[WikiEN-l] Trivia and popular culture sections

Sun Feb 26 21:03:57 UTC 2006

On Sun, 26 Feb 2006 12:35:01 -0700, you wrote:

>A lot of Hooke's research would probably fit in better with articles 
>about the _research_ rather than about the _man_, so if you were to 
>write an article covering all of that I expect it would also shed pieces 
>into those topics as well. That's still a net gain for Wikipedia, so 
>again no reason not to go ahead and write it.

Don't get me wrong - I think Hooke's *research* is a titanic
achievement, he was probably the greatest experimenter of his age, and
that was probably the golden age of the experimenter.  But much of the
verifiable detail is things like "Mr Hooke was asked about the
progress of the lenses, and stated that they required further
polishing but would be ready soon" or words to that effect.

I guess what I'm saying here is that not all that is verifiable, is
significant - even if we are not paper.  I don't think this is really
a particularly contentious view; in practice what is written on any
subject is only ever a tiny fraction of what *could* be written.  But
I have many subtexts here, not least of which is things like the
article Eep has now been deleted and re-created no less than six
times, centring on the fact that it is one of the words contained in
(but not part of the title of) a song which appears in one episode of
The Jetsons.  Not that I'm against covering popular culture, but the
effort expended can vary in inverse proportion to any objective
measure of merit.

Ho hum.  I have an article to write.  I will try to include at least
one piece of trivial information, I'm sure it will do me good.
Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG