[WikiEN-l] A morsel of substance, a truckload of nonsense

[David Goodman]

In a couintry where importance wa rought proportional to the amount of
property one owned and where it was located, a list of the propertyies
is highly relevant. There are multiple books discussing in detail the
landholdings of individual proprietors and the pattern of landholding
in general. This is the basic historical information. If he had owned
one compact estate, we would surely list it. As he owned a hundred,
just as much reason. Some thought could have been given to how to
present the references more compactly, but the information is
encyclopedic . since the information is available for every Domesday
landowner in the counties covered, I hope for more such articles. I
think there are a few thousand.

This list is just a start in the encyclopedic treatment. There needs
to be a discussion for each one of them of when they were acquired, of
their extent, and of what happened to them. The place for this is
probably in the articles on the individual locations., thus
buildingthe web--and probing that all geographic places  even
villages, do have something to be said about them.

How many events in his life should be covered? Not as much as in a
book about him, no. We might not list ''every'' charter he signed or
witnessed, as an historian would, or use them to reconstruct his
itinerary.  We should describe his tomb, we would not use the detail
that an art historian would in a monograph about it.  Though we would
mention his relatives, we would not put in long sections about their
later career , as an historian would to give context--this context
will be in other articles.  But the property he owned is as basic as
anything else about a feudal lord. The desire to remove it indicates
an absences of historical perspective, at the least. Wikipedia  is not
aimed as a scholarly encyclopedia, but we should not disdain
scholarship when we have it available.

The hardest concept for many of the people working at Wikipedia is not
NPOV, or even the need for sources.  it's NOT PAPER.


 The relevant policy,, as always remains, NOT PAPER
BTW, I think there is consensus against using collapsable boxes for
article content. It impairs universal access.



David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 6:37 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia at zog.org> wrote:
>> 2009/4/23 <WJhonson at aol.com>
>>
>>> The Domesday holdings are not significant to his biography.
>>> We are not trying to build a land holdings database, we are writing
>>> biographies.
>>>
>>
>> We are writing a comprehensive written compendium that holds information
>> from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.
>> We are not writing a comprehensive written compendium of biographies.
>
> Uh...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography
>
> Biography writing is certainly one way of writing articles about people.
>
> There was a template to do biography-by-the-numbers, but it might have
> got deleted. Several WikiProjects do have "fill in the blanks" article
> templates. They tend to do more harm than good, IMO.
>
> Carcharoth
>
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