Hi Maury, Thanks for your reply.
On 17/04/07, Maury Markowitz maury_markowitz@hotmail.com wrote:
- Should "notability" be relevant as a test-of-value in a cyber
encyclopedia, where the amount of space available, at least theoretically, is unlimited in scope?
The problem is that an entry on the wiki _becomes_ a notability criterion for many people. For instance, if I believed that drinking 50 litres of water a day makes you live forever few people would give it credence. But if someone were to write a wiki article on the topic, it suddenly becomes much more "real". This is why we need notability as a filter.
But aren't we confusing here between an untruth (50 litres of water) and a question of scale or importance (all humanly-defined, with the usual and traditional biases of defining the 'centre' and the 'periphery', the important that is 'us' and the not-so-important that is 'them')?
- Isn't "notability" a relevant issue? For instance, in my village in
Goa, India, the old schoolteacher who ran a local tiny grocer's shop was also "notable". So would Wikipedia have the space to include this kind of diversity?
I think you mean "relative issue"? In that case, no. The wikipedia is a worldwide resource, a grocer in Goa has no worldwide notability. Yes, I
So, are we saying that the world is not round? That there is indeed a centre and a periphery? That some people are more important than others (because they have mirrors and filters that judge them to be so)? And that Wikipedia will continue to act as a mirror defining its priorities by the standards of the traditional filters anyway (whether it is being subconsciously influenced by the values of Britannica, even when there is no reason for it to be so, or accept the 'big' and the 'important' and reject those that seem to be 'small' and 'insignificant' to our perspective today)?
If George V or Czar Whoever were defining things, then I'm sure M.K. Gandhi and V.I.Lenin would have looked as very insignificant (the village grocers or naked fakirs of the cyberspace equivalent of their time) once upon a time...
realize there is a huge amount of existing content that falls into this category.
We have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. If you think this person is important enough to deserve a web page for, then by all means, set one up on Facebook.
So we are thinking of hierarchies here too... where someone is good enough for Facebook and not Wikipedia, though what is said about that someone is factual and truthful anyway?
Would it be fair for me to argue that a country of 5 million should not have too much space (or none at all) compared to another of 1.4 billion or 1.1 billion? I think importance and relevance is largely in how we see it.
Cyberspace allows for new ways of seeing things, and buildings equalities/inequalities. Let's seize the moment and make the most of it. Can the alternative Wikipedia be really alternative in its approach?
FN