On 5/28/02 8:00 PM, "lcrocker(a)nupedia.com" <lcrocker(a)nupedia.com> wrote:
I don't
know anything about Max and so I don't know whether he
deserves an article, but the underlying question is important and
interesting: should anything that somebody bothered to write up be
accepted into Wikipedia, assuming it is NPOV?
I say no. The item has to be of relevance in some way...
I was inclined to agree, and I definitely think there are topics
that don't belong in an encyclopedia. But if we do implement some
approval system, especially a multiple-valued one such as I suggested
earlier today, I like Jimbo's suggestion of making relvance one of
the approval criteria. If that's done, then there's really little
reason not to allow reasonable articles on anything and anyone, and
simply consider them potential articles (which might get promoted
to "relevant" status if, say, Jimbo's mom gets elected to congress or
something).
One of the nice things about the fact that we're building a hyperlinked site
is that we, the individual human contributors, don't have to worry or even
think at all about the question of relevance. The system will deal with
that. All we have to worry about is article quality.
Not only is there really little reason not to allow reasonable articles on
anything and anyone in the current system, without any other features, but
there are major reasons for not instituting hard systems of approval.
If someone cares enough about a topic or a person to write a Wikipedia-style
entry for that person, and can plausibly link to that topic from some other
entry, then that, in my opinion, should be the end of discussion about
whether such entry "deserves" to be in Wikipedia.
--tc