User:Jerzy/Editing Space

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Nominator's args, point by point
    • Subpages
      "This page and its subpages purport to be a list of all people with articles in Wikipedia."
      • (Quibble) There are no subpages involved; the nominator intended to include
all the pages in the tree structure for which LoPbN is intended to function as the root.
They should also have included, logically,
_ _ the templates that provide lks to all the children-node pgs of a parent node;
_ _ the template-talk pgs that lightly automate the generation of markup for the templates just mentioned, and in effect provide hints about how to modify the currently effective generating-markup to generate markup for the next needed revision of the accompanying template page;
_ _ the templates that formerly provided lks to all the ancestor pages of children in the tree of a parent-node page, and to those ancestor-pgs' sibling-pgs in the tree;
_ _ probably dozens of templates that serve or served some role or other in the generating process just discussed, the one-per-tl-call formatting of LoPbN entries, or the (so far limited) semi-automatic cross-maintenance of both copies of groups of entries that are "polymorphic" (spelled, punctuated, or inverted differently) and "duplicates" (applying to one person who appears at two places in the alphabet).
--Jerzy•t 01:19, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
  • List of all Wikipedia bios
LoPbN-tree "purport[s] to be a list of all people with articles in Wikipedia."
  • What it purports is to be, like all WP articles, is a work in progress; what it does is aspire toward, approximate, and point the way to complete listing
  • Hopelessly outdated
    In [purporting to include all WP bios, LoPbN-tree pgs]'re hopelessly outdated ...
  • Like Thai art, LoPbN-tree currently does a dreadfully poor job of what it aspires to do, and needs more dedicated editing power than it currently gets, to be less dreadful. Neither should be deleted for falling short. I'm lousy at explicitly recruiting the dedicated editing power any article needs, but in many cases doesn't currently get, to be less dreadful. Despite that, List of people by name: Ru underwent an to 330% its former size late last month] (with the result that the Ru... names are now on descendant pages of it, which can be quickly found via the appropriate part of the exhaustive list.
  • Categories [don't] need manual upkeep
Unlike categories, [LoPbN-tree] need[s] manual upkeep.
  • Useful and some like it
"In previous discussions, it was kept on grounds that it's useful and that some people like it..."
  • _ _ The tone of this is dismissive, even tho they more explicitly argue that more useful and more likeable measures would be preferable. Please be aware that the nominator is accusing previous admins of neglect of duty, in claiming that the headings cited were the basis of the respective non-deletions.
_ _ WP:USEFUL applies to material that is arguably useful, but not encyclopedic. If usefulness has been argued, it was used in the same sense as "Redirects are useful". Like Rdrs, LoPbN is encyclopedic bcz it is useful in providing navigational aid to those seeking encyclopedic articles.
_ _ WP:ILIKEIT is likewise off target; it is about arguments for including topics bcz of the arguer's personal preference for the real-world entity that the article would cover, over its real-world competitors. If discussants like LoPbN (which is a navigational tool, not an article about something out there that is capable of being preferred), it is no closer to the subject of that passage than is liking one style of Dab page -- or a refactoring of a topic into separate articles for that matter -- better than its alternatives. It's good when discussants explain why they like it. (What's obvious in these cases is that they find it to do its job effectively; better they should go into what they job is and what about it enables it to do that job better and the evidence that it succeeds.) But unlike what the passage cited is about, their shortfall is not the injection of unencyclopedic criteria into a discussion about how to build the encyclopedia.
_ _ Mention of either of those two passages here is irrelevant, inaccurate, and offensive.
  • A lot better to offer than this
As indices go we really have a lot better to offer than this.
  • Like "unmaintainable" and "hopelessly outdated", these are opinions offered in lieu of any evidence, and are hard to distinguish from mere terms of abuse. Reasons have been previously offered as to what the go box, search and the Cat facility can't do as well. Countering those arguments with more than opinions and citations of the current imbalance of bio-finding resources and needs is needed to further this discussion.
  • Unwieldy
Wikipedia contains about 400,000 articles on people, making this list unwieldy at best and original research at worst.
  • I risk slipping into sarcasm, but not for long. You're right. This is a tough job. Let's chuck it and go do something easy, like making only short lists, and doing that really well. People get mentioned in all sorts of contexts that are odd to them, and its hard to know how to help them clarify them w/o imagining all the past and future contexts. But they are usually mentioned with at least one name (surname, for most of them), and usually you can tell the real people from the legends and fictions. "Notable historical person" is the only effective boundary we can restrict a tool to without leaving out a lot of cases that some users are likely to come up with. If you've seen and remembered the spelling of the whole name, you probably shouldn't use LoPbN to find the article, but what is your proposed solution for user's questions that we can't so easily serve as we can that specific case (whether it turns out to be the usual case or not). LoPbN could be better, but it's not useless, and may become better. (It's already a lot better than when a few of us started struggling with 50-Kb pages four years ago.) It may be that something smarter than a Cat but closer to a DBase can be still better, but if nothing else, LoPbN is going to be in the long run the test bench that clarifies for us what the better tool is going to have to face. Let's start talking specifics. I think that LoPbN is, for some needs that should not be ignored, far better than anything that's on our horizon; certainly than anything that's been proposed in this AfD.
  • All the nominator's arguments deserve to be addressed for the arguments' individual merits or demerits. Nevertheless, see my cmts under the bullet-hdg
    Nominator's args, point by point
specifically my citations of the explicit misinformation about Cat LP maint, & that which is implicit in citing WP:USEFUL and WP:ILIKEIT. In view of them, i hope the nominator is not being accorded the presumption of familiarity with the relevant issues, which one hopes nominators will deserve.