On 11/11/03 7:02 AM, "Delirium" <delirium(a)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.