Maury Markowitz wrote:
If Wikipedia
were a paper-based encyclopedia,
then I think there is no doubt that there would
be certain selection criteria. Wikipedia is not
paper, and consequently has decided that if it is
(a) Verifiable (b) (non-trivial) Reliable
sources, (c) written neutrally, then it is acceptable.
I would agree, but in every
case your examples failed on (c). The
article on Pensée failed to make any sort of effort to describe the
magazine _before_ it was radically re-imaged to become a mouthpiece
for Velikovsky, and I consider it deletable for that reason alone. Nor
did it make any reasonable attempt to describe the fact that the topic
is utter rubish, except by including a quote that suggested it was a
hissy fit by "mainstream" scientists. Pensée existed before the events
described in the article, yet zero effort was made to describe them.
This was nothing more than a roundabout promotion for Velikovsky-ism.
DELETE!
What you forget is that a person who knows that the magazine had a
previous incarnation should be working toward NPOV by expanding the
article to let us know about that previous life instead of deleting the
article as a means of promoting his biases. Writing neutrally does not
mean that we accept only neutral topics.
It is sufficient to express that Velikovsky's ideas are significantly at
odds with the mainstream. There is no need to fill these articles with
tediously redundant polemics. A few discretely placed references will
be enough to convince the thoughtful reader. At one time Velikovsky's
books were very popular, and that is a fact that cannot be ignored.
The article on the Electric Universe so obviously
fails (c) that I'm
astonished you would even bring it up as an example!
We don't have an Electric
Universe article; how is anyone supposed to
know what you are talking about?
Likewise, I
see no problem Wikipedia summarising
every book that was ever published. It already
summarised every episode of many obscure TV programmes.
Yes, but lots of people
actually watch The Simpsons. Very few read
about the Electric Universe.
This suggests that you would make contemporary
popularity a major
criterion for deciding what to review. Few people have read Einstein's
original papers - even in English translation - so by your criterion we
should delete references to Einstein, and allow our views about nuclear
power to be guided by Homer Simpson's relation to his employment.
[M]y point is
not to specifically argue for the
inclusion of these articles
Oh geez, yes it is. I can conclude this as easy as
looking at your sig...
Is that any worse than someone's blind argument for
deleting these articles.
I find it interesting that you don't even seem to
argue that these
topics are "real', only that they are "verifyable". This is why we
don't just accept V. I can, for instance, verify that the homeless guy
on the corner talks to himself, but that doesn't deserve an article on
the wiki either. We have rules like V, OR and NPOV to act as an
interlinked set of guidelines in order to filter out articles like these.
Verifiability in no way implies that the subject is "real"; it merely
establishes that someone, rightly or wrongly, believed this and wrote
about it.
Who has written an article about your "homeless guy"? Please provide
links so that I can read that article. That, or admit that the idea was
only raised as a straw man: a ridiculous example of something that
no-one would do presented for the sole purpose of discrediting a more
arguable issue. Your interpretation of the rules is a complerte distortion.
Ec