[Wikipedia-l] Re: September 11 articles

[Jeroen Heijmans]

>
>
>I basically disagree with all of your proposals, which shouldn't be too
>surprising
>since I'm responsible for most of the entry. And being from New York I have
>a certain personal weight on it.
>
Yes, I expected you to respond.

>But a general philosophy that I believe is true for the entire encyclopedia
>which applies here in particular is: Don't remove information. If someone has gone
>to the effort to add information to Wikipedia, and you feel it is poorly
>presented, then improve the presentation. Don't delete it. There's no good reason to
>get rid of the subpages. They should be edited such that they follow a pyramid
>structure of general overview to specific information, but specific information should
>not be lost.
>
Well, we have some rules about what Wikipedia is not. Nr. 14 says: "A 
news report". Many of the current entries
violate that, so they'll at least need some big rewrite. Many others 
need NPOVing. Other articles such as "personal experiences" of course 
NEVER belong in an encyclopedia.

>We are under *no* constraints of size. This is not paper.
>
Yes, but it is an encyclopedia. Also, it was proposed to move the 
non-encyclopedic parts, not delete them.

>Similarly, with the casualties (and I'm working on correcting the missing
>persons/ casualties list--it's pretty inaccurate, but oddly, about the only one
>available on the Net), just because the current entries aren't full now doesn't mean they shouldn't
>be in the Wikipedia. There is tons of biographical information about nearly every one
>of the victims available; which should be added to Wikipedia.
>
Why? Every day I can read about at least a dozen of people that died. I 
could enter an article on them. "John Doe died on date X in a traffic 
accident." Not very useful, right? Or should we also list the 6 million 
Jews, and millions of other people that died because of some kind of 
artrocity? Have articles about each Palestinian killed by an Israeli 
soldier?

>If you don't care about them, then ignore the entries, instead of deleting
>them. Other people do care. And that should be the criterion for what deserves to
>be in Wikipedia. As long as it follows the basic stylistic guidelines, any
>topic is worthy of entry.
>
With discussions going on about removing articles that say "A city in 
Arizona", I think "A person that died on 9/11" is of the same category. 
Also, the fact that some people care about an article does not 
automatically mean it belongs in Wikipedia.

If these articles were not about an incident that happened in the USA, 
most of these pages would have long been re-worked, adapted or deleted.

Jeronimo