[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Fri Nov 7 09:46:33 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:
> My main question is that it makes Wikipedia look ridiculous, and makes
> information harder to find.  If I search for "Michael Jordan" and get
> 4,000 results consisting of every person who has ever been named
> "Michael Jordan", that's *much* less useful than the current state, and
> a bit laughable.  Wikipedia is not a geneological database after all.

Hm, there seems to be two arguments on what makes Wikipedia look bad:
1. Junk, false info, random gibberish, poorly spelled types of entries
2. True but not terribly noteworthy entries.

I'd say #1 is an issue, but one that's less and less of one- there's a lot
of people that watch RC and keep an eye on what gets added... a lot of junk
pages I've seen are either old (often around the end of '02, IME) or very
very new... just new enough for me to see them before someone gets to them.

As for #2, I disagree that minor info really hurts us.

To respond to your example, [[Michael Jordan]] should have the header we use
for this sort of thing, which is something like ''This article is about
Michael Jordan, the basketball player. For others by this name, see
[[Michael Jordan (disambiguation)]].'' (I might be misquoting the standard
text, but you get the point.), and that article should come up first in a
search.

-- Jake