[Wikipedia-l] Re: Years in review and the need for editorial judgement

Toby Bartels toby at math.ucr.edu
Fri Jun 28 05:48:44 UTC 2002


Robert Merkel wrote in part:

>Let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. The fact that we might need
>special rules for Year In Review articles makes me wonder whether
>they are, indeed encyclopedia articles or something else entirely.
>If not, do they really belong as part of the Wikipedia or are they
>a job for another projct with different rules?  Probably not, but it's
>something to think about.

My intuition is clear that they are appropriate for encyclopaedias.
What happened in a given year is the substance of an article on that year,
and the passage of any specific year is a general phenemon,
suitable for inclusion in a compendium of the world's knowledge.
What Year in Review may be inappropriate for is simply
our *style* of encyclopaedia.

Ordinary encyclopaedias judge all the time that
a specific point, however correct and neutral,
is just too particular to belong in the article.
We don't.  We include every minor point mentioned,
no matter how petty, and even spin off subpages dedicated to them.

Would an ordinary encyclopaedia include a detailed outline
of Goedel's original proof of his Completeness Theorem?
Of course not, it would clutter up the article on the theorem,
which should be about the theorem in more general terms,
stating it only roughly (since precisely is complicated)
and talking about its effect on logic and mathematics,
not getting into the nitty gritty of its minor details.
We, OTOH, simply spin this proof off into a subpage.
The article [[Goedels_completeness_theorem]] reads well,
and [[Goedels_completeness_theorem/Original_Proof]] has the details
that somebody decided it was worth the trouble to spell out.
Unnecessary, maybe, but not problematic.

So this is what we do with material that is correct and neutral,
but still more information than a main article needs.
I'm confident that if Wikipedia continues, say, another hundred years,
then someday we will have a page like [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]]
that lists every book published that year with an article.
(And someday that page title will be too broad as well.)
Since we agree that Heinlein's books deserve articles, then they'll be there.
In [[1962]] itself, we'll list only Silent Spring,
but there will be a link to [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]],
and Stranger in a Strange Land will show up there.

Ellmist is placing these listings under a new heading of '''Books''',
and while I think that it's silly to spend time listing books *now*,
someday there will be Wikipedians whose normal Wikipedia activities
include checking that every book with an article is in the yearly listings,
just as today there are those that sometimes check for births and deaths.
When a newbie looks at [[1962]] today, they won't think <How excessive!>;
they'll think <How incomplete!>; and if they have enough time to waste,
they'll start adding their favorite author's books.
While a poor priority, I don't think that this is a bad thing;
it'll start out slow, and when it gets to be too much to handle,
a simple cut & paste job (maybe aided by a script?)
will create [[List_of_books_published_in_1962]] and its ilk,
and the future will have arrived.


-- Toby Bartels
   toby at math.ucr.edu



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