This is a collection of some of my views on inclusion in Wikipedia, compiled & modified from what I've said here in various places. Some of them are accepted policy, some are, unfortunately, not�–—or at least not yet.
Redirection is in fact exactly equivalent to deletion except it provides a link for searching within wikipedia and it makes it possible to get at earlier versions of the article if one is sophisticated enough to know how to do it--most ordinary readers are probably totally unaware of the way to see the material that was redirected. Further, it prevents the title from showing up in a high position in Google, which is--de facto--an extremely common method of accessing wikipedia. The use of redirection in practice is almost always done as a gentle way of deletion, and it is time the community recognized this. They both remove the content. A true merge is another matter. Most merges in the articles of this sort & often elsewhere have resulted in drastic loss of content, and often this is deliberate-- and in fact can even be appropriate. the term "smerge" has been sometimes used in afd discussions when this is the intended result. Such merges are an intermediate form of deletion. True merges, where all of the non-duplicative content is retained can be a true editing matter, determined in part by factors other than notability, including the length of the articles involved. But when they are in effect a decision that the article does not deserve separate treatment by our rules, then it is again , a gentle form of partial deletion, that also removes the material from prominence in Google. DGG ( talk) 18:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC) (from the [1]
Re Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lauren Harries
WE have actual workable guidelines only in a very few areas, such as athletes, and the ones we do have are frequently challenged. The general guidelines depend on the chance of sourcing; since this gives absurd results, we qualify it by NOT and BLP and a very elaborate reading of what makes a RS to get some degree of discrimination between what two newspapers or books happen to cover and any real meaningfulness for an encyclopedia. I wonder what we would get by a match in Google News or Books or Scholar to find everyone mentioned twice (they wont let the database be used that way, so it isn't practical). I wouldn't call the this a guessing game, I would call it a game of being able to make an argument and get enough support for it--which is a combination of logic and skill and community feelings and power and chance and the mood of the day. DGG ( talk) 14:21, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
We use it only because we have nothing better, not because there's consensus. It is worse than useless, actively misleading, because it confuses the question of accidents of what type of sources happen to be findable by the people here, with suitability for detailed treatment and a headline. Fortunately, its days are numbered, because in a year or two Google books will be able to find such references on anything at all that has ever been in print anywhere, and we'll need something more discriminating than the ability to count as far as 2. But more fundamentally, I think the entire concept of notability is wrong and unhelpful. I think we have totally confused 3 different problems:
This is a collection of some of my views on inclusion in Wikipedia, compiled & modified from what I've said here in various places. Some of them are accepted policy, some are, unfortunately, not�–—or at least not yet.
Redirection is in fact exactly equivalent to deletion except it provides a link for searching within wikipedia and it makes it possible to get at earlier versions of the article if one is sophisticated enough to know how to do it--most ordinary readers are probably totally unaware of the way to see the material that was redirected. Further, it prevents the title from showing up in a high position in Google, which is--de facto--an extremely common method of accessing wikipedia. The use of redirection in practice is almost always done as a gentle way of deletion, and it is time the community recognized this. They both remove the content. A true merge is another matter. Most merges in the articles of this sort & often elsewhere have resulted in drastic loss of content, and often this is deliberate-- and in fact can even be appropriate. the term "smerge" has been sometimes used in afd discussions when this is the intended result. Such merges are an intermediate form of deletion. True merges, where all of the non-duplicative content is retained can be a true editing matter, determined in part by factors other than notability, including the length of the articles involved. But when they are in effect a decision that the article does not deserve separate treatment by our rules, then it is again , a gentle form of partial deletion, that also removes the material from prominence in Google. DGG ( talk) 18:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC) (from the [1]
Re Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lauren Harries
WE have actual workable guidelines only in a very few areas, such as athletes, and the ones we do have are frequently challenged. The general guidelines depend on the chance of sourcing; since this gives absurd results, we qualify it by NOT and BLP and a very elaborate reading of what makes a RS to get some degree of discrimination between what two newspapers or books happen to cover and any real meaningfulness for an encyclopedia. I wonder what we would get by a match in Google News or Books or Scholar to find everyone mentioned twice (they wont let the database be used that way, so it isn't practical). I wouldn't call the this a guessing game, I would call it a game of being able to make an argument and get enough support for it--which is a combination of logic and skill and community feelings and power and chance and the mood of the day. DGG ( talk) 14:21, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
We use it only because we have nothing better, not because there's consensus. It is worse than useless, actively misleading, because it confuses the question of accidents of what type of sources happen to be findable by the people here, with suitability for detailed treatment and a headline. Fortunately, its days are numbered, because in a year or two Google books will be able to find such references on anything at all that has ever been in print anywhere, and we'll need something more discriminating than the ability to count as far as 2. But more fundamentally, I think the entire concept of notability is wrong and unhelpful. I think we have totally confused 3 different problems: