[WikiEN-l] I'm disappointed in Wikipedia.

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 09:02:06PM -0700, Todd Allen wrote:
> Anthony wrote:
> > On 6/16/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> >   
> >> On 6/15/07, The Mangoe <the.mangoe at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>     
> >>> At any rate, there are
> >>> some 1400 tenure and tenure-track faculty at UMD. Harvard has more.
> >>> That makes hundreds of thousands "notable", just counting present
> >>> faculty; the dead of course hugely outnumber them. The survival of the
> >>> project relies upon the lack of interest most people have in entering
> >>> these directories (for that is what they will largely be).
> >>>
> >>>       
> >> Are you suggesting that the project won't survive with 1400 additional
> >> entries?  If so, I have to disagree.
> >>
> >>     
> > Sorry, misread.  Are you suggesting that the project won't survive
> > with hundreds of thousands of additional entries?  I still disagree.
> >
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> >   
> I wouldn't go so far as to say it would kill off the project, but I
> believe it would be bad for it. We're not attempting to create "Who's
> Who in Academia", we're attempting to create an encyclopedia. By
> covering subjects which are barely of note, very little information
> exists for, and will be forgotten completely ten years from now, we are
> giving them undue weight simply by inclusion. That violates NPOV, which
> -is- a core principle.

I do not think anybody is really suggesting that all academics should
get a wikipedia article. It is at least arguable that Professors in the
UK and other Commonwealth countries, where most acdaemics are not
Professors, should have an article. In the US that would apply to named
and distinguished chairs which are comparable.

What concerns me is that we do give undue weight to people in other
areas, where in general they are even less notable. For example, just
taking one example I looked up just now, my local AFL Club, the
[[Western Bulldogs]], has an article that lists the current squad of
players. There are 44. That means some of them  will hardly get a game
the whole session. Only 3 are redlinks. 41 of them appear to have
articles. Most of these people will be far more forgotten in 10 years
time than academics who will have published something. It seems to me
that we include sports people and some others far more easily than we
include academics. We even had two Australian Vice Chancelloes up at AfD
this last week. We have articles for only about half the Fellows of the
Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences and many other highly
notable academies. We need more articles on good academics.

If only people would write about academics who deserve an article rather
on vanity stuff about their supervisor or themseleves. Oh well!.

Brian.


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-- 
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au  
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity