[WikiEN-l] "Best of" lists

[Tom Parmenter]

I do feel that the modest [[One-hit wonder]] article that I started
was pretty well rendered meaningless by fights about "well they had
two hits in England" followed by going through a reference book and
adding every single record by anyone who never had another hit to the
list and splitting it up between England and US so you couldn't see
any relationships.  Perfectly normal, now that I look back on it, but
the phenomenon of one-jit wonders was not well served by it.  I had
thought of making a [[One-hit wonder hall of fame]] so that genuine,
standout singular singles would have a chance of their proper notice.
I'm thinking of "Radar Love" by Golden Earring in particular. but
there could be a densely packed little list of truly memorable, even
influential, one-hit wonders.  

Likewise, in the music articles, to have sax players off of someone's
favorite album in between [[John Coltrane]] and [[Charlie Parker]]
makes it hard to understand the development of style on the
instrument.  Again, I considered shoveling a ton of them off into
something called [[Beloved favorites]], but couldn't face the
talk-page wars that would surely follow.  [[List of novelists]] grows
more "complete" and less useful with each passing day.

Anything that anyone might try to do bogs down in "that's just your
opinion" and "Kenny G has sold 22 billion albums, how can you say he's
not important".  Seems hopeless.  The best chance might be to make
lists of members of rock and roll hall of fame, Pulitzer Prize winners
(Duke Ellington was turned down for one), Booker Prize winners,
whatever can be made to look objective.

Tom Parmenter
Ortolan88

|From: erik_moeller at gmx.de (Erik Moeller)
|Sender: wikien-l-admin at wikipedia.org
|Reply-To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
|Date: 25 Jan 2003 01:07:00 +0100
|
|Do we have a policy on "best of" lists?
|
|A page "List of best physicists" was quickly deleted. It consisted of  
|several such lists, some of them with a reference, others without it.  
|Similarly, our anonymous "year in music" user added several "<year> in  
|KROQ" pages (KROQ being a radio station); those were also deleted. In case  
|2 I agree without reservation, in case 1 I think it might have been  
|rewritten to be useful (perhaps under the title "Lists of best .." rather  
|than "List of best ..").
|
|In both cases, we have authorities who are being cited as selecting  
|information from a larger sample. There could also be "Lists of best  
|science fiction stories", "Lists of best novels" etc. Some of these lists  
|would be written by authorities, others based on collaborative filtering  
|such as the IMDB top movie lists. In the latter case, when the list is  
|dynamically changing, an external link might be most appropriate.
|
|But if we allow such lists, do we open the door to all kinds of spam-type,  
|largely useless lists like the "year in KROQ" pages? Will people enter  
|never ending NPOV disputes over whether their particular list should be  
|included? I'm uncertain here and would appreciate some feedback. In any  
|case, we need a clear policy if it doesn't already exist.
|
|Regards,
|
|Erik
|
|
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