User talk:Geo Swan/opinions/Six degress of article separation

Alright, here's the explanation. 1) Wikipedia's purpose is to be a NPOV online encyclopedia. This means a variety of things, but one important factor is what an encyclopedia is. It is not a directory of people, nor is it a repository for old news. It is an encyclopedia. To warrant a Wikipedia article, you must be notable. 2) This is where we seem to disagree - notability. The problem is, you seem to have a much looser definition of notability than I do. I consider notability to be a factor of enduring record. If someone survives a terrorist attack, a shooting, a natural disaster, or what have you - or dies in one - the sensationalist media is likely to eulogize them, write stories about them, ect. However, the key is whether or not these people will endure. The answer is, 99% of the time, no. Tens of thousands of such petty stories appear every year, but they are quickly forgotten. Why is this? The reason is that they were never notable in the first place - they were human interest stories, attempts to draw people in, but they weren't ever important and they're quickly forgotten.

Normally I put all my comments at the end. But since this is just you and I am going to stick my comments at the end of the paragraph it addresses.

Actually, I think "notability" is a flawed measure when evaluating where a topic merits coverage, at least for controversial topics, because it relies on very subjective judgment.

Time and again some article I have contributed to, related to the "war on terror", has been called NN -- based in the highly subjective POV of my correspondent. Sometimes, I am sorry to say, my correspondents wanted to suppress coverage of material that complied by WP:NOR, WP:VER, and I believe complied with WP:NPOV, because they simply didn't accept what the verifiable, authoritative souces I cited had to say.  :*A case in point is the enormous struggle I had a year ago with admirers of the Tablighi Jamaat movement.

• The continued detention of several dozen of the Guantanamo captives was based, at least in part, on an alleged association with the TJ movement.
• Admirers of the TJ movement wanted to suppress any mention of the allegations that the movement was tied to terrorism, because they, in their personal judgement, thought the allegations from counter-terrorism officials were ridiculous.
• Personally, I too thought the allegations from counter-terrorism officials were flimsy, were based on bad research and a lack of clear thinking. But I strongly disagreed that this meant that coverage of the allegations should be suppressed from the wikipedia. Rather, I thought that the allegations should be covered, in enough detail, for interested wikipedia readers, who found the pages, to make up their own mind as to whether the allegations were credible.

There was one influential wikipedia administrator, User:Zoe, who took the position that ALL Guantanamo captives were NN, and articles about them would merely be instances of "America-bashing".

I am going to jump ahead. You mentioned the bath school disaster -- interesting. I agree with you -- nothing leaps out to justify an individual article about any of the victims there. But I disagree that Clark, Praimnath or Orio Palmer are like the Bath School disasters. I believe their stories are fundamentally different from your Bath School victims. The experiences of Clark and Praimnath lie at the center of very important lessons to be drawn from the WTC attacks. Five thousand, or ten thousand building occupants got out basically uneventfully. Those thousands of survivors knew where the emergency exits were, and those exits worked as they had be designed. So, there is no reason to cover their experience in any detail at all. Clark and Praimnath, and possibly dozens or hundreds of other survivors experienced something out of the ordinary. Their accounts merit coverage

I don't understand why you don't find their experiences exceptional. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I am not simply making this up; this is established Wikipedia policy. Time and again, people have made junk articles about people who died in or survived a particular terrorist attack or school shooting or what have you, and time and again we've deleted them. The reason for this is, quite simply, that neither they nor their story are actually important. The event was important, but the narrative of minor bit players such as they are not. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter how they escaped/survived because it was not important; whether they lived or died was not notable to the world, and thus not to Wikipedia. Five years later, I can't recognize a single one of these names because I haven't seen them at all since 2002. This is a major indication that these people were not memorable. I remembered that people escaped via the one clear stairwell and such, but their names and stories are unimportant. This is not just me; the media doesn't care either. And neither does Wikipedia. Do other languages have articles about these people? The answer is no. Why is this?

I know I have reminded you of this a number of times already. WP:BIO is not a wikipedia policy.

You are repeating again that how survivors, presumably including Clark and Praimnath, escaped, was not meaningful. How Clark and Praimnath escaped is extremely significant.

I was first brought to the {{afd}} fora when an article I was working on was nominated for deletion. After participating there I looked around at other articles that were undergoing {{afd}}. I found some poor guy who had created a bunch of articles about stars. Several of his articles had been nominated for deletion by wikipedia whose argument was, basically, "I never heard of this topic before, so it must be not notable". If his critics had their way the wikipedia would have covered only the dozen or so stars that get mentioned on Star Trek, or earn other pop culture references.

You aren't advancing the same kind of "know-nothingism" are you? You don't think that just because you haven't heard of something that makes it not-notable, do you?

Have you read any of my argument against merging articles into omnibus "main articles"? If not I would really appreciate it if you were to do so. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The reason is that these people are not notable at all; they aren't important. These people uniformly appear on one Wiki - this one. This category of person is obviously not considered significant to people who speak other languages, yet they appear on the English Wikipedia. The reason for this is that the English Wikipedia has a severe tendency towards covering topics which are important to the propaganda of English-speaking countries and are eulogized by the highly sensationalist American media. However, these people aren't important. What this is is bias. Who these individuals are is, ultimately, completely unimportant unless they are otherwise notable, and even then it isn't all that notable.

You seem to be suggesting that, in order to counter Americo-centricism we should scale back the coverage of topics you consider related to America. I am not an American. I consider countering Americo-centricism important. But I think a better solution would be to remind those who want to suppress coverage of non-American topics that this is not solely an American project, and urge them to be more inlcusive. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Someone who self-publishes a book is not considered notable on that merit. Someone who survives a natural disaster is not notable on that merit. Someone who dies in a terrorist attack or a shooting is not notable on that merit. The reality is that these people's articles just aren't worth it. You may claim that it is not paper and we have effectively limitless space, but that's not true; what we have instead is the issue of relevancy which restricts space. Something which isn't independently notable isn't important at all, and shouldn't get an article. If for some reason some event is notable and involves them, AND what happened to them is important enough to warrant mention in that article, so be it. But if you're just some random, as pretty much all of the survivors of 9/11 were, then you shouldn't get an article. Random articles about nothing are bad because they lower the quality of Wikipedia and decrease the signal to noise ratio, which is a very bad thing.

I'll remind you now that Clark's testimony before the 911 Commission has been widely cited.

There was a Dutch film-maker, named Van Gogh, who was assassinated after directing a film about the status of women under Islam. I'll agree that random acts of murder are unfortunately so common that they don't merit coverage. But Van Gogh's murder wasn't an isolated act. It was one with powerful implications for a number of ongoing debates in the arena of public discourse. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The fundamental issue is that you're assuming that their story is important in the first place. The reality is that ALL that matters is that people from above the impact level survived and escaped. That is it. And that isn't even all that important anyway, given that 747s don't crash into buildings often.

No offense, but this is simply an unsupported assertion. It is your personal POV, which you are entitled to hold. But it is not a "fact". And our editorial decisions can't be based on our personal POV. No offense, but why shouldn't I see your assertion as being as blinkered and narrow-minded as those of the guys who want to remove coverage from the wikipedia all the stellar objects they had never heard of, just because they had never heard of them.

FWIW, none of the high-jacked jets were 747s. IIRC they were all smaller, more modern 757s and 767s.

I don't accept, for one minute, that the relative infrequency of airliners alliding with buildings make the details of this allision unimportant. Didn't I read on your user page that you are studying engineering? Ah, it is coming back k to me. Biomedical engineering, wasn't it? If you haven't done so I am going to suggest you take a look at the archives of the RISKS digest at http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/risks. As an engineer I am surprised you don't know that people devote their careers to studying how things fail. The stories of Clark, Praimnath and Palmer lie at the center of several aspects of how the WTC disaster plans failed. I know I keep repeating this, Perhaps you could explain why their particular stories are trivial, after all? Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

The problem with your idea is that, fundamentally, reality doesn't work that way, and under your vision, their articles shouldn't exist at all. Why? Because all they did was survive 9/11. It is a story, not an encyclopedia article. But look at evolution. Evolution is a HUGE topic, and the article on it needs to cover the basics of a lot of stuff. That means that the article is going to be large.

Evolution is a potentially huge topic. There are a vast multitude of ways a wikpedia, or a project like it, could address it. I haven't actually looked at the evolution article. It sounds, from your reference to it, that it is, currently a big omnibus article -- what you have referred to as a "main article". Does it point to articles like Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle, Darwin and Wallaces's observations, or reasonable equivalent? Would you dispute that the material in the existing article could be covered adequately if the main article was forked into inter-related pieces, like Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle.

Reality works that way too. Would a constellation of smaller, more focuussed articles serve readers as well as a large omnibus "main article"? Well, on one level, that comparison would require subjective editorial judgment. However, on another level, I have offered you various arguments as to why a hypertext, that usess bidirectional links, like the wikipedia, will be superior, if it employs more smaller, focussed articles. Even if the quality of writing were identical between two projects like the wikipedia, but one used smaller, focussed articles, and the other used large omnibus articles, the former would be superior to the latter, because the latter squanders the potential of bidirectional linking. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not meant to be a repisitory of all knowledge and information; it is a repository of all IMPORTANT knowledge and information. Praimnath, Clark, and Palmer are not important; 9/11 is important.

I am really sorry to keep repeating myself, but your repeated assertions that Praimnath, Clark and Palmer are not important remains, so far, your unsupported personal judgment. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Important? That requires a highly subjective judgment call.

Do you have a problem seeing the wikipedia try to be the repository of all the useful knowledge and information that can be covered, from a neutral point of view, while relying on verifiable, authoritative sources? Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

No, these people aren't important; they are less important than people who self-publish books, who at least did something; these people did nothing except survive, something we all do every day.

Sigh. No offense, but as I said above, this sounds like merely your unsupported personal judgment. Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

We don't have articles about a bunch of randoms who survived Pearl Harbor, and we shouldn't. We don't have articles about a bunch of randoms who survived Hiroshima, and we shouldn't. We don't have articles about a bunch of randoms who survived the Bath School disaster, and we shouldn't. Likewise, we shouldn't have a bunch of junk articles about completely non notable people who survived 9/11. If someone did something important other than survive, then maybe they're relevant. But simple survival, simple death, these aren't notable, and this is well established Wikipedia policy. Titanium Dragon 04:08, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

We don't have articles about random survivors, or random victims, of Pearl Harbor, or other similar events. I'll tak your word on that. And I will agree we shouldn't have articles that are mere memorial articles, where there is nothing remarkable about the subject. Let's tak a similar vent I know more about -- the sinking of the RMS Titanic. We do have articles about some survivors and some victims -- people about whom there are are other remarkable things to flesh out. Many of the Titanic survivors and victims were among the richest and most influential people of their time, and they would have merited coverage in the wikipedida without regard to whether they sailed in the Titanic J.P. Morgan for instance. Violet Jessup survived the sinking of the Titanic, and her two sister ships, the RMS Olympic na the RMS Britanic. You might dispute whether she merits coverage. But people are still writing about her experiences, ninety years later. So the wikipedia's users are likely to expect that the wikipedia will cover her.

Regarding Pearl Harbor, the recent movie featured Cuba Gooding playing Dorie Miller a mess attendant who manned an anti-aircraft gun, and was awarded a Navy Cross. The US Armed Services were segregated in WW2. Black men weren't trained for combat roles in 1941, just support roles, like mess attendants, truck drivers, and so on. So a black mess attendant manning an AA gun was remarkable, and His role was based on the experience. If you and I were having this discussion in 1942, it seems to me that you would be arguing that Miller didn't merit an article in the wikipedia. WP:NOT says wikipedia is not a crystal ball. You have stated that, with one exception, and the references to Clark and Praimnath date back to 2002. That is untrue. Their stories received signifcant coverage in 2007. I am sure you will find that their stories, and more importantly perhaps, the implications their stories have for disaster planning, will be written about again in September 2007.

Before I close, let me ask you whether you would argue that the article on Anne Frank should be deleted?

And let me ask you, if you are still interested in a dialogue, you could address my criticism of mergism more fully.

Cheers! Geo Swan 19:27, 9 August 2007 (UTC)