Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
Which in turn means that he does, in fact, have a claim to fame, and should be included, right?
No more than everyone else who has ever died during any other notable event. And I happen to think that thats not a very good claim to fame. Sorry.
I personally find the history of ordinary people quite interesting, particularly if placed in the context of a time.
So do I. But wikipedia.org is *not* a place for new research, and that applies to new research in social history. There is certainly *a* place for research of this kind.
But ... the way to tell these peoples stories in an encyclopedia is not with a lot of articles about individual people, but a considered, well researched article about conditions on the whole.
Are there newspaper articles about your grandfather?
No. I guess he was too ordinary.
[1] (The WTC collapse killed 2,792 people in one day. The 1919 inflenza killed 22 million people in 18 months, or equivalent to 10-15 9/11s, every day)
But if your point is that we can't have articles about all those people
Its not. Its that this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Flu (or, rather an improved one much like) is the way to deal with the social history of that epidemic, much as these articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_Terrorist_Attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_Terrorist_Attack/Memorials... are the way to deal with the socio-historical facets of 9/11
Think along the lines of Studs Terkel's _Hard Times_, a book about ordinary people during the great depression, oral histories.
Or Lawrence Ritter's "The Glory Of Their Times". They're both great books.
Neither of them happen to be encyclopedias.