On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:23 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen&lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Deletionists, look away now... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Famous_animals Carcharoth PS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Carcharoth&lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; 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

David Gerard wrote: 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.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Charles Matthews&lt;charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: 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-histo… "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. 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-histo… 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_biographi… 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

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Carcharoth&lt;carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com&gt; wrote: Thank you for that link. I had thought to do something like that myself. I have been saved the time now.

fl wrote: Fixed. (No pun intended.)

2009/7/25 The Cunctator &lt;cunctator(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: 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.

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=his… 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

2009/7/25 David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: It's notable that you don't say that no-one can seriously question *that*!

The Cunctator 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. Charles

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Steve Summit &lt;scs(a)eskimo.com&gt; wrote: 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 Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 8:41 PM, Samuel Klein&lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> 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 Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Steve Bennett&lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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. 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 No article (yet). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Green_London But the local parks are too small to be on there. 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. 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 9:29 AM, Steve Bennett&lt;stevagewp(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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. 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? 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 Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 7:32 PM, Anthony &lt;wikimail(a)inbox.org&gt; wrote: 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.