Jens Frank wrote:

...

I agree with keeping it at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]], if that means anything.

Reading the article, I get the impression that "kidnap victim" might not be NPOV. I don't want to say that she was not kidnapped, but some points of the story indicate the possibility of a different explanation.

Well, I'd say that if any information comes out definitively to say otherwise, or if there's any actual controversy about it, we could try something different. The thing I like about 'kidnap victim' as a disambiguator is that it *instantly* disambiguates -- everyone will know exactly who we mean.

I'd prefer disambiguating by her middle name or by year of birth.

But those are meaningless, so if you got the page title in a search result or whatever, you'd not know to click on it.

--Jimbo

I don't understand how you can possibly imagine that she was not the victim of a kidnapping. Please explain your thinking?

RickK

Jens Frank JeLuF@gmx.de wrote: On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 09:38:50PM -0800, Andrew wrote:

I agree with keeping it at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap victim)]], if that means anything.

Reading the article, I get the impression that "kidnap victim" might not be NPOV. I don't want to say that she was not kidnapped, but some points of the story indicate the possibility of a different explanation.

I'd prefer disambiguating by her middle name or by year of birth.

Regards,

JeLuF _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:

But almost no one knows the middle initial of Elizabeth Smart, kidnap victim.

Well, thats what an encyclopedia is for, I suppose.

I think kidnap victim is a good term for disambiguation in this case.

I dont. Thats why I changed it to Elizabeth Ann Smart in the first place.

1: is has less words in it. 2. its not as clumsy 3. its not attaching to someone a "victim" status, as if it were up to her to do something encyclopaedia worthy that might overshadow her "victimness." Its silly to have in a title.

~S~

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No, let's not. Just because it's a topic that doesn't interest you doesn't make it unworthy of discussion. I have no interest in the over-my-head mathematics subjects, but I don't suggest THEY be deleted.

RickK

tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote: let's just get a grip and wipe the article. take the long-term view -- will anyone remember this in twenty years' time?

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--- tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote:

Daniel Mayer wrote:

...

therefore acceptable ([[George W. Bush]]/[[George

H. W. Bush]]). [[Elizabeth

...

Smart (kidnap victim)]] would be my second choice.

The 'media sensation' one

...

has got to go, though.

I see the article is at [[Elizabeth Smart (kidnap

victim)]] right now, so I'm

...

happy with that.

let's just get a grip and wipe the article. take the long-term view -- will anyone remember this in twenty years' time?

Maybe not outside of the US, but probably within it. I still vividly remember when Jessica McClure ("Baby Jessica") fell down that well in Texas in 1987. She should have an article too.

--mav

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Fred Bauder wrote:

...

...

let's just get a grip and wipe the article. take the long-term view -- will anyone remember this in twenty years' time?

Maybe not outside of the US, but probably within it. I still vividly remember when Jessica McClure ("Baby Jessica") fell down that well in Texas in 1987. She should have an article too.

Yes and there was another child in the 1950s, and the chicken that lived after his head was cut off, again from the fifties, and Bridey Murphey, etc.

See:

http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/story.htm

I certainly think that there is a place in an encyclopedia for the offbeat and ephemeral. They can be a source of endless fascination to the reader who discovers them and proceeds to introduce them at a dinner-table conversation with the words "Did you know that....?" Articles about Jessica McClure, Bridey Murphey and [[Mike (headless chicken)]] are all perfectly appropriate.

In science and technology there are any number of attempts that might have worked but were superceded by a more practical idea that wasdiscovered before the old plan could be put into operation. Thus the Collins International Telegraph Company scheme to lay a telegraph wire from New York to London via Alaska and Siberia, quashed by the undersea cable laid by the "Great Eastern". Also the 1920s plan to put a series of floating airports as refueling stops across the Atlantic, which quickly lost its appeal after Lindbergh's famous flight.

Ec

Ray Saintonge wrote:

Articles about Jessica McClure, Bridey Murphey and [[Mike (headless chicken)]] are all perfectly appropriate.

So what happens when readers from other countries write up articles on every single kidnap victim? Do any UK writers wish to create articles on [[Milly Downling]], or the [[Soham girls]]? Both those cases got plenty of media coverage here.

In science and technology there are any number of attempts that might have worked but were superceded by a more practical idea that wasdiscovered before the old plan could be put into operation. Thus the Collins International Telegraph Company scheme to lay a telegraph wire from New York to London via Alaska and Siberia, quashed by the undersea cable laid by the "Great Eastern". Also the 1920s plan to put a series of floating airports as refueling stops across the Atlantic, which quickly lost its appeal after Lindbergh's famous flight.

Now *that* I would find interesting!

Matthew J. Brown wrote:

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, tarquin wrote:

...

So what happens when readers from other countries write up articles on every single kidnap victim? Do any UK writers wish to create articles on [[Milly Downling]], or the [[Soham girls]]? Both those cases got plenty of media coverage here.

If someone wants to write about them, go right ahead. Wiki is not paper, and all that. I can't see as such articles detract from Wikipedia.

So can I write about the cat that was stuck up a tree in the next street from me? The local press gave in plenty of coverage!

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, tarquin wrote:

So can I write about the cat that was stuck up a tree in the next street from me? The local press gave in plenty of coverage!

That's the 'slippery slope' fallacious argument, and you know better than that, tarquin.

That's asserting that we can't have judgement about such things, but of course we can. If we didn't have any judgment, then it's all a slippery slope from the ability to create an article on down. We should just give up this Wikipedia project entirely if we can't.

The slippery slope argument says that if we don't have absolutes, then each time a small step further down is challenged it will be indefensible; thus, by induction, allowing the smallest step is tantamount to allowing the lot. This is generally fallacious, since peoples' resistance goes up the further the accepted policy goes from the consensus on rationality.

-Matt

tarquin wrote:

So can I write about the cat that was stuck up a tree in the next street from me? The local press gave in plenty of coverage!

Are there links? Would it be possible for others to confirm the story?

I hope people don't waste much time writing such pages, but it strikes me as much more of a waste to fight against someone who wanted to include them. I have no problem with a social stigma against writing such pages (just as there is and should be a social stigma against writing articles about ourselves), but a policy of deletion that goes beyond confirmability seems to me to invite more conflict than it would be worth.

Such pages...

1. Do not belong in Wikipedia 1.0 (paper edition), because such will be selected with an eye towards the cost of production

2. Ought not to be linked from the front page (which is space-constrained to deal with only big events and major conceptual topics)

But other than that, what's the harm?

One possible objection I can imagine is cluttering the search results. But the best solution to that, I think, would be to have a refined search engine that limits the impact of minor pages. There are a number of ways to do that, but in any event, it seems unlikely to be a huge problem anyway just because people aren't going to be so interested in writing that many pages of this type.

And that's especially true if we more or less just ignore the practice.

--Jimbo

Geoff Burling wrote:

I've been trying to determine for myself a good rule of thumb to answer this very question: when is something too trivial for inclusion in Wikipedia?

I think this question should be broken down into some subquestions before you can get a valid answer...

1. When is something too trivial for me to work on it?

2. When is something so trivial that I would frown on others working on it?

3. When is something so trivial that I think it should actually be deleted?

I recommend that people take a very strict view of #1, a more lenient view of #2, and really really relax a lot about #3. For #3 the least controversial rule is confirmability.

An obvious example for exclusion that I believe all of us can agree on are the occasional articles that pop up about average people & promptly get deleted.

These are generally full of non-confirmable information, right?

Likewise, there are thousands of individuals mentioned in historical records only once, & of whom nothing more can be known or guessed.

But even _that_ is worthy of a mention, or could be, if someone wants to bother. Suppose, for example, a name is mentioned only once, in passing, in the Bible. (All those 'begats'!) Nothing, let us suppose, is known beyond that.

Even so, that name is likely to appear somewhere in literature or what-not. Or perhaps someone will come across that name _in the Bible_ and wonder "hmm, I wonder what else is known about that person". Then, wikipedia can tell them "This name appears in the Bible. That's all anyone knows." Good information!

The point I am trying to make is this: we should keep in mind that Wikipedia, because it is an encyclopedia, is a reference work. People will want to consult it to answer questions about people, events or facts. This leads to the critereon that before adding an article, one should consider whether it would be of interest beyond a clearly limited audience.

Does it lead to that? I don't think so. *Other* considerations might lead to that answer, but the fact that Wikipedia, because it is an encyclopedia, is a reference work, implies for me a criterion of "well, someone somewhere might be looking for that, so why bother deleting it?"

Now, let me be the first to also say that I think that there *can be* answers to that question! One answer is namespace pollution. I would be very opposed to turning "Thomas Jefferson" into a disambiguation page like this:

"Thomas Jefferson is the name of at least two people:

[[Thomas Jefferson (president)]] - 3rd President of the United States

[[Thomas Jefferson (plumber)]] - plumber in Des Moines, Iowa from 1943-1947, subsequent whereabouts or activities unknown"

But I really think that the confirmability rule helps with almost all cases like that.

--Jimbo

Stan Shebs wrote:

Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the family is Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.

So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've thrown out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some way [...]

I believe this is being discuseed at someplace like [[Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of Biographies]]. Biographical entries seem to have the greatest potential for the addition of pointless trivia to the project. Much of this trivia is verifiable, as several recent article skirmishes have shown.

Simple, objective criteria for importance have been elusive, and it does not help that there isn't much agreement about the project mission in this area.

Jimbo Wales wrote:

For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least

controversial rule is confirmability.

That policy doesn't help the project much. Shall we modify the Rambot to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to 1890 (or whatever year they are now available for)? There is all manner of data about people, that is arguably of interest to at least someone, since, after all, people pay for the tapes. And it may make more than a stub, in that census forms then as now asked a variety of questions other than name and address.

Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line, including photos. Shall we upload all this, and have an article on every address? "No, they would just be stubs!" "Then merge them into articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!" Clearly importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.

Louis

Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

...

For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least controversial rule is confirmability.

That policy doesn't help the project much.

Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer that it gives? Do you see what I'm asking, here?

It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to see deleted.

I gave up on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia long ago. It's not; it's merely an aggregation of articles. As a consequence of giving up the vision of an encyclopedia, I no longer have any interest in having things deleted. So, no, I myself don't seek out the deletion of anything.

We write articles reasonably well, with many excellent examples; further, the work of many have made for some excellent topic areas, particularly in the sciences.

Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into an encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics beyond topical breadth and NPOV: - They are secondary source works; - They are comprehensible to a lay person; - They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across articles; - They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and researched further in any undergraduate college library - They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere aggregations of data such as sports scores or stock prices - They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other publications having related roles.

At present, Wikipedia is a repository and means for consensus editing for a wide variety of articles, perhaps putting it somewhere next to UseNet and GeoCities in 'netspace.

Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems that don't really exist. If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.

If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I think.

The main problem, as I have stated in earlier posts, is that the effort involved on the part of others to verify such trivia is high enough that it doesn't get done, so the trivial articles remain, unchecked and in most cases, inaccurate. Do you think that is benign? Moreover, this sort of policy issue is at the root of most of the ongoing friction at VfD. Imagined problems, indeed.

(If someone wants to start making a point by entering a bunch of information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll us!)

Is it really too much work to try to agree on some sort of policy rather than have to start the conversation from the beginning for each and every case?

Louis

The Cunctator wrote:

...

What's missing?

That's right. He fails to show how Wikipedia does not meet his criteria.

So there's more needed.

All right. You asked.

...

• They are secondary source works

This means that original research and criticism doesn't belong. To me, that means that material should really be sourced back to topical surveys rather than original documents, because of the need for balance. Therefore, for example, in areas of music, art, literature, theater, and film, we should be drawing to a considerable degree from the reviews and criticism written by other authorities rather than doing our own. For an encyclopedic article, the ideal footnote for an article about a film is not the film itself, but rather a book or magazine article about the film. This, among other things, helps with NPOV, and makes sure that we are a summary of human knowledge rather than having a strange and wonderful new perspective on something.

...

• They are comprehensible to a lay person;

For the most part we are OK on this, though there are some mathematics and philosophy articles that push it. Douglas R. Hofsteader, Asimov, and Sagan, despite their many critics, all have the allegorical style of writing that must be adopted when explaining complex scientific subjects to the uninitiated. They all value ease of comprehension over rigor, and we should too.

...

• They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across

articles;

I believe that this remains the largest problem area, encyclopedically speaking. We lack uniformity across articles. Now, some of this will naturally improve with time, but it will never totally correct itself without greater effort. The various & sundry WikiProjects have helped enormously with this, and those who have participated are to be commended. However, this is where there should be some judicious merging and editing of some of the overdone contemporary culture articles, and where the unencyclopedic articles should be dropped so that the criteria for inclusion are reasonably uniform. Without getting into disputed ground, it is fair to say that we need to have more on Dominco Scarlatti than on Phish; more on J.S. Bach than F. Joseph Haydn; and at least as much on John Steinbeck as J.R.R. Tolkien. What we have instead is the mantra of Wikipedia Is Not Paper which, while true, has undermined any sort of effort for consistency of treatment.

...

• They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and

researched further in any undergraduate college library

Many of the affectatious articles added on whims cannot; persons with local and ephemeral fame cannot be researched outside of the area where they were prominent, nor can obscure pop culture figures from decades past.

...

• They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere

aggregations

...

of data such as sports scores or stock prices

Well, that describes some of the Rambot entries where they have not been updated, and there are a handful of articles about CDs and so on that aren't much more than track listings.

...

• They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other

publications having related roles.

And last, the sense of Wikipedia as having a certain role, that is shared with other works that are better for their specific purposes, is a view that is not widely held. It is, at present, a dumping ground for whatever article anyone wishes to write. That's a start. Maybe that's OK in the long run too, if that's what we want. But it is most assuredly not what makes a good encyclopedia.

Louis

Louis Kyu Won Ryu wrote:

Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into an encyclopedia.

Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics beyond topical breadth and NPOV:

• They are secondary source works;

Check - I've seen very little primary material.

• They are comprehensible to a lay person;

Check - I'm a lay person in everything but CS, and I can understand random articles; with the exception of math articles, most of which need more context-setting.

• They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across

articles;

Check - at least half of the torrent of edits are to enforce unformity. Noobs usually learn pretty quickly to follow standard style if they want to see their text live intact for more than a day. :-)

• They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and

researched further in any undergraduate college library

Check - that's where I go for my source material. Actually, "any college library" is setting the bar pretty low - college libraries aren't what they used to be.

• They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere

aggregations of data such as sports scores or stock prices

Check, although the unfinished articles will be lacking here.

• They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other

publications having related roles.

Check - when I write articles, I'm hitting the highlights and key points, and make refs and ext links point to the exhaustively in-depth stuff, and I see most other people doing the same thing. References are too few and far between still, I've been thinking about efficient ways to fix that.

So that's great, looks like WP generally fits your criteria!

Stan

So what happens when readers from other countries write up articles on every single kidnap victim? Do any UK writers wish to create articles on [[Milly Downling]], or the [[Soham girls]]? Both those cases got plenty of media coverage here.

No problem. It's like the Elephant Man....Might make a move someday.

Fred

Fred Bauder wrote:

...

No problem. It's like the Elephant Man....Might make a move someday.

Right! "Move" or "movie"? ;-)

Ec

Typical typo for me, leaving final letters off. But yes a bunch of these sensational ephemeral stories are just that, good stories.

Fred

Stan Shebs wrote:

More than a little of the ancient history that we know has been painstakingly reconstructed from reports of sensational but ephemeral events; those reports often give us bits of cultural insight that the ancient scholars didn't understand well enough to describe in their encyclopedias and histories.

A lot of archaeological excavations take place in ancient garbage dumps. We don't study what these societies treasured, but what they threw away. :-)

Ec

Jimmy Wales wrote:

tarquin wrote:

...

Do any UK writers wish to create articles on [[Milly Downling]], or the [[Soham girls]]? Both those cases got plenty of media coverage here.

I, for one, would be fascinated to read such an article.

Perhaps it's very uncool to not look down my nose at media sensations, but I found the Elizabeth Smart case to be fascinating from many perspectives, and followed it quite avidly at the time. Learning more about similar cases in other countries (even if the similarity is primarily in the media sensationalism) would be valuable to me.

I didn't pay any attention at all to the Elizabeth Smart case when it was happening. But just because I wasn't interested in it doesn't mean that others aren't. Occasional UK cases do get mentioned; the one a few years ago (Bolger?) where two 11-year olds kidnapped and killed a 4-year old received a lot of mention in the news.

At other times a true sordid affair gets turned into a popular movie like "Chicago", and it is gown completely out of proportion.

Clifford Olson was from the Vancouver area, and known for having kidnapped and murdered some 10 kids. I heard of his arrest on a TV news report while visiting in the Philiippines.

My point is that lots and lots of things are interesting to only a small number of people. Wikipedia need not avoid those things, so long as there is confirmability.

With many of the things that we are taliking about now, confirmability is not a big problem. The sensational crimes get more than their share of media reporting.

Now, later on, when there's a formal 'drive to 1.0', some of those things may need to be left out, assuming that there are space constraints on 1.0 (for print).

This is where the idea of "Wikipedia is not paper" comes in, or in other words, "Wikipedia is not a static medium." With 1.0, whether on paper or CD, we will be producing something on a static medium.

Ec

Daniel Mayer wrote:

--- tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote:

...

let's just get a grip and wipe the article. take the long-term view -- will anyone remember this in twenty years' time?

Maybe not outside of the US, but probably within it. I still vividly remember when Jessica McClure ("Baby Jessica") fell down that well in Texas in 1987. She should have an article too.

They are both ephemeral. Children are abducted all over the world. Just because the US media gave it so much coverage does not make it worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia which should be taking the long-term view.