Talk:Robert Ward (MP)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Issues with Article Significance

I wonder why articles like this should be in Wikipedia.

1) If it wasn't that this person was elected to an office, nothing in the article reported about them would be significant enough to write about. I.e., this page would be immediately deleted if Robert Ward hadn't held office.

2) The authors of such Wiki articles are plainly copying (in some sentences practically verbatim) from sources which are largely almanacs, such as Leigh Rayment's Peerage Page and www.thepeerage.com.

3) The Wiki article adds no new information. The authors of the page don't evidence knowledge of the background of the politician. There's no presentation of the history events which surrounds his office.

4) Editing such articles, and checking them for factual content places a burden on Wiki editors. There should be some commensurate value for the effort. Here, it's not clear what that might be. I've been a Webmaster for a major company, in charge of the content. It would not be surprising if such an article such as this got no hits at all in a year — except perhaps those doing maintenance or users coming by accident.

These articles about politicians could be important, but now they tend to lack even the content that a university student of history would put in a book report.

24.6.67.7 12:42, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

You raise a good point. The article tells you little more than what could already be readily determined from Leigh Rayment's page. For that reason, when I write articles about politicians I make sure to say a lot more about them including the issues they campaigned for and their non-politicial work. However, the standard for Wikipedia is whether a person is notable, and it can reasonably be assumed that people elected to national Parliaments are notable.

We have been told that Wikipedia is not paper and there is no size restriction, so it does not really matter if no-one actually needs to refer to this article. I would say that what needs to be done is to expand the article rather than delete it. Sam Blacketer 12:47, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I was worried I was becoming a voice in the wilderness. Yes, the best approach would be to add more information to the article: I have a social historian's bias against trivializing an individual's contribution. Perhaps that's in part to what I'm responding — Robert Ward *must* have done something noteworthy!

24.6.67.7 13:39, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I left the following comment at User talk:24.6.67.7:

Hello. I know that it's a very short article with only basic information. If I had the sources I would expand on his career in parliament, his political views, what bills he tried to bring forward, et cetera although I doubt this would be very hard to even find in the UK. He was after all an MP at the time when Britain was a global super power as well as the member of one of the wealthiest landowning families in the country. Hopefully someone can expand this article in the future. To me the answer to the question whether we should have an article on the person with only this information or no article at all is easy. Wikipedia:stub is after all an important policy on Wikipedia, and it seems like you're questioning this.

In my mind articles like these are also what Wikipedia is very much about. In addition to articles on major topics we have room for more specialized topics that aren't found in other encyclopedias.

I also don't understand you comment regarding how many hits this would get every year. I am very well aware that this article won't be one of the most-read articles on Wikipedia or the internet as a whole but surely we shouldn't base our notablity guidelines on how many hits an article is likely to get. Tryde 14:46, 1 December 2007 (UTC)