On Fri, 28 Jun 2002 20:20:51 Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
"Jan.Hidders" wrote:
On Fri, Jun 28, 2002 at 04:11:28PM +1000, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
I agree that [[List of Books Published in 1962]] and its ilk are completely appropriate. What I am concerned about is maintaining the integrity of the year in review pages in the process by keeping them
a)
short and thus useful, and b) ensuring that only really important
stuff
gets on there as we build content so that we keep the integrity of
the
pages as a reference *now*.
How about the following:
- We make a guideline that says that there should be no more than, say,
10
births / deaths / events on the page and that these should be the
most
important ones in that year.
- We give some hints on what might be considered important and what
not.
- If someone comes along and thinks a very important event is missing
but
the list is already full then he or she has to remove the least
important
one.
Of course this will generate some debates but that is inherent in the
nature
of Wikpedia and these types of pages.
I STRONGLY disagree with this. Who's going to judge what is more 'important' or what to delete? I don't think it's a big deal to have books listed or movies or anything... when the page gets too lengthy then it can be broken up. Then we'll have a ready-made list for a subpage. Of course if you really want to keep them off the year pages what you need to do is to make a template for a 'Published/Produced in this year' page for people to put them on... the wikipedia's supposed to be about completeness after all!
Firstly, as I already agreed, it's entirely reasonable to have a complete list of "people who have an entry in Wikipedia who died in 1976" or "books in Wikipedia first published in 1976". My point refers specifically to keeping the main "year in review" pages useful by being a) short enough to read quickly, and b) reflect the actually important things that happened in that year in the area concerned.
If we let people add stuff willy-nilly, you will end up with people listing the fact that series 2 of "Walker: Texas Ranger" first screened in the US in 1994 to the [[1994]] page (if you don't know what that is, be very grateful and just rest assured that there are approximately 27,543 things that happened in the telvision world in 1994 that were more important). Now, two things might then happen. We might already have, or build up a list of lots of things that happened in television in 1994, and after discussion decide that, indeed, Chuck Norris and his buddies second series wasn't really that important. That might cause a bunfight, but the reason for the removal is at least clear.
A more tricky situation, however, is the case where there *aren't* immediately things there replacing it. Now, having an entry for that (and entries in 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001 for series 1 through 9), even if there aren't sufficient entries on "television" for it to be causing length problems, is giving a totally misleading indication of the significance of the events.
If you want a more realistic scenario, think popular music and a bunch of fans of some particular musical genre discovering the 'pedia.
Without some guidelines, there's nothing stopping them adding a bunch of listings of events interesting only to a small subculture, and no justification for people to delete the entries (or, as you point out, move them to a [[List of Acid Jazz Albums Released in 1993]] page). I don't have all the answers yet on exactly *what* guidelines we'll come up with yet, but I'm convinced that we need some. As others have pointed out, this is one of the few places in wikipedia where we are space-limited, and we need some extra smarts to deal with it IMHO.