User:Pcw~enwiki/2005exercise

I'm giving the same assignment to my class this summer. If you weren't paying attention last year, some folks noticed the sudden flood of articles about Dartmouth and labeled it "Dartmouth spam". Now that the dust has settled, I can report that in the summer of 2004 the students contributed about 550-600 articles on various topics. Some were great and some were just quick hacks turned out to get some credit. But almost all of them should be a welcome answer to someone looking for information, any information, on the particular topic.

Some people have suggested that I encouraged them to violate one of the dozens of policies floating on a number of pages. This suggestion still confuses me. The student are, after all, just students and they wanted to write about what they thought was significant. In fact, the policy for School_and_university_projects specifically asks me to direct them to "write what they know." When they do that, some people were racing to delete their contributions. Some have suggested that I encourage the students to write more "notable" articles. Of course, notability is an old discussion at the Wikipedia. While I value the contributions of the editors and their efforts to focus the text, I can say that I'm a big fan of inclusiveness. If they think a topic is interesting enough to write about, then I'm not going to argue with them. They're from a different generation and like The Monkees, perhaps they've got something to say. To me, the word "notable" sounds like a code word that's used to marginalize some person or group. For instance, in the past, the accomplishments of the Negro Baseball leagues were kept out of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Why? Well, the polite people might have used the word "notable" to block them. The notable contributions were made by the folks in the real big leagues. I think the attitude at the Hall of Fame has changed and the historians there are doing the best they can to reconstruct the past. The biggest problem they have today is that no one stored the information because it wasn't notable.

Disk space is very cheap and time is expensive. If someone wants to build a page about some seemingly obscure part of their life, then I have no complaints. As long as an article isn't clogging up the namespace for someone else, I say "Keep". You never know when the knowledge might be useful in the future. Articles that might have no place in a paper encyclopedia might still be quite valuable for an electronic one. The rules for significance are really much different when the only cost is diskspace.

I'm curious about your thoughts and comments.

--Peter Wayner (pcw@flyzone.com)