Joho the Blog
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July 05, 2007
There's a fascinating discussion at Wikipedia about whether lists of loosely associated items should be kept or deleted. in this particular case, a list of song titles that contain first names was deleted. I don't feel I have standing to have an opinion -- this is a discussion among people who spend a good chunk of their lives building and maintaining Wikipedia -- but (nevertheless) I do tend to favor including articles rather than deleting them. Wiki is not paper. As you'll see in the discussion, there are lots of criteria at play, but some of the arguments for deleting such lists seem to me to be based on a desire to keep Wikipedia dignified. That argument I don't buy. Other criteria adduced for deleting "silly" lists are far stronger. And in the discussion you get to see Wikipedia continuing to figure itself out through a process of suggesting criteria, interpreting settled criteria, appeals to precedent, and personal persuasion. [Tags: wikipedia encyclopedias everything+is+miscellaneous lists ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 5, 2007 08:08 AM
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Comments
How about a reverse Turing test?
If the candidate Wikipedia article could be trivially generated by computer (without the use of neural networks) then classify it as 'trivia', which could simply be a filterable ranking (and people could filter Wikipedia accordingly).
So, articles listing the semantically well formed anagrammatic words or phrases from the topic heading would be classed as trivia. So too, the intersection of classes of item, e.g. 'Song Titles 'and 'First Names', or 'Birthdates of Famous People' and 'A Specific Date', etc.
Some of these could be more interesting/constructive than others, but then notability should distinguish.
Posted by: Crosbie Fitch | July 5, 2007 09:25 AM
I created a wikipedia entry for the OpenLearn project, only to have it removed because it was `not relevant enough'. Pretty tough I thought!
Posted by: stuart brown | July 5, 2007 10:21 AM
Funny, but I actually needed to use the Wikipedia list of song titles that contain first names. There are a few songs which contain my daughter's name Georgia, but my younger son Jay was getting upset.
Searching for "Jay" songs on Google ain't easy. At least the Wikipedia list gave me hope!! So who is anyone to judge if a list is relevant or not!
Posted by: Tony Goodson | July 5, 2007 07:34 PM
The reverse Turing test for 'trivia' could work, but with modification. It is not enough to say a computer 'could' a generate the information. It should be able to using the current software at the site in question. Wikipedia exists for the sake of the general public. We cannot expect users to download the database and write code so that they can find the information they are looking for!
Posted by: Samuel Wantman | July 6, 2007 04:10 AM
I don't feel I have standing to have an opinion
Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia any one of us can edit!
Posted by: Phil Edwards | July 9, 2007 05:34 AM
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