On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.
An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add it would rapidly descend into farce.
Yes it can, and no it wouldn't. You're thinking of Wikipedia as if it were a printed set of volumes. If it were, the mass of pop culture related content would stick out. As it is now, it doesn't. Nobody reads wikipedia from cover to cover.
You're totally free to go about adding content to the Bismarck-Napoleon-Hans Delbrück side of Wikipedia, while someone else is adding biography stubs about every single character in Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. Or, you know, TV's Seventh Heaven. :)
It does no harm to have loads of articles on things that do not matter to you and that would never ever be in the crosshairs of Brittanica. Neither you nor I have a crystal ball and can predict what will be relevant in twnty year's time; if we continue as we're doing right now, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice.
So what if there are 500 Pokémon character biographies? They're not harming anyone.
Notability is harming Wikipedia. There is no absolute notability, and we should stop trying to autistically cram everything into neat little boxes. Let history sort things out, not bots and singe purpose accounts.
Michel