4 ms·

heh. i think this is a generational thing. he was pretty damn central to the early perl culture, but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of

heh. i think this is a generational thing. he was pretty damn central to the early perl culture, but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him. i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were? to give some idea of relative fame, i'd say he was no less famous in his community that, say, paul buchheit is these days. [and i'd like to know more details about how the prosecution ended up being expunged - whatever that means. he did time, right?]

mbateman 15y ago
Notability is not temporary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_is_not_temporary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability...
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  interesting, thanks. so he should stay.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    The notion that maybe he shouldn't is a false controversy. Even if he wanted the page removed, the page would stay. You can't be written up in tens or hundreds of news stories over a decade and not have a WP page written about you. Wikipedia is not suggesting that Schwartz be deleted. One random guy is. FILM AT 11.
- apike 15y ago
  Although notability is not temporary in theory, Wikipedia has always (and probably always will) suffer from presentism. Things that are important today get a disproportionate amount of attention. It is maybe easier to evaluate something's historical notability with the benefit of hindsight. That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.
  - dwyer 15y ago
    > I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like. Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that... * [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj] Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it? I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does. Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.
    - carussell 15y ago
      > Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? This is a pretty naïve argument. Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.
      - 15y ago
- gojomo 15y ago
  Notability is not temporary. Indeed, and backpropagating this principle through time, with a few other rough assumptions, suggests there are at least 1 million people who were once notable who will never get their own Wikipedia article. There is, however, a userspace article to commemorate these 'Unknown Notables': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of_the_Unknown_Notable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of...
carussell 15y ago
> i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were? This has been addressed, somewhat, but I'll say a bit more about it. This is, sorry to say, a wrongheaded approach. Editorial decisions should be made with some prescience, or at least an attempt at it. To suggest that a contrary approach is an acceptable one has a couple of negative effects: 1. There's the obvious problem, which is that it says after a threshold has been reached, it's okay that this stuff will be lost. Not even through neglect or inaction, but as a matter of policy and very deliberate action. This is, in a word, dumb. 2. It encourages people to spend unfortunate levels of effort on ephemera that's just going to disappear. To put it another way, it squanders an already-scarce resource on stuff that doesn't matter in the long run. That's a lot of churn, and there's enough as it is.
Zigurd 15y ago
More people know him as a TWiT Network host, nowadays.
- RandalSchwartz 15y ago
  I've noticed that at the past few open source conferences. Most people know me from FLOSS Weekly now. Since we already went through a "FLOSS Weekly deletion" action, can't some of that apply back to my article?
watmough 15y ago
"but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him" Isn't this why encyclopedias exist, and exactly why this entry shouldn't be deleted? Personally, I'm in the 'keep' camp, I can't understand why people would want to delete this, unless it's a manifestation of the trolling culture that seems to be springing up in a variety of places.

mbateman 15y ago

Notability is not temporary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_is_not_temporary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability...

andrewcooke 15y ago
interesting, thanks. so he should stay.
- tptacek 15y ago
  The notion that maybe he shouldn't is a false controversy. Even if he wanted the page removed, the page would stay. You can't be written up in tens or hundreds of news stories over a decade and not have a WP page written about you. Wikipedia is not suggesting that Schwartz be deleted. One random guy is. FILM AT 11.
apike 15y ago
Although notability is not temporary in theory, Wikipedia has always (and probably always will) suffer from presentism. Things that are important today get a disproportionate amount of attention. It is maybe easier to evaluate something's historical notability with the benefit of hindsight. That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.
- dwyer 15y ago
  > I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like. Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that... * [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj] Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it? I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does. Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.
  - carussell 15y ago
    > Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him? This is a pretty naïve argument. Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.
    - 15y ago
gojomo 15y ago
Notability is not temporary. Indeed, and backpropagating this principle through time, with a few other rough assumptions, suggests there are at least 1 million people who were once notable who will never get their own Wikipedia article. There is, however, a userspace article to commemorate these 'Unknown Notables': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of_the_Unknown_Notable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mike_Linksvayer/Article_of...

carussell 15y ago

> i guess the question is - to what extent should wikipedia cull entries for people who are no longer as famous as they one were? This has been addressed, somewhat, but I'll say a bit more about it. This is, sorry to say, a wrongheaded approach. Editorial decisions should be made with some prescience, or at least an attempt at it. To suggest that a contrary approach is an acceptable one has a couple of negative effects: 1. There's the obvious problem, which is that it says after a threshold has been reached, it's okay that this stuff will be lost. Not even through neglect or inaction, but as a matter of policy and very deliberate action. This is, in a word, dumb. 2. It encourages people to spend unfortunate levels of effort on ephemera that's just going to disappear. To put it another way, it squanders an already-scarce resource on stuff that doesn't matter in the long run. That's a lot of churn, and there's enough as it is.

Zigurd 15y ago

More people know him as a TWiT Network host, nowadays.

RandalSchwartz 15y ago
I've noticed that at the past few open source conferences. Most people know me from FLOSS Weekly now. Since we already went through a "FLOSS Weekly deletion" action, can't some of that apply back to my article?

watmough 15y ago

"but i'm not surprised most people these days haven't heard of him" Isn't this why encyclopedias exist, and exactly why this entry shouldn't be deleted? Personally, I'm in the 'keep' camp, I can't understand why people would want to delete this, unless it's a manifestation of the trolling culture that seems to be springing up in a variety of places.