Although notability is not temporary in theory, Wikipedia has always (and probably always will) suffer from presentism. Things that are important today get a disproportionate amount of attention. It is maybe easier to evaluate something's historical notability with the benefit of hindsight.
That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.
> I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.
Well, think about it this way. I go to Wikipedia, create a page about myself and bits are cheap so nobody cares. There's nothing published about me, so none of the information there is reliable, but nobody's going to read it anyway, so nobody cares. Then I click over to Michael Jackson's page, scroll down to the "cultural influence" section and chime in that...
* [[C Dwyer]] is a big fan of and has been heavily influenced in his daily life by Jackson. He was really sad when Jackson died. [http://caseysite.com/blog/i-love-mj]
Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him?
Clearly, there's a point where this becomes ridiculous. Notability has to be resolved sooner or later, so why not resolve it from the start? What makes Wikipedia intriguing is that articles can be interlinked to expand on and enhance each other. If an article cannot benefit other articles, much less does more harm than good, why include it?
I'm not a Wikipedia editor nor much of a Wikipedia user and I don't personally care how they conduct their business. If I were in charge of maintaining the integrity of something like Wikipedia, however, let's just say it would focus a whole lot more on quality than quantity than it currently does.
Would I include an article about Randal L. Schwartz in a general purpose encyclopedia? No. Would I include it in an encyclopedia about computer history and computer science? No. An encyclopedia about the history of Perl? Maybe a footnote.
If you're not interested in how the lives of human beings create history, then please write about natural history (e.g., physics, chemistry, geology, zoology), not human history. Perl, as software, may instantiate a mathematical ideal, but a history of Perl must talk about its connection to a community of programmers, and Mr. Schwartz is most certainly a leading light of that community.
Nothing I said was meant to be taken personally, so please stop with the ad hominems. I apologize if I offended you. I didn't mean to imply that your life and work are not important. I just don't feel like every single biography is worthy of ``the sum of human knowledge'', even if that person's work is. I guess that's not a fashionable opinion to have in the post-Twitter era, especially on a website where people submit their .vimrc files as potential ``hacker news'', but it is my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
It's not about being taking personally. It's just a fact: I wrote (with Larry Wall) the first book about Perl. And then the second book about Perl, which became the seminal teaching guide. If that doesn't deserve a note in the Perl history, you're confused.
Yes, but you would mention "The Camel Book", by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, right? Or that the capitalization "Perl" was coined by Randal (or so Wikipedia's Perl page claims)? And the "Schwartzian Transform" is kind of famous.
> Bits are cheap right? All the world's information is important. Why should anybody reading about Michael Jackson be deprived of my opinion about him?
This is a pretty naïve argument.
Take, for example, the recent brouhaha about Sarah Palin and her comments about Paul Revere. Barring a future where the comments have massively effected misconceptions in the common perception of Paul Revere (let's say, on the order of Columbus's voyage and the flat earth myth), there's basically no grounds for arguing that Palin's comments should be mentioned in the Revere article. But they absolutely are deemed appropriate for the Palin article.
Well there are certainly different degrees of ``inclusionism'' but I have read plenty argue that absolutely nothing is too trivial for Wikipedia. I don't care who's wrong or right, but given the standard the Foundation is attempting to set for themselves, it's clear to me why ``deletionism'' rules.
That said, I never really understood the effort to purge Wikipedia of vanity pages and the like.