I don't know anything about Max and so I don't know whether he deserves an article, but the underlying question is important and interesting: should anything that somebody bothered to write up be accepted into Wikipedia, assuming it is NPOV?
I say no. The item has to be of relevance in some way...
I was inclined to agree, and I definitely think there are topics that don't belong in an encyclopedia. But if we do implement some approval system, especially a multiple-valued one such as I suggested earlier today, I like Jimbo's suggestion of making relvance one of the approval criteria. If that's done, then there's really little reason not to allow reasonable articles on anything and anyone, and simply consider them potential articles (which might get promoted to "relevant" status if, say, Jimbo's mom gets elected to congress or something).
One possible downside is that many of them might become orphans, making database maintenance harder, because even if we allow such articles, we should not necessarily allow links to them from relevant articles. 0
On 5/28/02 8:00 PM, "lcrocker@nupedia.com" lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote:
I don't know anything about Max and so I don't know whether he deserves an article, but the underlying question is important and interesting: should anything that somebody bothered to write up be accepted into Wikipedia, assuming it is NPOV?
I say no. The item has to be of relevance in some way...
I was inclined to agree, and I definitely think there are topics that don't belong in an encyclopedia. But if we do implement some approval system, especially a multiple-valued one such as I suggested earlier today, I like Jimbo's suggestion of making relvance one of the approval criteria. If that's done, then there's really little reason not to allow reasonable articles on anything and anyone, and simply consider them potential articles (which might get promoted to "relevant" status if, say, Jimbo's mom gets elected to congress or something).
One of the nice things about the fact that we're building a hyperlinked site is that we, the individual human contributors, don't have to worry or even think at all about the question of relevance. The system will deal with that. All we have to worry about is article quality.
Not only is there really little reason not to allow reasonable articles on anything and anyone in the current system, without any other features, but there are major reasons for not instituting hard systems of approval.
If someone cares enough about a topic or a person to write a Wikipedia-style entry for that person, and can plausibly link to that topic from some other entry, then that, in my opinion, should be the end of discussion about whether such entry "deserves" to be in Wikipedia.
--tc
On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 08:09:59PM -0400, The Cunctator wrote:
One of the nice things about the fact that we're building a hyperlinked site is that we, the individual human contributors, don't have to worry or even think at all about the question of relevance. The system will deal with that. All we have to worry about is article quality.
Well said. The number of incoming links will always be the best indicator of relevance, even better than any "relevance rating". (Can you say Google? :-)) Having said that, I do share the concern with many people that if newcomers see a lot of trivial/personal stuff they will start adding their own and even add links to it from pages that are relevant. But I think and hope that having a clear mission statement plus the usual "social pressure" will keep people from adding such links. For example, if people start adding their own name to the list of mathamaticians because they have a degree in mathematics then this is not so much irrelevant as it is simply wrong because it is a list of *famous* mathematicians.
-- Jan Hidders
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