"Daniel R. Tobias" wrote
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
Do the flames of the old inclusionist/deletionist wars really need fanning?
I worked out my position long ago: pretty much deletionist on the science side, for anything suspect; pretty much inclusionist in the humanities; pretty much indifferent as to pop culture where it really doesn't much matter one way or the other whether we have articles on soap actors or not.
On schools, they can be hacked back to stubs if they are full of unverifiable stuff, or, more likely, promotional material.
Charles
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On 24 Sep 2006, at 09:44, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Daniel R. Tobias" wrote
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
Do the flames of the old inclusionist/deletionist wars really need fanning?
I worked out my position long ago: pretty much deletionist on the science side, for anything suspect; pretty much inclusionist in the humanities; pretty much indifferent as to pop culture where it really doesn't much matter one way or the other whether we have articles on soap actors or not.
On schools, they can be hacked back to stubs if they are full of unverifiable stuff, or, more likely, promotional material.
Some of us are working on a new notability guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
The key to me is that the content is reliable, which is covered by the first two points under Rationale: In order to have a verifiable article, a topic must be notable enough that it will be described by multiple independent sources. In order to have a neutral article with minimal errors, a topic must be notable enough that there will be non-partisan editors interested in editing it.
A lot of verifiable material is also promotional material because not everything verifiable is INDEPENDANTLY verifiable. And while one could indeed create masses of stubs for everything, things like what Carl described are better in the long run. Instead of creating stubs that cannot grow people should try for lists and combined articles for stuff that will never grow into a life-sized article itself.
When people cite that Wikipedia is "the sum of all human knowledge" they forget this is the aim for Wikimedia. Anything that doesn't fit an encyclopedia shouldn't be here. Quotes to WikiQuote, dicdefs to Wiktionary and so on... I'm sure there's more such things that actually don't belong in Wikipedia.
Mgm
On 9/24/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 09:44, charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
"Daniel R. Tobias" wrote
So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV shows, and so on? Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in- depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?
Do the flames of the old inclusionist/deletionist wars really need fanning?
I worked out my position long ago: pretty much deletionist on the science side, for anything suspect; pretty much inclusionist in the humanities; pretty much indifferent as to pop culture where it really doesn't much matter one way or the other whether we have articles on soap actors or not.
On schools, they can be hacked back to stubs if they are full of unverifiable stuff, or, more likely, promotional material.
Some of us are working on a new notability guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
The key to me is that the content is reliable, which is covered by the first two points under Rationale: In order to have a verifiable article, a topic must be notable enough that it will be described by multiple independent sources. In order to have a neutral article with minimal errors, a topic must be notable enough that there will be non-partisan editors interested in editing it.
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On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
Some of us are working on a new notability guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
Please be very aware that idiots *will* take it and use it as a stick to hit others with. Look at the disaster WP:RS is turning into, whether marked "guideline" or not.
Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.
- d.
On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:10, David Gerard wrote:
On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
Some of us are working on a new notability guideline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
Please be very aware that idiots *will* take it and use it as a stick to hit others with. Look at the disaster WP:RS is turning into, whether marked "guideline" or not.
Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.
I thought the biggest problem was that they didn't implement policy.
On 24/09/06, Stephen Streater sbstreater@mac.com wrote:
On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:10, David Gerard wrote:
Have you reviewed the history of other notability guidelines? Why did they fail? If you can't answer that, you need to be able to.
I thought the biggest problem was that they didn't implement policy.
I think the biggest problem was that they just didn't convince people other than the proponents.
(You can't claim that people are required to dive into a potential wiki-shitfight over what seems a fundamentally bad idea before they can object to a bad idea that affects them.)
If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
- d.
[*] I specify the one-sentence summaries because you just know that if I didn't then some creative soul would carefully choose suitable supporting sentences out of the long written pages.
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
- d.
How about:
For an article to exist there must be enough independent verifiable sources to make it posible to write it in a NPOV form.
On 24 Sep 2006, at 14:37, geni wrote:
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
- d.
How about:
For an article to exist there must be enough independent verifiable sources to make it posible to write it in a NPOV form.
This is good (apart from the typo).
I wonder if we should drop the pretence that articles are either "good" or "poor", and instead have a metric for how good we can expect them to be.
I would base this on the number of independent editors who have edited the article in the last year, and the number of sources cited. We could also include the number of people who have read the article and the number of active editors who have it watchlisted.
On 9/24/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
If you can come up with a notability policy that follows obviously and elegantly from the one-sentence summaries of NPOV, NOR and V [*], then it'll definitely fly. If not, it's unlikely to.
- d.
We should draw notability threshholds for inclusion such that our current core group of editors will be capable of successfully enforcing the core policies of NPOV, NOR, and V on all the material we have.
--Robth