[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 09:13:50AM +0100, Michel Vuijlsteke wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the
> > >  biggest PR blunder we engage in.
> >
> > An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants
> > to add it would rapidly descend into farce.
> 
> 
> Yes it can, and no it wouldn't. You're thinking of Wikipedia as if it were a
> printed set of volumes. If it were, the mass of pop culture related content
> would stick out. As it is now, it doesn't. Nobody reads wikipedia from cover
> to cover.
> 
> You're totally free to go about adding content to the Bismarck-Napoleon-Hans
> Delbr?ck side of Wikipedia, while someone else is adding biography stubs
> about every single character in Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. Or, you
> know, TV's Seventh Heaven. :)
> 
> It does no harm to have loads of articles on things that do not matter to
> you and that would never ever be in the crosshairs of Brittanica. Neither
> you nor I have a crystal ball and can predict what will be relevant in twnty
> year's time; if we continue as we're doing right now, we're doing ourselves
> a huge disservice.
> 
> So what if there are 500 Pok?mon character biographies? They're not harming
> anyone.
> 
> Notability is harming Wikipedia. There is no absolute notability, and we
> should stop trying to autistically cram everything into neat little boxes.
> Let history sort things out, not bots and singe purpose accounts.

I sort of agree with this. However, we do want to stop some stuff
getting in, like total crap that was dreamed up by some dud before
breakfast and he added it to WP before lunch. We avoid the notion of
adding what is "true" but have reached a compromise that we add stuff
with sources. However, we are more and more deleting stuff that could
have sources added. People work on deleting it, rather than working on
finding sources or just leaving it for others to do that.

Brian.

 
> Michel
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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