On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 1:21 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
:-)
I don't think anyone could !vote delete for such a cute little dog!
Carcharoth
2009/7/25 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
- d.
US Presidential pets are well established as being notable. Downing Street cats are probably notable although only the most recent two have articles and the original Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office does not.
geni wrote:
Not that I am in the slightest manner interested in any type of pet being added to wikipedia, but is this decision transitive?
That is, are (presidential/head of state) pets of any nation notable on the English language wikipedia,
Not sure if he actually had any famous pets, but I have it on good authority that Hitler was kind to dogs.
Aargh! Self-inflicted Godwinning...
More seriously - relatively speaking - I think we actually do have quite a few emperors and the like favorite rides as articles of their own. Granted horse are not generally considered pets.
If we don't have [[Bukefalos]] etc. as articles; I, for one, am appalled.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanencimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
More seriously - relatively speaking - I think we actually do have quite a few emperors and the like favorite rides as articles of their own. Granted horse are not generally considered pets.
Deletionists, look away now...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Famous_animals
Carcharoth
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanencimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
More seriously - relatively speaking - I think we actually do have quite a few emperors and the like favorite rides as articles of their own. Granted horse are not generally considered pets.
Deletionists, look away now...
<sob>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year
That is ridiculous category use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_amputees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Famous_lobsters
And going full-circle:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Presidential_pets
Carcharoth
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
<snip>
This one, on the other hand, is interesting (takes all sorts):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_monuments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Cod_of_Massachusetts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_Perm_Bear
Nice to know that Laika is on this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Conquerors_of_Space
Carcharoth
2009/7/30 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
<sob> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year That is ridiculous category use.
Hey, someone thought it was useful ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_amputees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Famous_lobsters And going full-circle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:United_States_Presidential_pets
Some of this will be made less silly when category intersections work efficiently ... whenever that will be in MySQL.
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2009/7/30 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
<sob> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year That is ridiculous category use.
Hey, someone thought it was useful ...
Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of "famous animal" articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this is how that particular dispute wound up being settled.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/7/30 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
<sob> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year That is ridiculous category use.
Hey, someone thought it was useful ...
Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of "famous animal" articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this is how that particular dispute wound up being settled.
So those categories need to be animated, rather than populated?
Charles
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Charles Matthewscharles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/7/30 Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com:
<sob> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year That is ridiculous category use.
Hey, someone thought it was useful ...
Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of "famous animal" articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this is how that particular dispute wound up being settled.
So those categories need to be animated, rather than populated?
Disneyfied? :-)
I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as "Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name, dates of birth and death, and other biographical data.
That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of how the system is currently set up.
The classic piece of data that we don't track, and which I usually drag up in these debates, is the number of articles on men and the number of articles on women. Now, you might say that you can't query an ordinary biographical dictionary to find out these things, but Wikipedia *should* be able to do more than other resources.
It seems a simple question, doesn't it? How many biographical articles do we have on women, and how many on men? But it is one of those questions that defies analysis because the data isn't there. We can give approximate answers about historical periods, and about nationality (as far as that is meaningful). But gender? No, we don't document that for some reason.
Which is strange, because "famous women in history" and "Biographies of Notable Women" are big topics if you search for sources on those topics. I'd like to know, for example, how many featured biographies we have on women from history (and possible contemporary biographies as well)? I might do just that and make another userspace list.
While searching for lists of famous women, I found this:
http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-histor...
"Welcome to our _Wikipedia Tour: Famous Women Throughout History_. Each day we’ll send you a link to a new article about a famous woman on Wikipedia. The introduction to each day’s article is included in the installment so you can choose to read just the introduction or the full article."
Wow. I never knew things like that were out there.
From this, is seems there was a list at one point:
http://july.fixedreference.org/en/20040724/wikipedia/Famous_women_in_history
That article was moved on 23 September 2005 to "List of famous women in history". It had 542 edits at the point it was deleted on 24 September 2006 following this discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_famous_...
One of the comments there:
"Please leave it - debate criteria if you will, but it's a very useful resource for educators".
Does anyone feel that something went wrong there? Surely the data on which articles are about women and which are about men should be present somewhere so people can query and produce such lists if they want them, for educational purposes, such as in the first link I provided? Maybe that is more the domain of wikibooks, but even so, it requires the basic information to be present somewhere in the articles about whether the subject of the article is a man or a woman.
I have no idea how many entries were on the list when it got deleted (looks to be several hundred), but the tour of 45 articles (undoubtedly hand-picked) took people through the following:
http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-histor...
Hatshepsut Cleopatra VII Boudica Hypatia of Alexandria Theodora (6th century) Hildegard of Bingen Eleanor of Aquitaine Christine de Pizan Joan of Arc Elizabeth I of England Artemisia Gentileschi Christina of Sweden Catherine II of Russia Caroline Herschel Mary Wollstonecraft Sacagawea Sojourner Truth Victoria of the United Kingdom Harriet Beecher Stowe Julia Margaret Cameron Elizabeth Cady Stanton Susan B. Anthony Florence Nightingale Mary Cassatt Marie Curie Emma Goldman Gertrude Stein Margaret Sanger Hellen Keller Virginia Woolf Georgia O'Keeffe Martha Graham Amelia Earhart Margaret Mead Hannah Arendt Rachel Carson Simone de Beauvoir Babe Zaharias Rosa Parks Ella Fitzgerald Rosalind Franklin Anne Frank Valentina Tereshkova Margaret Thatcher Madeleine Albright
[Why on earth couldn't they give a list somewhere? I had to click through all of them...]
I'm wondering how that compares to our list of 200 core biographies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography/Core_biographie...
Nine (9) of those 200 articles are on a woman.
We do have lists of women:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_women
Some quite good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-21st-century_female_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_mathematicians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates
Those are good lists and resources, but I still think some basic tag should enable identification of gender of the subject of a biographical article (including transgender and other options, of course). But how on Earth can something like that be done now, at such a late stage?
Going back to that website:
http://www.dailylit.com/tags/wikipedia-tours
That's really quite impressive.
Carcharoth
Carcharoth wrote:
I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as "Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name, dates of birth and death, and other biographical data.
That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of how the system is currently set up.
Absolutely true, but delete the word "biographical". The potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive database, period.
And I don't think it would be too hard. Just extract all the key/value pairs that are currently residing in infobox template invocations, and dump them into a nice, flexible, free-form database. Then arrange to invoke the infobox templates out of that database. Then provide a simple key/value editor on the edit page, to edit this metadata. Then provide a user-friendly query wizard. Hey presto, the complaints about editability of infobox template invocations go way down, *and* we've got cool new search functionality, and a whole bunch of strange and tedious-to-maintain categories can go away, and we don't need to worry about category intersection any more, and...
On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Thank you for that link. I had thought to do something like that myself. I have been saved the time now.
On Saturday, 25 July 2009 8:21 pm, David Gerard wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
The current introduction raised my eyebrows. "Bo Obama (born October 9, 2008) is the Obama family dog. Barack Obama is the head of the household and President of the United States. and is a neutered male Portuguese Water Dog, or Portie."
If we cut off the first sentence, we learn some interesting facts about Mr. Obama ;)
-- fl admin @ enwiki http://enwp.org/user:fl
fl wrote:
On Saturday, 25 July 2009 8:21 pm, David Gerard wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
The current introduction raised my eyebrows. "Bo Obama (born October 9, 2008) is the Obama family dog. Barack Obama is the head of the household and President of the United States. and is a neutered male Portuguese Water Dog, or Portie."
If we cut off the first sentence, we learn some interesting facts about Mr. Obama ;)
Fixed. (No pun intended.)
Seriously?? Are you arguing this kind of article shouldn't be in Wikipedia? Sheesh.
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 8:21 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
2009/7/25 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 8:21 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
Seriously?? Are you arguing this kind of article shouldn't be in Wikipedia? Sheesh.
No, it just pushed my personal "wtf" button, not something I'd actually advocate removing. The dog's famous enough.
My point is that despite media publicity about "deletionists" and people on the fringes of Wikipedia getting annoyed at not being considered article-worthy ... we still include a wider range of stuff than (I think) any general encyclopedia ever before us, and no-one can seriously question that. And we do so to actual standards.
- d.
On Sat, 25 Jul 2009, David Gerard wrote:
My point is that despite media publicity about "deletionists" and people on the fringes of Wikipedia getting annoyed at not being considered article-worthy ... we still include a wider range of stuff than (I think) any general encyclopedia ever before us, and no-one can seriously question that. And we do so to actual standards.
It's possible to be wider in some areas and narrower in others; even to be narrower overall with a few specific exceptions.
I'm inclined to say that the article on Obama's dog is an exception, not the rule. It's not part of a large category (webcomics, episode articles, etc.) that deletionists like to delete en masse. Also, since it's related to Obama, it's going to be preserved by Obama fans, and we've got lots of those who are already watching the Obama-related articles.
No, it just pushed my personal "wtf" button
Here's something that pushed my WTF button:
Why was a photograph of a public monument of Martin Niemoeller's poem "First they came", removed from Wikipedia?
Here is a small version of the photograph: http://www.oicu2.com/afc/Martin_Niemoeller.jpg
And here is the article's revision history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=First_they_came...&action=hist...
I contacted the deletionist at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kameraad_Pjotr#Martin_Niemoeller
Really, honestly, do some Wikipedia admins have nothing better to do than delete photographs of public monuments on grounds of the poems they represent not being in the public domain, while the very article page reproduces the poem in its entirety?
Aside from that, let's have a bit of common sense: does anyone sincerely think that if Martin Niemoeller were alive, he'd object to the image of that monument being on Wikipedia? Does anyone think that any of Niemoeller's heirs would object? WTF?!
-- Dan
On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 5:52 PM, Dan Dascalescuddascalescu+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
Aside from that, let's have a bit of common sense: does anyone sincerely think that if Martin Niemoeller were alive, he'd object to the image of that monument being on Wikipedia? Does anyone think that any of Niemoeller's heirs would object? WTF?!
Personally, I think Wikipedia made a big step forward when it stopped expecting individual users to understand copyright law, and instead just set policies that were always going to be within the law.
(So no, asking for "common sense" around copyright issues is not a good idea, imho.)
Steve
2009/7/25 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
My point is that despite media publicity about "deletionists" and people on the fringes of Wikipedia getting annoyed at not being considered article-worthy ... we still include a wider range of stuff than (I think) any general encyclopedia ever before us, and no-one can seriously question that. And we do so to actual standards.
It's notable that you don't say that no-one can seriously question *that*!
On 25/07/2009, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
My point is that despite media publicity about "deletionists" and people on the fringes of Wikipedia getting annoyed at not being considered article-worthy ... we still include a wider range of stuff than (I think) any general encyclopedia ever before us, and no-one can seriously question that. And we do so to actual standards.
If you really want WTF:
I recently saw the deletion review of the article '-graphy' which was up for deletion because the article name violated MOS (the title is not a noun or verb or phrase), and because it's a pure list of words, constructed on a lexical rule, which *is* actually in the wiktionary- wiktionary welcomes suffixes and prefixes with open arms as nearly all dictionaries do.
In other words, this is a real, bona fide dictionary definition in the encyclopedia. A real dicdef, as opposed to all those articles that haven't 'dun enuf' to be encyclopedic.
It was up for review once before, and although IMO the review seems to have been at best, no consensus, it rated a firm KEEP that time by the closing admin... odd...
Anyway for the second review the process gyrations they went through this time to avoid the deletion involved renaming it to 'Glossary of graphies' during the review, and then claiming that that made it OK, even though 'graphies' isn't a word either. I'm pretty sure that a glossary that contains words picked based entirely on their word endings is the weirdest glossary in history; they're supposed to be things you refer to when reading. But whatever.
The result of the review was, intriguingly, keep again, not even no consensus, after a voting extension which gave only a couple more votes and which included a vote for keep by an administrator who cast aspersions on the laziness of the user calling for AFD for not figuring out a way to save the article!!!!
After all that tiresome AFD business was completed it was of course renamed straight back to -graphy again...
- d.
The Cunctator wrote:
Seriously?? Are you arguing this kind of article shouldn't be in Wikipedia? Sheesh.
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 8:21 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Point them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_%28dog%29
The argument worth having is that reliable sources are a necessary condition for the inclusion of a topic, rather than a sufficient condition. (This is quite obvious, I believe, but one can go blue in the face saying it with no effect.) No way is the presidential pooch going to get deleted, in practical terms. But that only proves once more "voting is evil", really.
Charles
Charles wrote:
The argument worth having is that reliable sources are a necessary condition for the inclusion of a topic, rather than a sufficient condition. (This is quite obvious, I believe, but one can go blue in the face saying it with no effect.) No way is the presidential pooch going to get deleted, in practical terms. But that only proves once more "voting is evil", really.
My own take on the deletionist/inclusionist divide (which, admittedly, has little if anything to do with Wikipedia's inclusion policies as currently prescribed) is to ask: would anyone, anywhere in the world (other than the author) ever be interested in reading an encyclopedic treatment of this topic? (And in the case of Bo the first dog, the answer is pretty clearly "yes".)
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
My own take on the deletionist/inclusionist divide (which, admittedly, has little if anything to do with Wikipedia's inclusion policies as currently prescribed) is to ask: would anyone, anywhere in the world (other than the author) ever be interested in reading an encyclopedic treatment of this topic? (And in the case of Bo the first dog, the answer is pretty clearly "yes".)
I recently checked Wikipedia for an article on my local library, and found that it was deleted. If Wikipedia isn't "too" deletionist, then it's "improperly" deletionist.
C'mon, a library isn't notable?
On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Anthonywikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
My own take on the deletionist/inclusionist divide (which, admittedly, has little if anything to do with Wikipedia's inclusion policies as currently prescribed) is to ask: would anyone, anywhere in the world (other than the author) ever be interested in reading an encyclopedic treatment of this topic? (And in the case of Bo the first dog, the answer is pretty clearly "yes".)
I recently checked Wikipedia for an article on my local library, and found that it was deleted. If Wikipedia isn't "too" deletionist, then it's "improperly" deletionist.
C'mon, a library isn't notable?
We'd be more effective if we had notability guidelines that explicitly supported expansion of notability to allow more and more granular articles over time. Any monument or building or park that people invested thousands of hours into, or that people from far away come to see, or that thousands of people use a year, is notable in its own right.
Sometimes we address the issue of maintaining balance and quality as a perpetual fight over lines in the sand, when it's an important effort worth continual discussion and refinement.
As the number of editors interested in a topic area grows -- something that happens as WP includes more and more locally-notable entries, for instance -- the capacity to maintain quality in that area grows as well.
Sj
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Samuel Kleinmeta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
As the number of editors interested in a topic area grows -- something that happens as WP includes more and more locally-notable entries, for instance -- the capacity to maintain quality in that area grows as well.
But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, and so on.
And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
And I conclude: no article.
Train station, just possibly.
The big stately house and park that used to be here before it was built over, yes.
The current local park - probably not.
The local supermarket - certainly not.
The nearby main road - it does have an article already actually.
The old church, yes. The modern one - no.
The local MP, yes. The fishmonger - no.
Carcharoth
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, and so on.
And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
And I conclude: no article.
Yes. I had a similar thought after browsing through [[Wikipedia 1.0]] recently, particularly with regard to its "importance" scale. A local library is certainly not "must have" or "important". It's not really even "contributes to depth of knowledge".
One way to look at it: how big must the selection of articles be, for that article to be included? Is your local library in the top 100,000 most important articles? Top 1,000,000? Imagine the whole encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000 people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?
Train station, just possibly.
Once again I like my proposal to think in terms of length of article, not a boolean "is allowed to exist". Real encyclopaedias have short articles about unimportant stuff and long articles about important stuff. A train station might well be worth two sentences.
The big stately house and park that used to be here before it was built over, yes.
Yep.
The current local park - probably not.
Definitely a couple of sentences. In Wikipedia that probably means a reference in "[[Parks of xxx]]".
The local supermarket - certainly not.
Don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate to refer to it in the article about the supermarket chain, or to say that the town has two Woolworths and one Coles. But a whole article, no.
The nearby main road - it does have an article already actually.
I'm not up to date on the rules of road inclusion. It's pretty hard to draw a line. Again, articles about road networks would work better than articles about individual roads.
Steve
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Steve Bennettstevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, and so on.
And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
And I conclude: no article.
Yes. I had a similar thought after browsing through [[Wikipedia 1.0]] recently, particularly with regard to its "importance" scale. A local library is certainly not "must have" or "important". It's not really even "contributes to depth of knowledge".
One way to look at it: how big must the selection of articles be, for that article to be included? Is your local library in the top 100,000 most important articles? Top 1,000,000? Imagine the whole encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000 people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?
No, but would still be mentioned in the article on the town. One of the prime reasons for libraries appearing in the news, sadly, is when they are closed down. :-(
I didn't realise we have this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library
That is an interesting sort of article.
"More than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built, including some belonging to public and university library systems. Carnegie earned the nickname Patron Saint of Libraries."
I'll bet some of the people reading this list have Carnegie libraries near them.
And look at the architectural information in that article.
Not an article about a specific local library, but about something that many libraries have in common, and actually quite a fascinating article.
There are also several lists of Carnegie libraries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_Europe
etc.
Train station, just possibly.
Once again I like my proposal to think in terms of length of article, not a boolean "is allowed to exist". Real encyclopaedias have short articles about unimportant stuff and long articles about important stuff. A train station might well be worth two sentences.
Well, I checked. There *is* an article on the train station. And on the train lines as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Railway_lines_in_South-East_England
The big stately house and park that used to be here before it was built over, yes.
Yep.
No article (yet).
The current local park - probably not.
Definitely a couple of sentences. In Wikipedia that probably means a reference in "[[Parks of xxx]]".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Green_London
But the local parks are too small to be on there.
The local supermarket - certainly not.
Don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate to refer to it in the article about the supermarket chain, or to say that the town has two Woolworths and one Coles. But a whole article, no.
Dare I look? :-)
Nah. It's not mentioned. Shops get poor coverage in Wikipedia.
Big main article, though:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco
For the coverage of supermarkets in Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supermarkets_in_Europe_templates
etc.
The nearby main road - it does have an article already actually.
I'm not up to date on the rules of road inclusion. It's pretty hard to draw a line. Again, articles about road networks would work better than articles about individual roads.
Well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_United_Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Roads_in_Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transport_templates_by_continent
I think you get the idea.
A big bias towards Anglophone countries.
Carcharoth
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Steve Bennettstevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Train station, just possibly.
Once again I like my proposal to think in terms of length of article, not a boolean "is allowed to exist". Real encyclopaedias have short articles about unimportant stuff and long articles about important stuff. A train station might well be worth two sentences.
Of course you might get something weird happen, like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station
Because of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Millionth_article_FAQ
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Steve Bennettstevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Congress, and so on.
And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
And I conclude: no article.
Well, WP isn't paper. If your world is your town, then the history of your local library - from how it raised the million dollars needed to break ground and build it to its design and placement in the town, to the special collections and the services it provides, are both useful to locals, educational to visitors, and free knowledge about an institution designed to last for centuries.
A local library is certainly not "must have" or "important". It's not really even "contributes to depth of knowledge".
Why would it not contribute to depth of knowledge? That seems like the definition of the phrase... just another layer of depth. I would dearly like to know the nuanced history of my city's landscaping, zoning principles, and architecture over the past 5 centuries -- and would be delighted if I could zoom into the specific details of any given building or greensway of significance. Would you prefer to spin off a separate project such as "http://local-free-encyclopedia.org/en/cambridge" for this purpose?
US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?
Why should WP not have 30M topics instead of 3M? I wish that growth had not slowed; there is so much yet to be covered. It's useful to have a balance among articles, and not to have a million detailed articles on buildings and none on major cities in Africa, absolutely. But notability standards have been steadily shifting for years...
SJ
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Imagine the whole encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000 people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?
I only found one town of 100,000 in Namibia, and Wikipedia has an article on a library in it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhoek_Public_Library
As far as I'm concerned my local library is in the top 10,000 articles. If you want to even things out, try adding articles, not deleting my top 10,000.
On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:32 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Imagine the whole encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000 people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?
I only found one town of 100,000 in Namibia, and Wikipedia has an article on a library in it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windhoek_Public_Library
As far as I'm concerned my local library is in the top 10,000 articles. If you want to even things out, try adding articles, not deleting my top 10,000.
Oh yeah, by the way, only 7% of Namibia speak English. And only about 5% are "Internet users". So the usefulness of having information on places in Namibia pales in comparison to the usefulness of having information on places here in Florida.
But deletionist arguments rarely consider usefulness.