I do feel that the modest [[One-hit wonder]] article that I started was pretty well rendered meaningless by fights about "well they had two hits in England" followed by going through a reference book and adding every single record by anyone who never had another hit to the list and splitting it up between England and US so you couldn't see any relationships. Perfectly normal, now that I look back on it, but the phenomenon of one-jit wonders was not well served by it. I had thought of making a [[One-hit wonder hall of fame]] so that genuine, standout singular singles would have a chance of their proper notice. I'm thinking of "Radar Love" by Golden Earring in particular. but there could be a densely packed little list of truly memorable, even influential, one-hit wonders. Likewise, in the music articles, to have sax players off of someone's favorite album in between [[John Coltrane]] and [[Charlie Parker]] makes it hard to understand the development of style on the instrument. Again, I considered shoveling a ton of them off into something called [[Beloved favorites]], but couldn't face the talk-page wars that would surely follow. [[List of novelists]] grows more "complete" and less useful with each passing day. Anything that anyone might try to do bogs down in "that's just your opinion" and "Kenny G has sold 22 billion albums, how can you say he's not important". Seems hopeless. The best chance might be to make lists of members of rock and roll hall of fame, Pulitzer Prize winners (Duke Ellington was turned down for one), Booker Prize winners, whatever can be made to look objective. Tom Parmenter Ortolan88 |From: erik_moeller(a)gmx.de (Erik Moeller) |Sender: wikien-l-admin(a)wikipedia.org |Reply-To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org |Date: 25 Jan 2003 01:07:00 +0100 | |Do we have a policy on "best of" lists? | |A page "List of best physicists" was quickly deleted. It consisted of |several such lists, some of them with a reference, others without it. |Similarly, our anonymous "year in music" user added several "<year> in |KROQ" pages (KROQ being a radio station); those were also deleted. In case |2 I agree without reservation, in case 1 I think it might have been |rewritten to be useful (perhaps under the title "Lists of best .." rather |than "List of best .."). | |In both cases, we have authorities who are being cited as selecting |information from a larger sample. There could also be "Lists of best |science fiction stories", "Lists of best novels" etc. Some of these lists |would be written by authorities, others based on collaborative filtering |such as the IMDB top movie lists. In the latter case, when the list is |dynamically changing, an external link might be most appropriate. | |But if we allow such lists, do we open the door to all kinds of spam-type, |largely useless lists like the "year in KROQ" pages? Will people enter |never ending NPOV disputes over whether their particular list should be |included? I'm uncertain here and would appreciate some feedback. In any |case, we need a clear policy if it doesn't already exist. | |Regards, | |Erik | | |_______________________________________________ |WikiEN-l mailing list |WikiEN-l(a)wikipedia.org |http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l |

Erik Moeller wrote: (sorry for 2nd post. Wiki karma: erm... my lag is sooooooo bad at the mo) List of HUgo & Nebula award winners would be a good indication, and NPOV.