Talk:Folke Rydén

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Rydéns notability warrants a page in Swedish Wikipedia, but his relevance for an article in English is questionable. If anyone knows what he has done that is broadly known outside of Sweden, with proper sources given, please reference any such items!

A great number of articles have been submited by well-intentioned Swedes to English Wikipedia about people and particularly about details, which cannot reasonably be found relevant to readers outside of Sweden, the understanding and frames of reference within that country, its national culture and the ranks and listings of its domestically important celebrities. Cleaning up all that and trying to make some of the articles relevant and interesting to English Wikipedia (i.e. trying to make some sense of them in English) is an almost insurmountable chore.

The question in principle is: should Wikipedia be used to promote people from non-English-speaking countries by publishing large quantities of information about them in English that would not meet relevance criteria if the articles were about things that had been accomplished by Englishmen, Americans, Canadians, Australians, etc. in those non-English-speaking countries but were totally unknown in the English-speaking world? Are things that no one has ever heard of outside of Gambia, Palau, Mongolia, Liechtenstein or Uruguay relevant to EnW if they never will have any bearing on anyone outside of thse countries? The question is not for me to decide, just to pose.

This gentleman is also somewhat controversial for his many Swedish Television reports on the United States which Americans living in Sweden (there are about 10,000) have found ethnicly biased, i.e. overly anti-American in general, hurting the feelings of such viewers. That, of course, is no reason to delete the article, but if it is not relevant for English Wikipedia, plus the fact that his reports on America have been found offensive by many Americans, balanced and fair by none of them, the factor may have some bearing on this discussion. Or? EmilEikS (talk) 00:49, 15 November 2008 (UTC) EmilEikS (talk) 02:51, 15 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Folke Rydén probably meets criteria for notability on English wikipedia, but this article does not establish that with references. Maybe nothing else is written in English about Rydén, but external verification can also be by sources written in Swedish (WP:CSB). Criticism of Rydén's perceived biases can also be mentioned in the article, if there is a reliable source. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 08:00, 15 November 2008 (UTC)