[WikiEN-l] Re: Selecting content of print version

Thu Mar 4 21:50:43 UTC 2004

It could be a straw man argument except that it is what was proposed and how it was being used.

If people stop using it to help select which articles to include, so the Wikipedia no longer uses and incorporates the Columbia selection, it won't be a problem. Using it to see whether the Wikipedia has coverage of something is fine - it's creating coverage based on not having it that is not.

I know that you didn't propose these things. If people had stuck to what you had suggested, there would have been nothing to worry about.

Ed wrote:

I would like to have a page of article titles which (a) Columbia Concise has but (b) Wikipedia doesn't. It would stimulate us to find existing
articles or to write new articles. 

(user_Jamesday: Ed proposing using the Columbia article selection to select articles to produce; Timwi responded by creating the list)

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Timwi wrote:

I have just made four edits; rather, created four new pages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Aakjaer%2C_Jeppe&action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Aalto%2C_Alvar&action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Abano%2C_Pietro_d%27&action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Abbado%2C_Claudio&action=history

I'm creating these redirects as they are titles used in the Columbia 
encyclopedia, and they have an obvious correspondence to a topic in the 
English Wikipedia.

(user_Jamesday: those were the start of a process of creating those redirects automatically because they were in the Columbia Encyclopedia - I think it was stopped by someone applying a two minute block to the robot because it wasn't following the robots policy)

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Ed wrote:

Okay, I wrote a few stubs, made a bunch of redirects. See St - Ta. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Columbia_Encyclopedia_article_titles_(38)

(user:Jamesday: Ed using them to insert redirects into the Wikipedia based on the Columbia selection)

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>>
> > Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some
> other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping
> Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest.
> 
> It's a fair point,

It would be a fair point, if it weren't a complete and total straw man argument. No one has suggested that we do any such thing, and I have spoken against it several times. <<