[WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

[Alex Rosen]

(Sorry I'm late to this discussion, I was out of town.)

So this sounds like a new position, the idea of a middle ground. Some
things should not be encouraged, but should not be deleted either.
Right?

Where does What Wikipedia Is Not fit in to this? I always assumed that
WWIN listed the criteria for whether something should be deleted or not.
Or more specifically, it lists the criteria for whether something should
be fixed - but if it's unfixable, then delete it (e.g. if it can never
become more than a dictionary definition).

The problem I've had all along is that WWIN doesn't say anything about
trivia or ephemera. So there's no agreement on whether to delete them or
not. So I take it that Jimbo's position is that these things would fall
into a new category in WWIN - those things that should be discouraged
but not deleted. If someone is motivated enough to create a list of
songs whose title does not appear anywhere in their lyrics, then we
shouldn't delete it, but we shouldn't encourage it either. So "Wikipedia
is not for trivia" isn't really either true or false. Does that sound
like what you were saying?

Alex (axlrosen)

=======================

tarquin wrote:
> So can I write about the cat that was stuck up a tree in the next 
> street from me? The local press gave in plenty of coverage!

Are there links?  Would it be possible for others to confirm the
story?

I hope people don't waste much time writing such pages, but it strikes
me as much more of a waste to fight against someone who wanted to
include them.  I have no problem with a social stigma against writing
such pages (just as there is and should be a social stigma against
writing articles about ourselves), but a policy of deletion that goes
beyond confirmability seems to me to invite more conflict than it
would be worth.

Such pages...

1.  Do not belong in Wikipedia 1.0 (paper edition), because such will
be selected with an eye towards the cost of production

2.  Ought not to be linked from the front page (which is
space-constrained to deal with only big events and major conceptual
topics)

But other than that, what's the harm?

One possible objection I can imagine is cluttering the search results.
But the best solution to that, I think, would be to have a refined
search engine that limits the impact of minor pages.  There are a
number of ways to do that, but in any event, it seems unlikely to
be a huge problem anyway just because people aren't going to be so
interested in writing that many pages of this type.

And that's especially true if we more or less just ignore the
practice.

--Jimbo