[WikiEN-l] Has an article in a paper encyclopedia, but it's "Not Notable"

Sigvat Kuekiatngam Stensholt st09039 at mi.uib.no
Tue Dec 2 13:56:35 UTC 2008


I am in one sense amused, in another sense astonished, that Ellen 
Hambro, the leader of what is effectively the Norwegian Environmental 
Protection Agency, up for AFD, and even more astonished to see some long 
time contributors voting to delete it.

Here is a fact: Ellen Hambro is covered in a paper encyclopedia, "Store 
norske leksikon", which is the largest, and most well-known of all 
contemporary general-purpose Norwegian encyclopedias written on 15 
volumes of paper.

And yet I see people rejecting this encyclopedia as "not intellectually 
independent" and "crypto-official".

I would not be writing this list if this were a one-off occurrence, but 
this is the third time in only a few weeks that I have seen encyclopedia 
subjects (and this means: has a separate article in a general-purpose 
paper encyclopedia) nominated for deletion. The other two are the 
articles [[Glamour (presentation)]] and [[Star Shipping]], the latter 
which was nominated for *speedy* deletion, and had that speedy tag stuck 
on it for several hours.

There comes a point when we need to do a reality check. The reality is 
that we are in danger of deleting a subject which a commercial 
general-purpose print encyclopedia has deemed notable enough to be 
within their limited pages. Deleting any of these articles will be an 
action more profound than deleting Mzoli's, Terry Shannon, or Pownce 
would ever be.

I fear that the zeal to delete articles in the name of enforcing 
policies and the notability guidelines are starting to encroach upon the 
fundamentals Wikipedia's mission to be an encyclopedia. We cannot 
possibly claim to be comprehensive if we start deleting subjects covered 
in the very works we want to surpass. I really don't consider myself an 
"inclusionist", but is it really all that "inclusionist" to support 
keeping subjects traditionally covered by encyclopedias?

Sjakkalle



More information about the WikiEN-l mailing list