In a couintry where importance wa rought proportional to the amount of property one owned and where it was located, a list of the propertyies is highly relevant. There are multiple books discussing in detail the landholdings of individual proprietors and the pattern of landholding in general. This is the basic historical information. If he had owned one compact estate, we would surely list it. As he owned a hundred, just as much reason. Some thought could have been given to how to present the references more compactly, but the information is encyclopedic . since the information is available for every Domesday landowner in the counties covered, I hope for more such articles. I think there are a few thousand.

This list is just a start in the encyclopedic treatment. There needs to be a discussion for each one of them of when they were acquired, of their extent, and of what happened to them. The place for this is probably in the articles on the individual locations., thus buildingthe web--and probing that all geographic places even villages, do have something to be said about them.

How many events in his life should be covered? Not as much as in a book about him, no. We might not list ''every'' charter he signed or witnessed, as an historian would, or use them to reconstruct his itinerary. We should describe his tomb, we would not use the detail that an art historian would in a monograph about it. Though we would mention his relatives, we would not put in long sections about their later career , as an historian would to give context--this context will be in other articles. But the property he owned is as basic as anything else about a feudal lord. The desire to remove it indicates an absences of historical perspective, at the least. Wikipedia is not aimed as a scholarly encyclopedia, but we should not disdain scholarship when we have it available.

The hardest concept for many of the people working at Wikipedia is not NPOV, or even the need for sources. it's NOT PAPER.

The relevant policy,, as always remains, NOT PAPER BTW, I think there is consensus against using collapsable boxes for article content. It impairs universal access.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 6:37 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Michel Vuijlsteke wikipedia@zog.org wrote:

...

2009/4/23 WJhonson@aol.com

...

The Domesday holdings are not significant to his biography. We are not trying to build a land holdings database, we are writing biographies.

We are writing a comprehensive written compendium that holds information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. We are not writing a comprehensive written compendium of biographies.

Uh...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography

Biography writing is certainly one way of writing articles about people.

There was a template to do biography-by-the-numbers, but it might have got deleted. Several WikiProjects do have "fill in the blanks" article templates. They tend to do more harm than good, IMO.

Carcharoth

---

WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l