Bryan Derksen wrote:
Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sun, 18 Feb 2007 Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
The problem here is that AfD is working as designed. In my opinion, there is certainly room for a list of really tall men on wikipedia. It should however be limited to those who are notable for being tall; which would mean a lower limit of around 2.40 m, and a smaller list of "legendary" tall men, whose names are almost synonymous with "giant", such as Goliath.
And 2.4m comes from?... This is the problem.
It's not like we don't have lots of other arbitrary criteria for inclusion already, both in lists and in article retention. But in this case as long as the list's criteria can be evaluated reasonably objectively I see nothing inherently wrong with it. Perhaps the list could be divided into a number of sublists with different cutoffs, allowing the reader to pick his own preference for what "tall" means? It'd be a crude emulation of allowing people's articles to be tagged and sorted by height.
This is one of those so-what articles. I would have no interest to go there in search of information; it's fundamentally useless. Still, I'm not about to complain about it, and there are ways of dealing with the how-tall-is-tall criterion. There are people who love to play with this kind of list, and I am glad to see these eager little minds diverted into harmlessly useless endeavours. What we end up with is a handful of old-fashioned school principals who have forgotten their principles and a bunch of kindergartners who are learning through play. The rest of us are learning or teaching somewhere else in the school; we don't directly give a damn about what's happening in the kindergarten. For us, Wikipedia's reputation does not depend on self-righteous principals suppressing kindergarten activity. We mostly don't get involved in specific deletion arguments; that would be too time-consuming. But we do resent being assumed to belong to some imagined consensus.
We had a recent thread about Wikipedia's fame as expressed in webcomics. I had not taken the time before to view these so I looked at a sampling of them. One thing struck me. The common thread had nothing to do with the accuracy or reliability of Wikipedia. Instead, it had more to do with people making jokes about being blocked or having material deleted. It makes me wonder about our priorities.
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