[HnNoPassMailer]

Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).

[felipemnoa]

>>Everyone should have a wikipedia page

Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.

[HnNoPassMailer]

I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages, while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.

[wpietri]

It's an interesting notion, and Wikipedia used to be more like that, but Wikipedia has gone the other way for a lot of good reasons, including fairness to both readers and subjects.

Readers are poorly served by a one-line biography for somebody obscure, and even more poorly served by the typical marginal biography, which is a couple paragraphs of poorly written cruft sans citations.

Subjects are poorly served by shaky biographies because suddenly the top search result is a couple of semi-random sentences covering the few things that happen to be verifiable about them.

For example, when you search for my mom's name, the top result is her obituary. I carefully wrote it in consultation with the family to give a balanced view of her life, so I'm happy to see it there. But suppose there were a Wikipedia article about her. If you went and pulled all her public records, I think you'd get a) her birthdate, b) her bankruptcy, c) her real estate broker's license, and d) the times she was the victim of a crime. I would hate it if she had an article in Wikipedia, because nothing that really matters about her life would be a part of it, and if I tried to put it in I'd (correctly) get [citation needed].

[felipemnoa]

I get what you are saying but I still rather your teacher gets a page in a different site (Facebook is perfect for that, create your own group) if she doesn't have much notoriety (startup idea?).

But you probably don't want Facebook because it just doesn't have the same status that Wikipedia has, right? (i.e. Most Facebook pages are junk) Wikipedia did not achieve a high status by letting somebody's teacher have a page (No snark intended), and there lies the rub.

If Wikipedia lowers their standards then that means that your teacher will get her page along with a lot of spammers. Right now Wikipedia is quite good, if they open the gates the spammers will ruin it.

[ultrasaurus]

Wouldn't the pagerank algorithm work as a first pas for notability? I can guarantee that more (and more important) wiki pages will link to Turing's page than mine.

There would still be policing, but now it's of the form "This article on Bletchley Park shouldn't link to this random guy's page" which is more objective than giving me a notability score.

[ricky_rozay]

I like the idea of using some mechanism like the pagerank algorithm for notability but i worry that those random almost-obscure/niche academic subjects may not pass it. When i was in college i found that wikipedia was really helpful for getting background/links to certain lesser-known topics that would pop up in reading assignments...i haven't contributed much to wikipedia however so i don't know how they determine notability of those types of pages