

Wikiid: Can Wikipedia make a Wikipedia page notable enough to avoid deletion? - unalone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Diikiw/Wikiid

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henning
This reminds me of the old joke about induction in mathematics. Maybe it could
be adapted as follows:

Claim: Every Wikipedia page ever made is notable.

Proof: Suppose at least one Wikipedia page that is not notable exists. Choose
the one whose length in characters is smallest. Then surely this page is
notable for being the short non-notable Wikipedia page ever created, making it
quite notable, indeed. We have reached a contradiction and hence the proof is
complete.

Or something like that.

~~~
tpyo
Why does it have to the the shortest page? The logic is flawed.

~~~
henning
In the 'interesting number paradox' the smallest non-interesting number is
chosen. By convention every ordered set has a smallest element which is
arbitrarily chosen.

The logic is flawed for the main reason that partitioning sets in any non-
objective manner and then drawing conclusions from that is folly, which is the
point of such so-called paradoxes.

~~~
time_management
I tend to think of "interestingness" as a fuzzy property that is at or near 1
on the obviously interesting integers {0, 1, ...} and approaches 0 as N ->
infinity. But that obviously doesn't alter the fact that "interestingness" is
extremely subjective.

Another cool paradox is the one surrounding "the smallest positive integer
that cannot be expressed using twenty or fewer English words".

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dbul
This is reminiscent of Hofstadter's desire for a book of reviews of itself
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter#Columnist>).

Wikipedia tries to keep its integrity, but I think sometimes they need to be
more reasonable. Someone ought to create a complement to wikipedia which
allows people to add things like this and other non-spam articles which
wikipedia editors won't tolerate.

~~~
unalone
I guess not surprisingly, I attempted to write a book of reviews of itself
once. The idea still lingers in my mind, and I'd suspect that after a handful
of years I'll pull it out and finish it. (I think the idea will be to mark the
book as a "50th anniversary edition" of itself, and have the entire thing just
be a history of forwards to the book from various known literary critics,
documenting the critical reception of the book throughout history. It's a very
conceited idea.)

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dkokelley
Somehow, <http://xkcd.com/545/> and <http://xkcd.com/446/> seem appropriate to
mention here.

 _Hint: Check the alt text_

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critic
> It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.

I think this is more of a recursive humor than metahumor.

~~~
unalone
True, false classification. (Metahumor would be humor about humor.)

Well, it's a wiki page, so anybody can edit it and fix stuff like that.

~~~
donaq
Well, according to wikipedia, in which metahumor redirects to meta-joke:

 _Meta-joke refers to three somewhat different, but related categories: "self-
referential jokes", "jokes about jokes" (see meta-) also known as metahumor,
and "joke templates"._

Recursive humor would be a subclass of self-referential jokes, going by the
definition for self-referential jokes as given by (what else?) Wikipedia.

 _This kind of meta-joke is a joke in which the joke itself, or rather a
familiar class of jokes, is part of the joke._

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nicara
There should be a wiki page about the creation of the Wikiid page (which
apparently got deleted?). Surely that's relevant?

~~~
Angostura
Well there is:

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page>

~~~
unalone
Nah, it didn't catch it.

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unalone
Looks like a few people are vandalizing stuff - which is pretty awesome and
should definitely be added to the page's "history" at some point - but for a
reference point, the page looked like this when I submitted it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Diikiw/Wikiid...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Diikiw/Wikiid&oldid=251285005)

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mikeryan
Anyone can make a page notable enough to avoid deletion. Fill it with well
written, relevant and verifiable materials and its fine.

~~~
wmf
"Within Wikipedia, notability refers to whether or not a _topic_ merits its
own article." (emphasis added)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability>

Topics are notable; articles are not. If a topic is non-notable in the real
world, nothing written on Wikipedia should change that.

