User talk:Dansalin1

Please stop adding nonsense to Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism. If you would like to experiment, use the sandbox. Thank you. Academic Challenger 06:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

It's all right. However, I still don't think that Ben Foster is notable enough for a Wikipedia article of his own. Instead, you should add information about him to the article about The Machine. Just because someone opposes something strongly does not make them notable. Academic Challenger 06:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Try reading Notability (people). I have read the article about The Machine, and I understand that it is an important local cause, but Ben doesnt deserve an article just for being involved in the controversy. Academic Challenger 07:13, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

It doesn't seem that we will agree on this issue. What will probably happen if you recreaet the article is that I or someone else will nominate for deletion and the community will take a 5-day vote on whether to include the article. It will probably be deleted, and the main argument will be that noone should have an article until they are actually prominent, because you will never know exactly who will become prominent. However, because there is so much dispute about this I won't speedily delete the article again. Academic Challenger 07:28, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree that people who lost campaigns can be very important, and I oppose moves by some people to delete some politicians who lost campaigns. However, I do feel that, if for example someone says they will run for governor in 20 years, we should actually wait until he has some sort of political office, business career or nationally notable incident happen to them. Many people claim to want to have political office. I'm also a college student and I have a friend who keeps saying that he's going to run for president of the United States. Wikipedia just cannot keep track of everyone who seems to have a bright future. Academic Challenger 08:17, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the concept of an encyclopedia is inherently elitist. Every encyclopedia in history has ha a major criteria for people to be included, and for nearly any other encyclopedia the criteria is much more strict than Wikipedia. Many other encyclopedias don't even have an article on the University of Alabama, and they would never dream of including losing gubernotorial candidates unless they were more famous for something else. Wikipedia has made a lot of progress in fixing this problem in my opinion. Of course we make some mistakes, but we are beginning to set our own criteria which will prevent the encyclopedia from being fflooded with articles about people whose activities are not notable enough for many people to know about. As for free speech, Wikipedia does no claim to be a place for free speech. Wikipedia is an international project which does not need to follow the American constitution. I agree that freedom of speech is desirable, and we allow a lot of it on user pages, and I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment in the United States, but it is not a good argument for keeping an article on Wikipedia. Academic Challenger 08:34, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

One reason that people are not allowed to write about the simple accomplishments of people they know is that, tragically, this ability has been abused. If you wander around the New Pages section for a few hours you are likely to see several people try to create articles which brutally attack people by saying "so and so is gay and doesn't have any friends." Or they make up grandiose accomplishments for people like "this person fought off the entire American army when he was 3 years old." Some people are more subtle and add things that actually could be true. Also we have several people a day claiming to be the coolest person in the history of the universe. This may make us more warry of certain types of new articles when we should be, but we have gotten into trouble over verifiability issues. In order for this problem to end there will indeed have to be a serious change in society which would make people not want to write lies in Wikipedia. Academic Challenger 08:55, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

So we're back online at the same time again. Is this Ben Foster radio personality the same person you were trying to write about last night? Academic Challenger 01:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)