4 ms·

It's a tough row to hoe. How do you keep a crackpot with a couple of friends (or sockpuppets) from establishing an 'authoritative' beachhead ? In this case, I

by ableal 18y ago

It's a tough row to hoe. How do you keep a crackpot with a couple of friends (or sockpuppets) from establishing an 'authoritative' beachhead ? In this case, I think someone well-meaning tried to enforce the 'notoriety' policy. Now, it's a matter of judgement if a reverse engineer known to hundreds or thousands deserves a place along Donald Duck. Personally, I don't see much harm in giving a Wikipedia page to anyone who ever lived.

jaaron 18y ago
Personally, I don't see much harm in giving a Wikipedia page to anyone who ever lived. I feel the same way.
tptacek 18y ago
You wouldn't lose an argument about whether WP should give articles to everyone --- it's not a crazy idea --- but you wouldn't win it, either: the WP community, guided by people who spend huge amounts of time working on the encyclopedia, has already decided that providing pages for non-notable people isn't part of WP's charter. They have arguments for that, and they are sensible arguments. For instance, if you provide articles for everyone who ever lived, someone needs to police those articles. If you don't police the articles, you end up with tens of thousands of pages making specious claims about people, some of which may be damaging to the subject of the article, others of which may be damaging to the fields those people represent, all under the aegis of one of the most important sites on the Internet. Also, WP is by design not a primary source. Original research isn't allowed on WP. It's not WP's job to validate and referee research, to provide political analysis, or to promote people and companies. But the overwhelming majority of the content you'd get in articles about non-notable people would be inherently original research. By restricting the WP to summaries of independent reliable sourcing on notable people, the problem of maintaining an entire encyclopedia as a volunteer effort is at least tractable. I think veteran Wikipedians could probably win the argument that eliminating those standards altogether could make maintaining WP intractable. Also, remember that the article we're discussing here really sucked. Fravia might be important, but whoever wrote that article did him a disservice if he was.
- ableal 18y ago
  Thanks for summarizing the cons. Yep, there's enough on the plate for now. But we'll probably get a 'Biopedia' in some form or another sometime. Then we can debate if animals should be included ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus ;-)

by ableal 18y ago

jaaron 18y ago

Personally, I don't see much harm in giving a Wikipedia page to anyone who ever lived. I feel the same way.

tptacek 18y ago

You wouldn't lose an argument about whether WP should give articles to everyone --- it's not a crazy idea --- but you wouldn't win it, either: the WP community, guided by people who spend huge amounts of time working on the encyclopedia, has already decided that providing pages for non-notable people isn't part of WP's charter. They have arguments for that, and they are sensible arguments. For instance, if you provide articles for everyone who ever lived, someone needs to police those articles. If you don't police the articles, you end up with tens of thousands of pages making specious claims about people, some of which may be damaging to the subject of the article, others of which may be damaging to the fields those people represent, all under the aegis of one of the most important sites on the Internet. Also, WP is by design not a primary source. Original research isn't allowed on WP. It's not WP's job to validate and referee research, to provide political analysis, or to promote people and companies. But the overwhelming majority of the content you'd get in articles about non-notable people would be inherently original research. By restricting the WP to summaries of independent reliable sourcing on notable people, the problem of maintaining an entire encyclopedia as a volunteer effort is at least tractable. I think veteran Wikipedians could probably win the argument that eliminating those standards altogether could make maintaining WP intractable. Also, remember that the article we're discussing here really sucked. Fravia might be important, but whoever wrote that article did him a disservice if he was.

ableal 18y ago
Thanks for summarizing the cons. Yep, there's enough on the plate for now. But we'll probably get a 'Biopedia' in some form or another sometime. Then we can debate if animals should be included ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucephalus ;-)