Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not
I just added a new entry on What Wikipedia is not. The entry is concerned with the habit of some, to do wholesale copy-and-paste jobs of public domain source material (i.e. entire books, laws, etc.). One of the worst (or best?) examples is the The Origin of Species article that has each entire chapter in its own subpage! This would be a real nice, cool and useful thing, if the entire planet couldn't edit the text and therefore change what Darwin said. This type of use (misuse?) of public domain text is, for practical reasons, useless. It would be nice if there was a way to submit such text into a central repository, under our control, so that articles that need to can link to the text and the text will be at a stable IP, and be formatted and presented in a consistant way. However, this should not be a wiki (although there should be a way to edit the text for typos -- but that would require a formal review). This is probably something that would be better done on Nupedia. maveric149
- I'd agree in general (though it's not a universal view around here), but I would argue that there are some exceptions where the entire text of a primary source does belong here, where the material is a) short, and b) important. For instance, I would argue that the entirety of the US Declaration Of Independence is acceptable, as might be the text of Jabberwocky, or an image of the Mona Lisa. I would agree that there does need to be some way to lock such primary texts. Otherwise, while somebody should be storing important primary sources (and whilst cooperation with such projects is an excellent idea) I don't see that Wikipedia is the place for it.
My main exception to the copy/paste practice is the fact that primary sources of historical documents and other works should not be editable by the general public if those documents are being presented as the original text. I agree that short and highly relevent documents should be in an encyclopida -- It is just not possible to protect what the original authors said if the text is editable in the wiki way. It would be great, if we had a place to "upload" such text, link to it in an article, and have it displayed in a non-editable, text-box (all it would be in edit mode is the URL to the text file -- just as it now is with images). maveric149
Discussion copied from: Talk:Listing of noted atheists
Who cares about these people being atheists? I find it of little encyclopedic value to have this list around; same for the other lists of noted (religion x)s. These lists would only be useful if they contained people who are actively proclaiming their opinion on this topic, and are known for that. Not just a bunch of actors that happen to share some opinion. We might just as well make a list of noted people that have a hamster as a pet... jheijmans
I am tempted to agree. Does anybody want to argue the case for listing everyone who might happen to be an atheist here? --Robert Merkel
These types of lists aren't really useful. Although I wouldn't like to see lists of noted persons in certain professions go away. Religious affiliation seems peripheral in importance to me (but then, so does sexual orientation. See: Famous gay lesbian or bisexual people). --maveric149
I also would tend to agree; a listing of people whose atheistic beliefs are relevant to what they've accomplished in life and how they present themselves would be interesting, but a mish-mash of people who happen to be atheists and also happen to be somewhat famous? Maybe someone might like it, but I don't really care. (On the other hand, I'm not a militant atheist. The kind of people who want to see Christmas Day removed as a national holiday might think otherwise.) --Brion VIBBER
These lists are useful as an expression of support or community for minorities or out-groups. Many adolescents find these especially useful - "Gee, I always thought I was the only 'X'!"
I think these lists are a valuable service in this regard, and we can´t make any case against them that outweighs this value. Again - if you don't like these lists, don't read them! :-)
- I've made that exact same argument in the past, but these things are getting less and less useful.
- The debate is on whether we should list *all* 'X's, or whether we should restrict the list to people whose X'ism is part of the reason they are encyclopedia-worthy.For instance, Bob Hawke was agnostic, and worthy of an encyclopedia article here, but does he warrant an appearance on a list of noted agnostics? I would argue not. --Robert Merkel
I'd say this is pretty simple: People who like these lists can make them. People who don't like these lists can ignore them - it's not like the lists are hurting anything. I think we need to be very wary of judging what "we" consider to be "encyclopedia worthy". Personally, I'd remove all articles on video and computer games, rap music, US counties, and I'd seriously consider removing everything on professional sports. Fortunately, my opinion on these things isn't important. Live and let live. Work on the subjects you like. :-)
- Indeed. I'm certainly not arguing against the existence of the list, just for some judicial trimming to make it an interesting and informative list. Expressions of support for out-groups are lovely and wonderful, but they're advocacy, which isn't really the mission of an encyclopedia. All-inclusive lists of famous people who were/are/might have been atheists for the purpose of making dejected teenages feel better can be found in warmer, fuzzier places that are specifically pro-atheism -- [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] were the first five that came up in a google search for "famous atheists".
- Want to include some links to advocacy sites at the bottom of an article about people who are noted for being atheists? Fine by me! What to have "a partial list of persons believed to be atheists"? What's the point? --Brion VIBBER
The point is to have a partial list of persons believed to be atheists, of course! (what Wikipedia article can claim to be "complete"?) (and the same for lists of other types of persons 'X')(Though I'd like a slightly more rigorous standard than "believed to be")
Sturgeon's Law says "90% of everything is crap".
90% of Wikipedia is crap.
'However', one person's crap is another person's fertilizer. We do NOT all agree on *which* 90%! As I said above, I detest a lot of what I see on Wikipedia. However, I understand very well that *somebody* likes it (and "somebody" is generally at least several thousand people, I'd guess). I think when we work on Wikipedia, we should confine ourselves to 1)writing what we believe to be true 2)correcting what we believe to be false 3)making things more NPOV. I *don't* think we should be in the business of judging what others might find useful or interesting.
- To say "People who like these lists can make them. People who don't like these lists can ignore them." misses the point. The point is that no encyclopedia or almanac for that matter would simply list noted persons of any faith just because they happen to be a member of that faith (or anti-faith as in this case). This would be the true even if they were like wikipedia and did't have paper contraints; because such lists are inherently non-neutral propoganda designed to make other people with similar views feel good about themselves (and wikipedia is attempting to be a neutral encyclopedia that has some almanac type information -- such as valid lists of noted professionals who are famous because they advanced their profession). Think of the hideous hugeness a Christian list might become (or the inevitable controversy over who is "really" a Christian rubbish). Brion is right, if there is to be such as list it must be short and informative and, as Robert said, the people listed should be famous in relation to, at least, being X faith -- just because they were otherwise famous and a member of X faith doesn't count. The problem with having these lists is that they can never be said to be nearly complete, are oftentimes difficult to verify, many people change their faith several times during their lives and others only pretended to be faithful or are not considered to have belonged to a certain faith by some groups. In addition, having "Listing of X faith" encourages the creation of other such meaningless lists and brings down the average quality of wikipedia. I'm starting to see a strong consensus here that this page in its current form is not informative and should either be fixed or remain in the deletion queue for final review. I don't see any reason why this page shouldn't be copied over to the meta though. Hard drive space is cheap, but wikipedia's strived for reputation for NPOV content is a very important goal -- these faith and related lists are more proselytizing propoganda than anything else -- this also goes for Famous gay lesbian or bisexual people too (I'm both atheist and gay BTW). --maveric149
I agree that these lists should go. If there is any justification to keeping them, it would be only after they are trimmed down to include only people who are famous because of their affiliation. In other words, a list of famous atheists should only include people who contributed to atheism and are famous for doing so (Madeleine Murray O'Hare comes to mind). In that case, the list could be appended to the Atheism article. I feel the same way about the list of famous gay people, Jews, Prussians, Canadians, etc. Oh, and I am very much opposed to the list of "Beautiful Italians," which puts these lists to shame. Danny
End Listing of noted atheists discussion
Is it fair to say that the collection of pages on the Simpsons, Star Wars, Atlas Shrugged and the like violate convention #7 (on encomia/fan pages). I appreciate that some people consider these books/shows very important, or like them very, very much, but I hardly think that an encyclopedia is the place for such pages. While I think the question of what knowledge is relevant and important enough to warrant inclusion in Wikipedia is a difficult one, I think these pages clearly don't deserve inclusion; if the authors wish to create detailed pages on the Star Wars universe, they are perfectly capable of creating such pages in hundreds of other places around the Web.
Has this been discusssed elsewhere?
Graft 08:21 Jul 25, 2002 (PDT)
There appears to be a typo in item 9. The final phrase reads, "or significantly contributed too the list topic" (emphasis added). I believe it should read "to the list topic", i.e. change 'too' to 'to'. I would have boldy updated the page itself, but it appears to be a protected page.
Hope this helps, Jim DLH (who is not yet a Wikipedian, but may become one soon).
- Typo fixed. Locking of the help/documentation/policy pages is a bit controversial; to stimulate discussion, I've unprotected this one. --Brion 05:27 Sep 23, 2002 (UTC)