On 11/11/03 7:02 AM, "Delirium" delirium@rufus.d2g.com wrote:
The Cunctator wrote:
But there is no legitimate grounds on which to do so: there is no way we can say that the Sept. 11 biographies are notable, but 6 million Holocaust victims are not. Many people, in fact, would argue the reverse, with that particular example.
And I would not disagree with that, nor have I ever.
Please correct your misunderstandings of what I have said.
Then I think the simple disagreement boils down to that. I think that this is opening the door for a flood of stuff Wikipedia doesn't need and shouldn't have to deal with, while you disagree that it is undesirable for us to have such entries. So I suppose slippery slope doesn't enter into it at all: I think we should have none of them, and you think we should have all of them. Is that accurate?
I would only say that my position is that we should have all of them eventually--which could be a very long time. I'm in no rush to accelerate the process.
I'm curious what you meant by "necessary interface changes". Do you mean we wouldn't reference the non-notable people at all on the articles of the famous people?
I don't know, honestly. I do believe that the Wikipedia interface could be improved somehow to deal with namespace collisions.
Disambiguation pages are an imperfect hack.
I'm objecting to an article on, say, Thomas Jefferson, saying "Thomas Jefferson was also a chemical engineer who worked for Raytheon in the 1960s and 70s," or "Thomas Jefferson was a high school student who died in an automobile accident in 1952," or even a link pointing to a "list of other Thomas Jeffersons" which is populated with such non-noteworthy people. If they can somehow be kept completely isolated in a "people who are not notable" ghetto, such that [[Thomas Jefferson]] doesn't have to include them or a link to them or a disambiguating page containing them, I'd have no objections to their mere presence in the database--it's the pollution of the namespace I'm objecting to.
That's a perfectly reasonable objection.
But saying "We can't let people add entries on lesser-known people because then there would be 4000 Michael Jordan articles" is not a reasonable argument.
I think it behooves anyone who wishes to add such entries to ensure that the entries don't collide with more famous people by using middle names, etc.
But as we've seen we still have the name-collision problem with "famous" people as well (see [[Elizabeth Smart]]).
Again, I believe we'll figure out a better way to deal with naming collisions as it becomes a more pressing problem.