I think you are all dancing around the real subject. Is wikipedia meant to help people have access to knowledge, to apportion access to knowledge, or to be a gate-keeper on which knowledge and at which rates do people have access to it?
On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 3:46 PM, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6 February 2013 13:06, Carcharoth <[email protected]> wrote: >> On 2/6/13, Charles Matthews <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not perishable, let's recall. >> >> Yeah. But that is a bit of a canard in some cases. It is a question of >> whether coverage endures and continues or peters out. i.e. Whether >> people/sources (the right sort) write about something over time, and >> in what manner. Coverage of something when it starts is very different >> to coverage after it is gone. The former is news, the latter starts to >> become history (whether a footnote or not). > > Yes, the point about reducing notability to "reliable sources" is that > making GNG depend on RS assumes we know what we are talking about in > RS. Which is questionable. So I cordially hate GNG. Precisely because > it takes more to write history of lasting value,, than journalism that > informs and sells, reducing things to RS is basically a bust. But, > absent a catchy replacement, it is what we are stuck with. Which is > exactly the status of notability, anyway. > >> >>> Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of WP's purposes is to host >>> such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to >>> footnote coverage. >> >> Ultimately everything becomes a footnote if you take the long view. >> With some things being more a footnote than others. Getting the >> balance right as something goes from having lots of coverage at >> inception, to either increasing or decreasing coverage thereafter is >> tricky, but an important consideration. >> >> It is something that I don't think those engaged in debates about >> notability consider enough, especially when considering that living >> people get coverage because they are living. Whether they get coverage >> when or after they are dead (which we won't know until that happens) >> *should* be a consideration, but often isn't. >> >> Sometimes when something comes to en end, new coverage will prompt >> updates here, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. It all results >> in a large mass of articles that are poorly maintained and look >> increasingly out of date as time goes by. > > Nothing at all wrong with footnotes, though. I once had a project to > go through the footnotes of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall". I had an > interesting hour with the first, on Jordanes, but got no further, > though it produced an article. > > Articles from 6 or 7 years ago are often essentially unimproved from > their early days. Now with much better online resources I often find > I'm improving a very stubby one from 2007. There isn't an actual > problem, though. in that I feel motivated now to do that improvement. > I think the right attitude is that it has taken longer than we thought > to start "eating our tail" and upgrade old stubs. To get back on > topic, if a stub really is on a notable topic, then there isn't much > of a problem. I'll agree that a certain kind of "transience" isn't > well expressed in basic policy. > > Charles > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
