User talk:Ryan Paddy

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[edit] Thanks for research on Spearhead LARP

Regarding this discussion on List of live action role-playing groups. Thanks for taking the time to assume good faith and do the research to back up notable items. It's more work than simply deleting content, but far better for Wikipedia. I sometimes feel like I'm spending as much time defending good content as adding content, and it can be discouraging. Indeed, I've basically given up on the list, as most LARP group coverage tends to be in small newspapers who don't have online archives visible to Google. It's good to know that other editors are like minded. — Alan De Smet | Talk 04:27, 25 October 2007 (UTC)

No worries. There's a fair amount of coverage of larp organisations in the mainstream media when you go looking for it, although some otherwise prominent groups do avoid being covered because of quite reasonable fear of poorly informed press, a subject I've written an article on. Definitely worth searching for media coverage though, and the groups' websites are often a good place to start as they sometimes have links to online articles about the group or scanned-in copies. --Ryan Paddy 20:19, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
You continue to be endlessly polite and rational. Thank you for all of your time. — Alan De Smet | Talk 23:36, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bicolline

Hello,

If you need any help in translating stuff from the news articles about Bicolline, just let me know. However, it may take some time as I'm very busy with my new boy who is just 10 days old... ;-). Don't hesitate to let me a note at my french talk page. Cordially, Boréal (talk) 16:46, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks mate, and congratulations. ;) I am working from Google translations of the French pages, which seem surprisingly good (I guess because the languages are so closely related). But I really appreciate your offer and will keep you in mind. --Ryan Paddy (talk) 20:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] re: Origin of the notability concept

Sorry, but I can't take credit for it. The idea predates my edit by rather a lot. For as long as I've been with the project, we had a page on the "criteria for inclusion of biographies". (The page has been moved several times.) That first version didn't use the word "notability" but did try to establish some useful rules of thumb that met the same ends. I wasn't very involved with creation of that page but did watch it and tried to apply it.

Someone then created a parallel page for businesses. Having some experience there, I did help with the crafting of that page. What we discovered on the predecessor to WP:CORP was that absolute standards of inclusion didn't work very well - that any objective measure of revenues, headcount, etc. made for a very poor proxy of our ability to predict whether adequate sources existed or that we would ever find enough interested and informed writers to keep the article neutral and free of advertising. (Bias was a particular risk for articles about companies because they could afford to pay marketing agencies to write purely favorable content.) We found, however, that we could write reasonably objective standards for sourcability.

Over time, we discovered that the WP:CORP "primary" criterion worked really well. And it fit perfectly with the core attribute of an encyclopedia as a tertiary source, synopsizing the works of others. If there are insufficient secondary sources to work from, that's a pretty good indicator that we shouldn't have an article on the topic. I did, at one point, start to advocate for a generalization of that concept back from WP:CORP to some of the other pages that talk about inclusion criteria and I think that it's worked well.

But I can't take credit for the concept of "notability" or even for the WP:CORP wording on sourcability. I built on the work of much smarter people. Rossami (talk) 12:59, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Your analogy to archeology was right on - in Wikipedia terms, you are talking ancient history. I remember that the concept was scattered across several different pages which were moved, merged, unmerged, moved, remerged and so on. And at the time, the WikiMedia software didn't automatically document pagemoves. You had to trust to the editor making the move to document it by hand. Here are a few more pages to check that I culled from my Watchlist but some of the documentation also occurred on people's Talk pages and some of the most important conversations evolved out of individual AfD (then VfD) discussions. Sorry I can't be more help. Rossami (talk) 02:18, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Come join the party

Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration#Allegations_of_state_terrorism_by_the_United_States Inclusionist (talk) 05:04, 13 May 2008 (UTC)