[Wikipedia-l] September 11 articles

[koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com]

Jeroen Heijmans Wrote:
>* The main article, as it is, has a very good start, and little has to 
>be changed to that.

Yes, I'd say the beginning is quite good.

>Others can be severely shortened, removing the "news 
>value" and reverting to facts and summaries. The parts of the 
>subarticles that really have to do with the subsequent attack and 
>anthrax attack should be at those articles. External links should be to 
>pages that give a good summary of the issue, and not merely newspaper 
>articles. Much of the remaining subpages could be included in the main 
>article itself.

I would agree with that also.

>* As for the list of casualties and the individual articles on them, I 
>think these should all go. In my view, the articles currently existing 
>are terrible and useless. They're terrible because they are templates 
>that say "(Name) was killed on September 11 (...) in 
>(WTC/Pentagon/Airplane). He lived in (Place), (State) and was married to 
>(Name). He had (#) children.". And these articles are about as useless 
>an article on the man walking his dog that I can see out of my window 
>right now. My opinion about a list of casualties is less strong, but I 
>also think it has little value. A good link to a memorial site (I'm sure 
>there are some) would be much better.

I not sure if I agree with this, only because I can't decide if it would be worthwhile to have an article on everyone ever killed in a terrorist bombing in the Middle East.  I suspect that it would not.  I'm inclined to want to remove them, though I'm also hesitant to state that something has /no/ encyclopedic value, because my metric for that is quite different from a philosopher's, or a biologist's, or a historian's.  Perhaps they should stay, if only because drivespace is cheap and people have found them useful in the past--it would, however, be great to have more information on each person than that they were killed in X place on Sept. 11.  All of these people had a life leading up to Sept. 11, and some of them undoubtedly were influential and noteworthy before the attack.

kq