OK, so then please explain the "usability" of [[List of externally visible
animal parts]] and why it deserves to be kept.
RickK
Mark Richards <marich712000(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Aha, perhaps something new in this debate - I like
this - is 'usability' something that we can agree on,
a perhaps move forward with?
Mark
--- "Eric B. and Rakim"
wrote:
An ironic thing
about schools vs species is that I
could write an
article about a species that has only ever been
observed by one
scientist, has only one paper about it in an
obscure journal, and
only one specimen in a jar somewhere, and yet no
one would dream of
deleting the article for non-notability (in fact
we
have a number
of such articles already), while an article about
the largest high
school in Cleveland would probably cause a furious
VfD debate. Is
the obscure species, which is of interest to maybe
a few dozen
specialists, really more notable than the high
school and its
thousands of students?
This is very interesting. I think it proves that the
notability criterium is
out of whack. It seems like when "the deletionists"
say "notability" of
information, they instead mean "usability" of
information. Because noone can
claim that one specimen of one species documented in
one academic journal is
more notable than any high school in Cleveland.
However, the information
about the specimen might well be more useful than
that about the school....
.... to biologists!
But not to anyone else. Is it so that the deletions
is a symptom of the fact
that many wikipedians see the target audience as
something else than many
other wikipedians see it? If we assume that
Wikipedia HAS a limited number
of target audiences, then I can understand that
people want to delete
factual, verifiable information. It doesn't make
sense to have an article
about a school in Cleveland if Wikipedia's target
audience is not
Clevelanders (or foreign exchange students..) It
also makes sense to delete
[[Melissa Doll]]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Doll if
Wikipedia's
target audience is not fans of Melissa Doll/people
interested in porn
actors.
And so on. So maybe Wikipedia's *only* target
audience is the target
audience that Encyclopaedia Brittanica has. But I
don't think so. I'm a
member of the community and I has a say in what goes
into Wikipedia too. So
does everyone else that has ever written something
in Wikipedia. We are all
authors and contributors.
For every article ever witten someone has thought "I
know this and I think
this is useful for someone else." Which means that
everything ever written
has passed someones test of usability. That doesn't
mean that it has to be
included in Wikipedia, but I think more thought
should be spent on that fact
than currently is.
To summarize. Don't delete articles because they
aren't "notable", delete
articles because they aren't usable. Delete
information about someones bank
account number because, while it might be verifiable
at an ATM machine, it
isn't usable to a large enough audience. Keep
information about Cleveland's
high schools because that information is usable to
thousands of students.
Delete information about some random street because
nothing interesting has
ever happened there. Keep information about US
President's dogs because
thousands of people do find that information useful.
-- Eric B. and Rakim
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN
Search!
http://search.msn.com/
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