Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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/Memorial…
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.
--
Gareth Owen
I'm very enamoured of the idea of meta-content markup ...
there are a lot of cool possibilities. But we should be reluctant to tamper
much with a system that totally works in an amazing way. -- Jimmy Wales