Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 17:43, 29 January 2004

This page is designed to host polls on deletion issues that span multiple articles.

Polls

Should lack of fame or importance be a legitimate reason to delete an article ?

Yes

• Angela
• Imran
• Archivist
• Tempshill
• Jiang
• JeLuF
• Maximus Rex
• Dori
• Secretlondon - although needs quantifying
• Wiwaxia
• Darkelf — but agreed with Secretlondon in that this needs some quantifying.
• Sean 23:21, 25 Jan 2004 (UTC)
• Tuf-Kat
• Kokiri
• Muriel - if not it would be unleashing hell
• Fennec - though it should not, of course, be the only criterion. If there are other reasons to delete as well, that would be better.
• Tompagenet - with common-sense (sic) applied to each case
• Bmills - but not on a simple Google hit count, please.
• UtherSRG
• Jimbo Wales - but see my NO vote as well! This vote is a token of expression of concern for the real issues that users in favor of this rule are raising, while my no vote below is an expression of where I think the real solution lies.

No

• Jimbo Wales - 'fame' and 'importance' are not the right words to use, they are merely rough approximations to what we're really interested in, which is verifiability and NPOV. I understand and appreciate where people are coming from on the 'Yes' vote, but feel that they will only get the unanimity necessary in a wiki environment if they rephrase the issue in those terms. Consider an obscure scientific concept, 'Qubit Field Theory' -- 24 hits on google. I'd say that not more than a few thousand people in the world have heard of it, and not more than a few dozen understand it. (I certainly don't.) It is not famous and it is arguably not important, but I think that no one would serious question that it is valid material for an encyclopedia. What is it that makes this encyclopedic? It is that it is information which is verifiable and which can be easily presented in an NPOV fashion. (Though perhaps only as a stub, of course, since it's very complicated and not many people would know how to express it clearly in layperson's terms.)

• Anthony DiPierro - Misplaced Pages is not paper.

• Jack 09:40, 28 Jan 2004 (UTC) - "me too!"... really tho, you can see a debate on this on my user talk. deletionism is anti-wiki

• --denny vrandečić 17:11, Jan 28, 2004 (UTC) - too much material about too much is not really that bad, methinks

• tb - Maybe it's just the wording. I'm not really worried about deletion of "vanity articles", but I hope this doesn't lead to the deletion of non-famous and not very important towns, cultures, languages and other information. (Which I'm sure it's not intended to do, i don't mean to sound paranoid!) But I don't see too much wrong with an article about an obscure school, as long as they don't modify other pages inappropriately to link to it.

• Lizard King 11:30, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC) - Who gets to decide what is famous and significant? The Deletionist Armada, that's who. The object of this poll is completely ridiculous and, in principle, contradicts the very spirit of Misplaced Pages. If this poll is taken seriously it will give envious little gremlins with too much time on thier hands the excuse to destroy 30 to 70 percent of the entries on Misplaced Pages. Further, it just seems like this is clever way for some people to get more leverage on deleting the pages of wiki users they have a beef with, and that is basically it. So I guess you are saying you can have an article on Superman, but not on Krypton the wonderdog, because he is not as famous. What appeals to me about Misplaced Pages in the first place is that you can potentially find information on virtually anything. If you give editors on here the power to arbitrarilly delete entries because they don't think they are important they will abuse that power.

• Seth Ilys - "Importance" or "fame" are subjective criteria. My two (personal) criteria for inclusion of biographies, are 1) verifiability of information -- can someone who doesn't know the individual verify the facts (all the more reason to get a workable citation system up ASAP), and 2) linkability -- are they linked to (or could they reasonably be linked to) in a non-biographical article, excluding lists (which suggests that we also have a long way to go in creating non-bio articles). The non-policy at Misplaced Pages:Criteria for inclusion of biographies roughly suggests to me that one out of a thousand individuals are ultimately deserving of inclusion in Misplaced Pages. That sounds about right to me.

• ScifiterX ScifiterX More information is always better in my opinion. I agree that importance and fame are subjective. I also feel that deleting information is not only anti-wiki, it is contrary to the spirit if the First Admendment. I have the right to speak my mind. Others have the right to disagree with me. No one has the right to make it so others can't speak their minds.
  • Two points; a) Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia not a forum for 'speaking your mind' and b) the first amendment to the Constitution of Ireland extended to conflicts in which the State is not a participant the provision for a state of emergency to secure the public safety and preservation of the State in time of war or armed rebellion. Is this what you had in mind or do you imagine that the writ og the US constitution runs everywhere? Bmills 15:22, 29 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Why?

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 Misplaced Pages:Polling guidelines:

Misplaced Pages is not a democracy. In general decisions are made by consensus (see consensus decision making) rather than a strict majority rule. However, on occasion it is useful to take a poll of opinions on some issue, as an aid to achieving consensus and an indication of which options have the most support.

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 Misplaced Pages 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)

On vfd the argument comes up several times a week whether any topic at all can be included in[REDACTED] or if criteria including fame/importance should be used. This isn't an issue where a "compromise" can be reached because it depends on the fundamental belief of the individual on what[REDACTED] is or should be. The primary purpose of this poll is so that when someone uses this arguement they can be pointed at this page and see what the majority of wikipedians believe at that time. --Imran 01:48, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Well, we'll never know if a consensus (nicer than a "compromise"...?) can be reached unless we try! Setting up a system whereby the community is forced to polarise itself into two diametrically opposed camps is not helpful. If we're just blindly pulling in opposite directions, we'll never get anywhere. Let's at least pretend to be rational people here. Even if it's not true, it's a good game. What happens is, we put forward arguments for our positions, and other people argue against them, and eventually someone persuades someone of something, and we all move a step closer to enlightenment. Hurrah!

I'm certainly willing to listen to arguments as to why it would be a Good Thing to exclude information from our encyclopaedia on topics that are not well known. As I say, if there are any such arguments... -- Oliver P. 04:13, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Several people wanted criteria for how famous one has to be. When I decide my opinions on subjects, I consider Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages. 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)

My opinion

1. Non-famous subjects in Misplaced Pages 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. Misplaced Pages has a "random page" generator. It is already the case that something like 1 in 5 articles in Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages 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 Misplaced Pages with its current organisation could possibly be improved by large numbers of articles about very obscure subjects. Onebyone 22:38, 26 Jan 2004 (UTC)