On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 09:02:06PM -0700, Todd Allen wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On 6/16/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On 6/15/07, The Mangoe the.mangoe@gmail.com wrote:
At any rate, there are some 1400 tenure and tenure-track faculty at UMD. Harvard has more. That makes hundreds of thousands "notable", just counting present faculty; the dead of course hugely outnumber them. The survival of the project relies upon the lack of interest most people have in entering these directories (for that is what they will largely be).
Are you suggesting that the project won't survive with 1400 additional entries? If so, I have to disagree.
Sorry, misread. Are you suggesting that the project won't survive with hundreds of thousands of additional entries? I still disagree.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I wouldn't go so far as to say it would kill off the project, but I believe it would be bad for it. We're not attempting to create "Who's Who in Academia", we're attempting to create an encyclopedia. By covering subjects which are barely of note, very little information exists for, and will be forgotten completely ten years from now, we are giving them undue weight simply by inclusion. That violates NPOV, which -is- a core principle.
I do not think anybody is really suggesting that all academics should get a wikipedia article. It is at least arguable that Professors in the UK and other Commonwealth countries, where most acdaemics are not Professors, should have an article. In the US that would apply to named and distinguished chairs which are comparable.
What concerns me is that we do give undue weight to people in other areas, where in general they are even less notable. For example, just taking one example I looked up just now, my local AFL Club, the [[Western Bulldogs]], has an article that lists the current squad of players. There are 44. That means some of them will hardly get a game the whole session. Only 3 are redlinks. 41 of them appear to have articles. Most of these people will be far more forgotten in 10 years time than academics who will have published something. It seems to me that we include sports people and some others far more easily than we include academics. We even had two Australian Vice Chancelloes up at AfD this last week. We have articles for only about half the Fellows of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences and many other highly notable academies. We need more articles on good academics.
If only people would write about academics who deserve an article rather on vanity stuff about their supervisor or themseleves. Oh well!.
Brian.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l