Saturday, November 03, 2007

Who is Frank Thompson, and why include them in Wikipedia

Frank Thompson features on the "List of mayors of Yarra". He is "blue linked" so there must be an article on him right? Clicking on the link gets me Frank Thompson who was a member of the house of Representatives. It is more or less easy to fix and I am sure that someone will.

For me it is interesting to see how Wikipedia deals with what is considered relevant. To me these people are irrelevant, both misters Thompson are no longer in office. But they are deemed to be noteworthy enough to link to where might be an article.

In a similar way there are articles about pop stars who had a single hit in 1962, there are articles about wide receivers that only played one season.. There is a lot of information that is of no importance and that is fine.

What astounds me is that when an article is written in the German and the English Wikipedia about Kotava, a constructed language, it is speedily deleted. When it is then indicated that this language is on route to be recognised in the ISO-639-3 code, the comment is speedy deleted. The article that was deleted was more then a stub, it cited sources and I did not write it.

I would love to understand why a mayor of Yarra, a 1962 pop star or a 1956 wide receiver are "relevant" and a language like Kotava is not.

Thanks,
GerardM

4 comments:

MovGP0 said...

Be careful about terms like "blue linked", because the color of political parties has not the same meaning in every country.

In my country, the "blues" (FPÖ) are a party that don't like foreigners and want to get them out of the country at any cost. They are the radical right-wing politics.

In the US the "blues" (Democratic Party) are the left-wing politics.


For the Kotava-Article I've made my comments at the german deletion review. I didn't got an answer yet and it can take a while. The german speaking peoples are very fast at deleting articles, but it may take a week to restore the article.

llywrch said...

I'm also puzzled about this randomness. On one hand, I'd say this is an inevitable result of cases close to the edge of notability: call it a fractal effect, quantum tunnelling, or something like that. (Someone who knows their mathematics would doubtlessly have a better term for how the presence of an edge affects sorting items to either side.)

On the other, I've peaked into the dynamics of Articles for Discussion/Deletion enough times recently to know that some days the discussion there is appalling. People quoting policy by acronymns, but without any proof that they actually understand that policy. People attempting to keep articles by the "last asshole standing" rule -- scream & kick enough until people let you have way.

If I ever figure out exactly what is going on, I'll propose my own solution. Until then, I'd have to say that obtaining an ISO-639-3 identifier ought to be a reasonable proof of notability: someone will see that entry & want to know what that language is.

Geoff

blog author said...

MovGP0: "Blue-linked" refers to the color of the link I believe, not the party. That is, blue link vs. red link (WP:RED). ^^

Lea

Anonymous said...

The reason is this: Wikipedia has no real standards, the people who run it are ignorant and stupid and proud of it!, and the operation is run like a street gang.

Things are approved if written by one of the clique, and deleted otherwise.

The operation should be shut down and the people associated with it should have to endure lectures on why they have done wrong, until they break.