On 27/02/06, Ben Yates <bluephonic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
But a constellation of related articles covering every
detail of
Hooke's life won't happen all at once -- we'll have to wait for the
facts to accumulate before they can be organized comprehesibly.
Removing what you consider trivia because it doesn't fit perfectly
with the rest of the article short-circuits this process.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. That means it covers everything, yes -
but it means it covers every topic, not every piece of information.
Our article (or even articles) on Hooke are never going to be a
five-volume biography, and two major features governing this are that
our editorial processes are not equipped to deal with a five-volume
biography, and our readers don't want one. The vanishingly small
number of people who go to our page on Hooke looking for a book-length
study can find one easily; we've got (or should have) references to
the major works on him. Think of what we're aiming for as an
intelligent précis of the five best books written on the topic...
We're not going to compile notes for the five-volume biography in
order to trim it down to ten or fifteen thousand words over a handful
of articles. There are going to be pieces of information which are
verifiable, and possibly even of interest, which are simply of too
fine a level of detail to include in an encyclopedia article. And, a
lot of the time, we can tell that the information is below that
threshold simply by looking at it.
(The "does it assert notability" test on WP:CSD is surprisingly
appropiate here - Grafton might have been a very influential man who
got angry, or Hooke's reply might have been a vitriolic spew which got
reprinted in twelve different newspapers... but it doesn't say so. It
doesn't tell us that it's important.)
It's not that it doesn't fit perfectly with the rest of the article -
I'm all for disjointed articles with "(...1973-1988 goes here...)"
stuck in the middle, so awkward sentences hanging at the end are fine.
It's just... unimportant. The normal editorial process, if we were
working from a comprehensive study and summarising it, would lead us
to leave these minor details out; why should we feel compelled to keep
them because someone explicitly added it?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk