[WikiEN-l] PR consultants: perhaps Wikipedia is not the ideal promotional medium

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 12:58 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

I'm not sure about bot-seeded and maintained topics. You need to have
the human editors to go with that. Having bots doing stuff *without*
humans working with them and complementing them, tends to be a recipe
for disaster.

> Rather than waiting for someone to both care about a group and
> understand where to find notability guidelines, we should have lists
> of notable groups without articles compiled by people who know those
> guidelines and how to mine public databases.  Then the people who know
> about the topic (but not WP policy quirks) can get to work writing the
> article, people who cry NN on deletion discussions can be pointed to
> the "list of notable <foo> without articles", and the aforementioned
> writers can simply worry about citations, verifiability, and decent
> prose.

But I like this idea! Those lists do sort of exist in userspace and in
redlinked lists in mainspace, and there are (or was) some systematic
listing of such things at "requested articles". Have a look at
requested articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_articles

Are you suggesting something like that, but maintained by editors who
decide which suggestions are notable? I predict edit wars over which
links would stay or go on such lists. The only thing more useless than
arguing over an existing article at AfD, is arguing over an article
that hasn't even been created yet... :-)

> People sometimes to say that 'all the easy articles have been
> written', but I regularly run across topic areas which are
> interesting, notable, but overlooked with tens of thousands of
> subjects missing.  Geographic places in internet-free zones;
> monuments and buildings in Asia and Africa; notable professors and
> politicians outside of modern North America and Europe; businesses
> that were notable in their day but have since merged or shut down;
> notable published works that are out of print; even, as DGG says,
> modern notable businesses, or bands and other artists who don't have a
> Wikipedia-savvy following.

Or even founding editors of publications like the Times Literary Supplement:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lyttelton_Richmond

As one of the sources I looked at said, not a name many have heard of,
but a surprising amount of influence.

Carcharoth