8 ms·

"No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat." And if we did? It think it would be rather cool for everyone, living or dead, to have his own

by antidoh 14y ago

"No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat." And if we did? It think it would be rather cool for everyone, living or dead, to have his own Wikipedia page. In fact these might have special status as non-deletable. If your family ran a web site about its family, would you deny any member a page, especially if some members already had pages? Now consider our larger family, all us humans that have ever been and ever will be. Besides the many topics about our "family" covered by Wikipedia, some of us have pages specifically about us. Why shouldn't all of us have our own pages? Well before Wikipedia came along, I've wished that each person on Earth could have some way of being recorded for posterity. Some peoples' record will of course be more interesting than others'. But we're all family, even the boring and embarrassing ones.

kijin 14y ago
Methinks there already is a website with more or less the same function. It's called Facebook, and from what I've heard, people don't seem to be particularly enthusiastic about recording their lives to be displayed in public in perpetuity.
- hobin 14y ago
  I'm quite certain this would be one of those things people would be uncomfortable with for a few months - a year, tops. Then they get used to it.
  - hhsa 14y ago
    While I think a lot of people would get used to it (as proven by the amount of people who have all their lives and conversations in public on Facebook), there definitely will still be some who are aware of the consequences. The whole "overshare your whole life publicly on the internet" situation is starting to get out of hand. I don't need to tell HN'ers, but once something is put online, it's there forever, available to any of the 7 billion people alive right now, and it will be available to anybody else that ever lives in the future. Yet still people continue to post content that is immature, embarrassing, risqué, illegal/incriminating, etc. using their full names and identities for the world to see. But a full Wikipedia article for every person? Do you really want anybody on the planet to have your full DOB, birthplace, educational history, employment history, place of residence, pictures, etc. AND then have all of that information for your spouses, parents, children? This is getting too crazy.
  - rego 14y ago
    hhsa's post seems to have gotten dead'd, so: While I think a lot of people would get used to it (as proven by the amount of people who have all their lives and conversations in public on Facebook), there definitely will still be some who are aware of the consequences. The whole "overshare your whole life publicly on the internet" situation is starting to get out of hand. I don't need to tell HN'ers, but once something is put online, it's there forever, available to any of the 7 billion people alive right now, and it will be available to anybody else that ever lives in the future. Yet still people continue to post content that is immature, embarrassing, risqué, illegal/incriminating, etc. using their full names and identities for the world to see. But a full Wikipedia article for every person? Do you really want anybody on the planet to have your full DOB, birthplace, educational history, employment history, place of residence, pictures, etc. AND then have all of that information for your spouses, parents, children? This is getting too crazy.
- icebraining 14y ago
  Not really. Facebook is geared towards logging your whole life (with more or less detail), not having a small profile page. See Rob Pike's[1] Wiki page, for example; it's just a couple of paragraphs describing where he was born and what he did and does professionally. From his personal life, there's only 8 words. I'm someone who likes to remain pseudo-anonymous, but I'd be OK with a page like that.
bravura 14y ago
I think this would be a great idea, to have articles on "non-notable" subjects. The underlying motivation for "notable" is a potential bug in Wikipedia, not a problem with "notability" per se. The notability requirement is epiphenomenal, a kind of code smell for the Wikipedia guidelines. The underlying issue is whether the Wikipedia attribution and citation guidelines are strong enough to indicate when an article contains content that is possibly fallacious. Non-notable topics are more likely to have fewer references, and hence the information about a non-notable subject are more subject to manipulation. It would be an interesting acid test for Wikipedia (perhaps a sub-Wikipedia, like http://everything-en.wikipedia.org/ http://everything-en.wikipedia.org/) to open the floodgates on "non-notable" entries. Articles would start out by default with a banner that says "No editor has reviewed whether this article contains credible sources." Another editor could swoop in, read the citations, and remove the banner, or change it to: "The sources cited in this article are easily manipulated, and lack independent review." Iterating over http://everything-en.wikipedia.org http://everything-en.wikipedia.org editor guidelines, Wikipedia could evolve a strong set of guidelines for remaining authoritative over the long-tail of information. I wish this would happen, but I don't know if/how it would.
mjn 14y ago
If there are good references, Wikipedia has been moving in this direction. But as an encyclopedia, and one that claims no authority for itself based on any kind of expertise of the authors, articles really need to be referenced to good sources in the published literature. If you do have good sources for something, e.g. there is even a relatively small biographical section on someone in a published book, or a journal article, or something similar, the separate "notability" requirement has been increasingly going away, so that "but I've got sources" trumps it. I wrote a bit on that last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability... (I also discuss some of the history around these requirements, some of which were motivated by trying to do something about Usenet physics cranks who found Wikipedia and decided it'd be a great place for articles on all their pet theories.) I've been systematically going through several references and adding articles on everything in them, and haven't run into people objecting to my articles or trying to delete them for several years, since the end of the more "notability" focused era. Now as long as my articles include some references, they seem fine. One of my projects is marching through the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie adding articles on random people who were mayors of Prussian towns in 1850, and that kind of thing. There's even a Wikiproject trying to organize efforts to cover everything in that particular reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/ADB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_e... I do think it's also valuable for there to be other projects, which catalog information that can't be referenced well. For example, Know Your Meme does a pretty decent job of doing original research in history-of-memes. There are several genealogy projects that attempt to catalog people more exhaustively as well. But those are pretty different projects from Wikipedia's goal of summarizing stuff that's published in the existing literature, with references. Wikipedia doesn't have to be the only wiki on the internet, so I don't see why those original-research projects can't develop in parallel.
- matznerd 14y ago
  I have not seen Wikipedia "moving in this directon." I had some editors delete a 5 year old page with multiple published sources and 10+ inbound wikipedia links on it. I am getting it reviewed now. There are some bad apple editors on Wikipedia who are high up on their horses.

by antidoh 14y ago

kijin 14y ago

Methinks there already is a website with more or less the same function. It's called Facebook, and from what I've heard, people don't seem to be particularly enthusiastic about recording their lives to be displayed in public in perpetuity.

hobin 14y ago
I'm quite certain this would be one of those things people would be uncomfortable with for a few months - a year, tops. Then they get used to it.
- hhsa 14y ago
  While I think a lot of people would get used to it (as proven by the amount of people who have all their lives and conversations in public on Facebook), there definitely will still be some who are aware of the consequences. The whole "overshare your whole life publicly on the internet" situation is starting to get out of hand. I don't need to tell HN'ers, but once something is put online, it's there forever, available to any of the 7 billion people alive right now, and it will be available to anybody else that ever lives in the future. Yet still people continue to post content that is immature, embarrassing, risqué, illegal/incriminating, etc. using their full names and identities for the world to see. But a full Wikipedia article for every person? Do you really want anybody on the planet to have your full DOB, birthplace, educational history, employment history, place of residence, pictures, etc. AND then have all of that information for your spouses, parents, children? This is getting too crazy.
- rego 14y ago
  hhsa's post seems to have gotten dead'd, so: While I think a lot of people would get used to it (as proven by the amount of people who have all their lives and conversations in public on Facebook), there definitely will still be some who are aware of the consequences. The whole "overshare your whole life publicly on the internet" situation is starting to get out of hand. I don't need to tell HN'ers, but once something is put online, it's there forever, available to any of the 7 billion people alive right now, and it will be available to anybody else that ever lives in the future. Yet still people continue to post content that is immature, embarrassing, risqué, illegal/incriminating, etc. using their full names and identities for the world to see. But a full Wikipedia article for every person? Do you really want anybody on the planet to have your full DOB, birthplace, educational history, employment history, place of residence, pictures, etc. AND then have all of that information for your spouses, parents, children? This is getting too crazy.
icebraining 14y ago
Not really. Facebook is geared towards logging your whole life (with more or less detail), not having a small profile page. See Rob Pike's[1] Wiki page, for example; it's just a couple of paragraphs describing where he was born and what he did and does professionally. From his personal life, there's only 8 words. I'm someone who likes to remain pseudo-anonymous, but I'd be OK with a page like that.

bravura 14y ago

I think this would be a great idea, to have articles on "non-notable" subjects. The underlying motivation for "notable" is a potential bug in Wikipedia, not a problem with "notability" per se. The notability requirement is epiphenomenal, a kind of code smell for the Wikipedia guidelines. The underlying issue is whether the Wikipedia attribution and citation guidelines are strong enough to indicate when an article contains content that is possibly fallacious. Non-notable topics are more likely to have fewer references, and hence the information about a non-notable subject are more subject to manipulation. It would be an interesting acid test for Wikipedia (perhaps a sub-Wikipedia, like http://everything-en.wikipedia.org/ http://everything-en.wikipedia.org/) to open the floodgates on "non-notable" entries. Articles would start out by default with a banner that says "No editor has reviewed whether this article contains credible sources." Another editor could swoop in, read the citations, and remove the banner, or change it to: "The sources cited in this article are easily manipulated, and lack independent review." Iterating over http://everything-en.wikipedia.org http://everything-en.wikipedia.org editor guidelines, Wikipedia could evolve a strong set of guidelines for remaining authoritative over the long-tail of information. I wish this would happen, but I don't know if/how it would.

mjn 14y ago

If there are good references, Wikipedia has been moving in this direction. But as an encyclopedia, and one that claims no authority for itself based on any kind of expertise of the authors, articles really need to be referenced to good sources in the published literature. If you do have good sources for something, e.g. there is even a relatively small biographical section on someone in a published book, or a journal article, or something similar, the separate "notability" requirement has been increasingly going away, so that "but I've got sources" trumps it. I wrote a bit on that last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability... (I also discuss some of the history around these requirements, some of which were motivated by trying to do something about Usenet physics cranks who found Wikipedia and decided it'd be a great place for articles on all their pet theories.) I've been systematically going through several references and adding articles on everything in them, and haven't run into people objecting to my articles or trying to delete them for several years, since the end of the more "notability" focused era. Now as long as my articles include some references, they seem fine. One of my projects is marching through the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie adding articles on random people who were mayors of Prussian towns in 1850, and that kind of thing. There's even a Wikiproject trying to organize efforts to cover everything in that particular reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/ADB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_e... I do think it's also valuable for there to be other projects, which catalog information that can't be referenced well. For example, Know Your Meme does a pretty decent job of doing original research in history-of-memes. There are several genealogy projects that attempt to catalog people more exhaustively as well. But those are pretty different projects from Wikipedia's goal of summarizing stuff that's published in the existing literature, with references. Wikipedia doesn't have to be the only wiki on the internet, so I don't see why those original-research projects can't develop in parallel.

matznerd 14y ago
I have not seen Wikipedia "moving in this directon." I had some editors delete a 5 year old page with multiple published sources and 10+ inbound wikipedia links on it. I am getting it reviewed now. There are some bad apple editors on Wikipedia who are high up on their horses.