which can accept this information. If you look at things from a macro perspective, what project is best placed to house a particular article? In the case of Optimus Prime, I think the best place is Wikinews, because this person is known mainly for changing his name to Optimus Prime - something widely reported by news outlets, but almost certain to be nothing more than a footnote in proper secondary sources such as books. We need to be more willing to embrace the perspective that Wikimedia projects are for housing information, but that different projects are meant for different types of information.
Having said that, we need to improve the transwiki process. It has not changed at all since I became an admin over three years ago, and it has always been one of the most tedious parts of closing AfDs. (I remember the time I had to transwiki a gallery of images to Commons/Wikibooks...it was horrible.)
Johnleemk