[Wikipedia-l] Deletion of /pages/ with No Content

The Cunctator cunctator at kband.com
Tue Aug 27 01:11:48 UTC 2002


"Daniel Mayer" <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Monday 26 August 2002 12:20 pm, The Cunctator wrote:
> > And the doubt here shouldn't be an individual's doubt, but on
> > the doubt of everyone. And in the case of stubs, there will always be
> > doubt, because the determination of "useless" is not objective.
>
> Sorry but I must wholeheartedly disagree. A page that is blank or whose
only
> content is "Put your text for the new page here. alkjfl;asdkj;lkj" "or
"this
> is gay" IS objectively useless (worse than useless since it shows up as an
> active link). This is also true for pages whose only content is the title
of
> the page and arguably for pages whose only content is an external link.

Note that I wrote "in the case of stubs", not "in the case of pages that are
blank
or whose only content is 'Put your text for the new page here.
alkjfl;asdkj;lk'".

And "arguably" is a signifier of a subjective determination.

And utility is still a subjective determination. Even in the extreme case,
one could
imagine a person for whom the "this is gay" page is useful; say, someone who
wanted
proof of anti-homosexual sentiment on the Web, could devise a metric based
on the
 number of times "this is gay" appears on the Web, or even just on Wikipedia
in
general. There is interesting sociological data to be mined in the random
scribblings of
anonymous users of Wikipedia.

That said, I know that when you say "useless" you mean "not helping the
stated
purpose of the Wikipedia project". I'm not trying to be obtuse. I'm just
making a
careful distinction between stubs, which are of limited value but do fit
within the
rubric of Wikipedia, and random nonsense. They should not be conflated.






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