![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
See Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy for more general deletion policy discussion.
This page contains a discussion of the following question:
Should lack of fame or importance be a legitimate reason to delete an article?
This poll is not saying something has to be famous/important to be included in wikipedia. It says does there exist some threshold of fame/importance which articles should exceed, without specifying what that threshold should be. That is it is on the principle should we include articles on everything or require some level of fame/importance. -- Imran 20:19, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)
(earlier note:) I definitely agree that some view of the wikipedia should have fame and importance standards. I also definitely feel that acquiring as much NPOV information as possible is good. Some information not currently important may become so -- your local city councilman may become mayor, or an international talk-show-host star who later becomes governor. In which case it will be wonderful to have your old thoughts about him handy. And even if only twenty people in the world care about your information -- the local place-names for landmarks in your home village 40 miles outside of Islamabad, in all 12 regional dialects -- that's the kind of glorious archive that only a distributed encyclopedia can provide.
WE MUST HAVE AN ARTICLE ON EACH AND EVERY ANT IN MY ANT FARM! - Arthur George Carrick
Why is this poll being held? Where is the discussion in which people have put forward arguments for and against excluding articles on subjects that are not famous or "important", and tried to come to a consensus decision? Has there even been a centralised discussion of this issue at all? This fashion for solving disputes by polls has reached the limit of absurdity here. From Wikipedia:Polling guidelines:
Is this poll being used an aid to achieving consensus? Or is it just an attempt to suppress any attempt at reaching a consensus by sheer weight of numbers?
What we should do is move this page to Wikipedia talk:Inclusion of content or some such thing, and use it to discuss the reasoning behind this suggestion (assuming there is any), and try to come to a consensus about precisely what sorts of material should be ineligible for inclusion, and, just as importantly, why. -- Oliver P. 01:07, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Several people wanted criteria for how famous one has to be. When I decide my opinions on subjects, I consider Wikipedia as a collection of encyclopedias on specialist subjects. For example, it would be reasonable for an encyclopedia of punk rock, Japanese history or conspiracy theories to be published (and they probably have been). Anything which would be in any of those encyclopedias is fair game. I oppose high schools, for example, because I doubt even an Encyclopedia of education in XXX country would include an entry on an otherwise non-famous high school, but even the most bizarre educational style or teaching tool would have an article, and thus can have one in Wikipedia. Plenty of extremely obscure punk rock bands, who perhaps existed for a brief period and never recorded, might have articles, but my friends' band, Lovenut & the Weird Beards, would not, even though I think they're quite good. I suppose this doesn't really help define any criteria for inclusion, because it depends on what I believe are likely topics for and in a published encyclopedia, but that's the criteria I use, and it has served me well. Tuf-Kat 04:42, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)
I think that although lack of fame and importance of an article should be A reason to delete it, it should never be THE ONLY reason to delete it. - Fennec 20:03, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Who decides what is important and what is not? How can one decide what is important while maintaining a neutral point of view? I suggest that if the conclusion is Yes, it be implemented cautiously with guidelines which should be debated and not be rigid. - Hemanshu 20:03, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
1. Non-famous subjects in Wikipedia tend to be either people or schools. In each case, the article is typically written by the subject, or someone close to the subject. I believe this raises two immediate problems, of bias and of verifiability. To this extent I'm not stating that non-famous subjects should be deleted for being non-famous, however I am stating that if a subject is non-famous, then (by definition) the chances are small of there being other Wikipedians who can verify the information and counter bias. As such, these articles should be treated with extreme suspicion until corroborating sources can be found. In my personal opinion, this suspicion should extend to deletion if no external sources are readily available, i.e. the assumption here should be guilty until some argument for innocence is presented.
2. Wikipedia has a "random page" generator. It is already the case that something like 1 in 5 articles in Wikipedia is a stub containing raw demographical data for an American village or town. This makes the place look bad. If we also had an article for everyone who stumbles across the site, and another one for his dog, it would look appalling. This could of course be dealt with to an extent by biassing the random page generator, but when Wikipedia advertises "we have X thousand articles", I believe that it is dishonest not to qualify that with "of which several thousand are auto-generated from US census data". If any and all articles about someone's mate Dave were welcomed, we would have to add "and several thousand more are about otherwise poorly-documented subjects".
3. Yes, a judgement of "famous" is influenced by point of view. However, there are many other issues in the organisation of the Wikipedia which always are, and always will be, influenced by the subjective opinions of the authors. With a given article it is not possible to compromise between splitting it into sections or keeping it in once piece. It is not possible to compromise between deleting it and not deleting it. So if there is genuine disagreement on these kinds of issues, a balanced "NPOV" solution is impossible. The organisation of the 'pedia cannot be done from a neutral point of view, hence neutrality can be sacrificed to expediency in this case, and a "not NPOV" argument can't be applied on either side of this argument.
All that said, I'm not voting. I don't wan't non-famousness to be a criterion for deletion. However I can't see how Wikipedia with its current organisation could possibly be improved by large numbers of articles about very obscure subjects. Onebyone 22:38, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
We serve the readers. The readers should decide whether something belongs to the encyclopaedia or not. We should have a system to get readers comments and use them for deleting or keeping the articles. If the readers want Wikipedia to list biographies of all ants of Earth, we should allow that. We should get the opinion of all readers, or most of them, not only one or two. We cannot decide whether an article should deleted or not, if we don't ask the readers first. Optim 17:03, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)
We ARE the readers of Wikipedia. We are also the writers and editors. The main concept is that this is not written by one group for the use of another group. Instead, it is intended as a collaboration by the readers. With this in mind, deleting in the manner done now is being done by the READERS. (Us) - Texture 18:18, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)
No, rather we should consider those whom we are here to serve ;) Sam Spade 21:47, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't find that to be remotely accurate, but I don't think this is going anywhere, so let's agree to disagree, shall we? I agree w Optim above, so perhaps his explanation is more useful to you than mine. Sam Spade 01:17, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What does it matter what the famouness of an article, or what you believe the usfulness is. There will be someone that will want to know about it, and thats what matters. Its an encyclopedia, a library of all knowledge. killographic was deleted because its a new word, well, I'm seeing it appear more often now, and 10 games are on poll to become the first retail Adult Only rated games because of this words invention. But nope, its new, so out it goes.
If an article actually contains information on its subject, it should stay. Or, - To reverse the context - As long as it isn't gibberish, or spam, or something that isn't related to the article, it should stay. People say its a dictionary word? So are many of the articles on here. Let it grow.
Of course, pages about a nobody that was made by them should be restricted to their user lookup.
Just my 2 dollars - Fizscy46 00:00, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In theory, non-famousness is a fine reason to delete something, since it's not encyclopedic. In practice, however, I don't believe it works. I rarely see anon comments on VfD, and indeed that page is heavily tilted away from being "new-user friendly", full of slang and so on that takes time to pick up. As such, I'm forced to assume that the only people who get a look at most of the candidates there are a (relatively) small group of regular contributors. We ARE NOT a representative sample.
Much of the time, I don't know enough about a subject to say whether or not it's famous. For example, take the disputes over Wilfredo G. Santa. He may or may not have been famous enough to be in the Wikipedia. In that case, we were informed by the Spanish Wikipedia, but in the future we might have no such sources. And I don't know enough--nor does the relatively limited community of VfD contributors--to make calls like that. In such a situation, we have to follow the principle of least harm. Which does more damage: deleting legitimate content and alienating contributors (which will happen, if fame is the criterion) or allowing irrelevant content to sit? Nonsense should be deleted; things should be moved to other wikis, as appropriate; bad writing should be improved; but non-famousness should not, given the constraints of reality, be a criterion for deletion. Meelar 05:32, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It's very possible for someone who isn't particularly famous to be important enough to warrant an encyclopedia entry -- a scientific researcher who's made a major medical discovery, for instance, is undeniably important, but may not necessarily be famous in the usual sense of the word.
I think "fame" is, at best, a poor shorthand for what we're really trying to get at here. Perhaps a better word is "relevance". I mean, hell, I've created a few entries myself for people who wouldn't exactly qualify as famous by most standards, but have significant historical relevance far beyond their actual name recognition among the general public.
This is the issue I have with an entry like Sarah Marple-Cantrell. That she's not famous isn't the problem; it's that I simply don't see why she's relevant enough to warrant inclusion in an encyclopedia (paper or not). - Bearcat 08:41, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Surely that's part of the point though isn't it? I mean I see her importance but not everybody in the whole world will, and the same can be said for every single article in Wikipedia, some will see the importance and some won't. And it shouldn't be a domininance of the majority over the minority either, if only one person values the subject of the article that should be all that's needed. Silly articles such as every single ant in the ant farm (my judgement about it being silly - no-one else's) will be often thought of but seldom actually completed. -- wayland 13:19, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I have a real issue with people saying that someone's death wasn't important. Especially the fact that a 12 year old girl was desperate enough to kill herself. We will never know what was going through her head when she pulled that trigger and the fact that you people have the audacity to say her death wasn't important????? That's sick. I knew this girl. Maybe not as well as I should, but I knew her and my family knew her. For someone to say a little girl's death by her own hand isn't important is just sick and twisted.
There is no question whether Sarah Marple Cantrell's death was important. And the fact that people don't think so makes me very sad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.251.81.233 ( talk) 03:00, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I staunchly disagree, for the same reasons as others have given, with the "fame criterion" for deletion. Importance is almost impossible to define. Are sigma-algebras important, or just nifty? They certainly aren't famous.
I've been in several deletion debates, most regarding the card game Ambition. Ambition is a game of rapidly-increasing popularity, but certainly not yet canonical like Bridge or poker. The first Ambition page was written in (I believe) November by another author, and had many problems. At the request of many Wikipedia users (including myself) it was deleted, and I (the inventor of Ambition) was called to write a new article. The "fame debate" surfaced in the deletion debates surrounding this article.
In my opinion, fame should not be the metric of inclusion, for reasons stated above. As for "importance", I don't even know how I would define that. Who's qualified to say what's "important"? I'm not. Certainly my cat is important to me, but I wouldn't write a page for her, include her birthday under April 1 or otherwise try to establish her here. Who else is interested in my cat?
Instead, I submit the humble opinion that general interest should be the metric of what stays and what goes. For examples of how such a criterion would be applied:
Sedenions would stay. They're certainly not famous, and I'm not aware of any practical use for them (though I'm sure there is, somewhere) but they are of definite interest to mathematicians.
Ambition (card game) would stay. It contains information on the strategy and development of a somewhat well-known card game.
Neither of the above examples are world famous, but both pertain to subjects that a new user, during his or her first visit to Wikipedia, could conceivably have enough interest in to type the queries directly into the search-box in the upper-right corner.
John Highway would be deleted. Not because it was written by its subject, but because there is very little general interest in the material on the page.
A (hypothetical) review or summary of an unpublished novel or set of poems would be deleted. If said novel could not be accessed by any users here, why would they have interest in reading a review about it?
An article about a high-school or strictly local band would be deleted, on a similar principle: Almost no one would have the opportunity to see this band's performances, anyway, so what general interest would such an article have? Almost none.
Likewise, these three examples are for subjects which new users, during a first visit to Wikipedia, would be highly unlikely to enter as search queries.
An interesting point was raised earlier regarding the Random Page function:
<<It is already the case that something like 1 in 5 articles in Wikipedia is a stub containing raw demographical data for an American village or town. This makes the place look bad. If we also had an article for everyone who stumbles across the site, and another one for his dog, it would look appalling.>>
Would it be possible to weight the Random Page function according to frequency of visit, so that obscure pages would come up proportionately less often?
Mike Church 23:48, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Your last paragraph is an interesting idea. How about frequency of edit? Except for edit conflicts, the pages most often edited are (IMHO) usually the best. OTOH, some people use Special:Randompage to find things that need editing -- maybe we should ask the opinion of the Wikipedians that use it a lot? Because I don't! -- Toby Bartels 06:20, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't use Random Page often. It's unlikely that something "random", i.e. chosen out of all the possible concepts in existence, will be interesting to me. I use Wikipedia quite often when I'm looking for a specific thing, but I don't often just go "surfing" here.
Multiple edits do indeed improve quality of a page dramatically, I agree. Even the best writers have to write multiple drafts of their work before publication, and often rely to some degree on other people to revise and edit their work. Frequency of edit could be an alternate weight for the function. That could be an alternative weight, except for (as you said) the fact that edit wars would bias the results. So perhaps it should be number of editors in the past XXX, not number of changes.
Does Wikipedia have the capability to track frequency of access? I think, perhaps, web stats on each page would be interesting. As said above, web stats could be used to weight the Random Page function. Also, it could be used to compile a "Top 100 Most Visited Wikipedia Sites" list which might be interesting. Of course, it would include only the encyclopedic subject pages, not metadiscussion pages like VfD or User Pages.
On the other hand, the danger to the latter idea is that people might write bots to break the charts, and put a page in which they have personal investment up to #1. Still a cool idea, aside from that flaw. Mike Church 03:06, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Judging whether an article should stay or be deleted could be done by the number of links to the article. Any comments on this?
I think we need some concept along the lines of importance, because otherwise we can unintentionally mislead the reader. Whether we use importance as a criterion or not, I'm sure most users will assume that we do, just like any other encyclopedia. If I'm a reader and I find 15 biographies of architects, I'm going to assume that all of them are fairly well-known people who have either designed notable buildings, or had some significant effect on the course of architectural history. If one of these articles is included because the architect is a contributor's grandfather, this article is implicitly misleading. A reader trying to get a broad view of the subject (which is, after all, what an encyclopedia is for) will waste time reading this entry (even if it's true and verifiable, it's not what the user wanted.)
Here's a possible way to judge "relevance" or "importance". Imagine that the subject of the article never existed. What would be different? How many people would notice, and how much would it affect them? Unfortunately this metric still isn't perfect, as it would for examle have us removing a lot of the more obscure items in list of mathematical topics. Isomorphic
And Santa Claus
And euyyn 23:00, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC), who is currently outlining his arguments, which point in this direction
I have a real issue with people saying that someone's death wasn't important. Especially the fact that a 12 year old girl was desperate enough to kill herself. We will never know what was going through her head when she pulled that trigger and the fact that you people have the audacity to say her death wasn't important????? That's sick. I knew this girl. Maybe not as well as I should, but I knew her and my family knew her. For someone to say a little girl's death by her own hand isn't important is just sick and twisted.
There is no question whether Sarah Marple Cantrell's death was important. And the fact that people don't think so makes me very sad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.251.81.233 ( talk) 02:59, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
![]() | This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
See Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy for more general deletion policy discussion.
This page contains a discussion of the following question:
Should lack of fame or importance be a legitimate reason to delete an article?
This poll is not saying something has to be famous/important to be included in wikipedia. It says does there exist some threshold of fame/importance which articles should exceed, without specifying what that threshold should be. That is it is on the principle should we include articles on everything or require some level of fame/importance. -- Imran 20:19, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)
(earlier note:) I definitely agree that some view of the wikipedia should have fame and importance standards. I also definitely feel that acquiring as much NPOV information as possible is good. Some information not currently important may become so -- your local city councilman may become mayor, or an international talk-show-host star who later becomes governor. In which case it will be wonderful to have your old thoughts about him handy. And even if only twenty people in the world care about your information -- the local place-names for landmarks in your home village 40 miles outside of Islamabad, in all 12 regional dialects -- that's the kind of glorious archive that only a distributed encyclopedia can provide.
WE MUST HAVE AN ARTICLE ON EACH AND EVERY ANT IN MY ANT FARM! - Arthur George Carrick
Why is this poll being held? Where is the discussion in which people have put forward arguments for and against excluding articles on subjects that are not famous or "important", and tried to come to a consensus decision? Has there even been a centralised discussion of this issue at all? This fashion for solving disputes by polls has reached the limit of absurdity here. From Wikipedia:Polling guidelines:
Is this poll being used an aid to achieving consensus? Or is it just an attempt to suppress any attempt at reaching a consensus by sheer weight of numbers?
What we should do is move this page to Wikipedia talk:Inclusion of content or some such thing, and use it to discuss the reasoning behind this suggestion (assuming there is any), and try to come to a consensus about precisely what sorts of material should be ineligible for inclusion, and, just as importantly, why. -- Oliver P. 01:07, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Several people wanted criteria for how famous one has to be. When I decide my opinions on subjects, I consider Wikipedia as a collection of encyclopedias on specialist subjects. For example, it would be reasonable for an encyclopedia of punk rock, Japanese history or conspiracy theories to be published (and they probably have been). Anything which would be in any of those encyclopedias is fair game. I oppose high schools, for example, because I doubt even an Encyclopedia of education in XXX country would include an entry on an otherwise non-famous high school, but even the most bizarre educational style or teaching tool would have an article, and thus can have one in Wikipedia. Plenty of extremely obscure punk rock bands, who perhaps existed for a brief period and never recorded, might have articles, but my friends' band, Lovenut & the Weird Beards, would not, even though I think they're quite good. I suppose this doesn't really help define any criteria for inclusion, because it depends on what I believe are likely topics for and in a published encyclopedia, but that's the criteria I use, and it has served me well. Tuf-Kat 04:42, Jan 26, 2004 (UTC)
I think that although lack of fame and importance of an article should be A reason to delete it, it should never be THE ONLY reason to delete it. - Fennec 20:03, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
Who decides what is important and what is not? How can one decide what is important while maintaining a neutral point of view? I suggest that if the conclusion is Yes, it be implemented cautiously with guidelines which should be debated and not be rigid. - Hemanshu 20:03, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
1. Non-famous subjects in Wikipedia tend to be either people or schools. In each case, the article is typically written by the subject, or someone close to the subject. I believe this raises two immediate problems, of bias and of verifiability. To this extent I'm not stating that non-famous subjects should be deleted for being non-famous, however I am stating that if a subject is non-famous, then (by definition) the chances are small of there being other Wikipedians who can verify the information and counter bias. As such, these articles should be treated with extreme suspicion until corroborating sources can be found. In my personal opinion, this suspicion should extend to deletion if no external sources are readily available, i.e. the assumption here should be guilty until some argument for innocence is presented.
2. Wikipedia has a "random page" generator. It is already the case that something like 1 in 5 articles in Wikipedia is a stub containing raw demographical data for an American village or town. This makes the place look bad. If we also had an article for everyone who stumbles across the site, and another one for his dog, it would look appalling. This could of course be dealt with to an extent by biassing the random page generator, but when Wikipedia advertises "we have X thousand articles", I believe that it is dishonest not to qualify that with "of which several thousand are auto-generated from US census data". If any and all articles about someone's mate Dave were welcomed, we would have to add "and several thousand more are about otherwise poorly-documented subjects".
3. Yes, a judgement of "famous" is influenced by point of view. However, there are many other issues in the organisation of the Wikipedia which always are, and always will be, influenced by the subjective opinions of the authors. With a given article it is not possible to compromise between splitting it into sections or keeping it in once piece. It is not possible to compromise between deleting it and not deleting it. So if there is genuine disagreement on these kinds of issues, a balanced "NPOV" solution is impossible. The organisation of the 'pedia cannot be done from a neutral point of view, hence neutrality can be sacrificed to expediency in this case, and a "not NPOV" argument can't be applied on either side of this argument.
All that said, I'm not voting. I don't wan't non-famousness to be a criterion for deletion. However I can't see how Wikipedia with its current organisation could possibly be improved by large numbers of articles about very obscure subjects. Onebyone 22:38, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)
We serve the readers. The readers should decide whether something belongs to the encyclopaedia or not. We should have a system to get readers comments and use them for deleting or keeping the articles. If the readers want Wikipedia to list biographies of all ants of Earth, we should allow that. We should get the opinion of all readers, or most of them, not only one or two. We cannot decide whether an article should deleted or not, if we don't ask the readers first. Optim 17:03, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)
We ARE the readers of Wikipedia. We are also the writers and editors. The main concept is that this is not written by one group for the use of another group. Instead, it is intended as a collaboration by the readers. With this in mind, deleting in the manner done now is being done by the READERS. (Us) - Texture 18:18, 30 Jan 2004 (UTC)
No, rather we should consider those whom we are here to serve ;) Sam Spade 21:47, 26 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't find that to be remotely accurate, but I don't think this is going anywhere, so let's agree to disagree, shall we? I agree w Optim above, so perhaps his explanation is more useful to you than mine. Sam Spade 01:17, 27 Feb 2004 (UTC)
What does it matter what the famouness of an article, or what you believe the usfulness is. There will be someone that will want to know about it, and thats what matters. Its an encyclopedia, a library of all knowledge. killographic was deleted because its a new word, well, I'm seeing it appear more often now, and 10 games are on poll to become the first retail Adult Only rated games because of this words invention. But nope, its new, so out it goes.
If an article actually contains information on its subject, it should stay. Or, - To reverse the context - As long as it isn't gibberish, or spam, or something that isn't related to the article, it should stay. People say its a dictionary word? So are many of the articles on here. Let it grow.
Of course, pages about a nobody that was made by them should be restricted to their user lookup.
Just my 2 dollars - Fizscy46 00:00, 1 Feb 2004 (UTC)
In theory, non-famousness is a fine reason to delete something, since it's not encyclopedic. In practice, however, I don't believe it works. I rarely see anon comments on VfD, and indeed that page is heavily tilted away from being "new-user friendly", full of slang and so on that takes time to pick up. As such, I'm forced to assume that the only people who get a look at most of the candidates there are a (relatively) small group of regular contributors. We ARE NOT a representative sample.
Much of the time, I don't know enough about a subject to say whether or not it's famous. For example, take the disputes over Wilfredo G. Santa. He may or may not have been famous enough to be in the Wikipedia. In that case, we were informed by the Spanish Wikipedia, but in the future we might have no such sources. And I don't know enough--nor does the relatively limited community of VfD contributors--to make calls like that. In such a situation, we have to follow the principle of least harm. Which does more damage: deleting legitimate content and alienating contributors (which will happen, if fame is the criterion) or allowing irrelevant content to sit? Nonsense should be deleted; things should be moved to other wikis, as appropriate; bad writing should be improved; but non-famousness should not, given the constraints of reality, be a criterion for deletion. Meelar 05:32, 2 Feb 2004 (UTC)
It's very possible for someone who isn't particularly famous to be important enough to warrant an encyclopedia entry -- a scientific researcher who's made a major medical discovery, for instance, is undeniably important, but may not necessarily be famous in the usual sense of the word.
I think "fame" is, at best, a poor shorthand for what we're really trying to get at here. Perhaps a better word is "relevance". I mean, hell, I've created a few entries myself for people who wouldn't exactly qualify as famous by most standards, but have significant historical relevance far beyond their actual name recognition among the general public.
This is the issue I have with an entry like Sarah Marple-Cantrell. That she's not famous isn't the problem; it's that I simply don't see why she's relevant enough to warrant inclusion in an encyclopedia (paper or not). - Bearcat 08:41, 22 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Surely that's part of the point though isn't it? I mean I see her importance but not everybody in the whole world will, and the same can be said for every single article in Wikipedia, some will see the importance and some won't. And it shouldn't be a domininance of the majority over the minority either, if only one person values the subject of the article that should be all that's needed. Silly articles such as every single ant in the ant farm (my judgement about it being silly - no-one else's) will be often thought of but seldom actually completed. -- wayland 13:19, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I have a real issue with people saying that someone's death wasn't important. Especially the fact that a 12 year old girl was desperate enough to kill herself. We will never know what was going through her head when she pulled that trigger and the fact that you people have the audacity to say her death wasn't important????? That's sick. I knew this girl. Maybe not as well as I should, but I knew her and my family knew her. For someone to say a little girl's death by her own hand isn't important is just sick and twisted.
There is no question whether Sarah Marple Cantrell's death was important. And the fact that people don't think so makes me very sad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.251.81.233 ( talk) 03:00, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I staunchly disagree, for the same reasons as others have given, with the "fame criterion" for deletion. Importance is almost impossible to define. Are sigma-algebras important, or just nifty? They certainly aren't famous.
I've been in several deletion debates, most regarding the card game Ambition. Ambition is a game of rapidly-increasing popularity, but certainly not yet canonical like Bridge or poker. The first Ambition page was written in (I believe) November by another author, and had many problems. At the request of many Wikipedia users (including myself) it was deleted, and I (the inventor of Ambition) was called to write a new article. The "fame debate" surfaced in the deletion debates surrounding this article.
In my opinion, fame should not be the metric of inclusion, for reasons stated above. As for "importance", I don't even know how I would define that. Who's qualified to say what's "important"? I'm not. Certainly my cat is important to me, but I wouldn't write a page for her, include her birthday under April 1 or otherwise try to establish her here. Who else is interested in my cat?
Instead, I submit the humble opinion that general interest should be the metric of what stays and what goes. For examples of how such a criterion would be applied:
Sedenions would stay. They're certainly not famous, and I'm not aware of any practical use for them (though I'm sure there is, somewhere) but they are of definite interest to mathematicians.
Ambition (card game) would stay. It contains information on the strategy and development of a somewhat well-known card game.
Neither of the above examples are world famous, but both pertain to subjects that a new user, during his or her first visit to Wikipedia, could conceivably have enough interest in to type the queries directly into the search-box in the upper-right corner.
John Highway would be deleted. Not because it was written by its subject, but because there is very little general interest in the material on the page.
A (hypothetical) review or summary of an unpublished novel or set of poems would be deleted. If said novel could not be accessed by any users here, why would they have interest in reading a review about it?
An article about a high-school or strictly local band would be deleted, on a similar principle: Almost no one would have the opportunity to see this band's performances, anyway, so what general interest would such an article have? Almost none.
Likewise, these three examples are for subjects which new users, during a first visit to Wikipedia, would be highly unlikely to enter as search queries.
An interesting point was raised earlier regarding the Random Page function:
<<It is already the case that something like 1 in 5 articles in Wikipedia is a stub containing raw demographical data for an American village or town. This makes the place look bad. If we also had an article for everyone who stumbles across the site, and another one for his dog, it would look appalling.>>
Would it be possible to weight the Random Page function according to frequency of visit, so that obscure pages would come up proportionately less often?
Mike Church 23:48, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Your last paragraph is an interesting idea. How about frequency of edit? Except for edit conflicts, the pages most often edited are (IMHO) usually the best. OTOH, some people use Special:Randompage to find things that need editing -- maybe we should ask the opinion of the Wikipedians that use it a lot? Because I don't! -- Toby Bartels 06:20, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I don't use Random Page often. It's unlikely that something "random", i.e. chosen out of all the possible concepts in existence, will be interesting to me. I use Wikipedia quite often when I'm looking for a specific thing, but I don't often just go "surfing" here.
Multiple edits do indeed improve quality of a page dramatically, I agree. Even the best writers have to write multiple drafts of their work before publication, and often rely to some degree on other people to revise and edit their work. Frequency of edit could be an alternate weight for the function. That could be an alternative weight, except for (as you said) the fact that edit wars would bias the results. So perhaps it should be number of editors in the past XXX, not number of changes.
Does Wikipedia have the capability to track frequency of access? I think, perhaps, web stats on each page would be interesting. As said above, web stats could be used to weight the Random Page function. Also, it could be used to compile a "Top 100 Most Visited Wikipedia Sites" list which might be interesting. Of course, it would include only the encyclopedic subject pages, not metadiscussion pages like VfD or User Pages.
On the other hand, the danger to the latter idea is that people might write bots to break the charts, and put a page in which they have personal investment up to #1. Still a cool idea, aside from that flaw. Mike Church 03:06, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Judging whether an article should stay or be deleted could be done by the number of links to the article. Any comments on this?
I think we need some concept along the lines of importance, because otherwise we can unintentionally mislead the reader. Whether we use importance as a criterion or not, I'm sure most users will assume that we do, just like any other encyclopedia. If I'm a reader and I find 15 biographies of architects, I'm going to assume that all of them are fairly well-known people who have either designed notable buildings, or had some significant effect on the course of architectural history. If one of these articles is included because the architect is a contributor's grandfather, this article is implicitly misleading. A reader trying to get a broad view of the subject (which is, after all, what an encyclopedia is for) will waste time reading this entry (even if it's true and verifiable, it's not what the user wanted.)
Here's a possible way to judge "relevance" or "importance". Imagine that the subject of the article never existed. What would be different? How many people would notice, and how much would it affect them? Unfortunately this metric still isn't perfect, as it would for examle have us removing a lot of the more obscure items in list of mathematical topics. Isomorphic
And Santa Claus
And euyyn 23:00, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC), who is currently outlining his arguments, which point in this direction
I have a real issue with people saying that someone's death wasn't important. Especially the fact that a 12 year old girl was desperate enough to kill herself. We will never know what was going through her head when she pulled that trigger and the fact that you people have the audacity to say her death wasn't important????? That's sick. I knew this girl. Maybe not as well as I should, but I knew her and my family knew her. For someone to say a little girl's death by her own hand isn't important is just sick and twisted.
There is no question whether Sarah Marple Cantrell's death was important. And the fact that people don't think so makes me very sad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.251.81.233 ( talk) 02:59, 22 October 2007 (UTC)