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What to do with entries related to September 11 casualties

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The September 11 memorial wiki hasn't seen much activity, and there are still a lot of pages here in the main Wikipedia which IMO don't really belong in a general-purpose encyclopedia. The following is a list of articles on Wikipedia which, in my opinion, should be moved over to the memorial wiki. --en:User:Bryan Derksen

Here's my two cents. If the entries are not (or cannot be) informational but are instead explicitly tribute-minded and memorializing, they should be moved to the memorial wiki.

If they are informational, they should remain in Wikipedia. A benefit of the Web is that there is no limit on space; the editors of a dead-tree general encyclopedia have to worry about whether something is "encyclopedic" (an empty word if there ever was one); we do not.

We need to worry about whether something is Wikipedic. What does that mean? It means:

  • the entry title needs to be specific and meaningful, so that
  • the content can tend towards comprehensive information that can be backed up by other sources if necessary (aka tend toward NPOV)
  • the entries should be well interlinked and organized.

and that's about it. In fact, Wikipedia should include just about everything that satisfies those conditions. Thus, while it's absolutely marvelous that Bryan decided to make a page listing September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack pages, and that other people are jumping on the bandwagon, the belief that they don't fit the Wikipedia mission is misguided.

Think about it: Martin below is recommending moving en:Cantor Fitzgerald off of Wikipedia. That makes no sense.

It's true that I've spent months of work into these pages, so I have a personal interest here, but again, the better goal is to make each entry correct and comprehensive, not eliminate knowledge from Wikipedia.

Try picking one of the casualties and writing a Wikipedia entry on that person. Or pick someone who's died in some other historically significant event, for whom you can find enough information to write a useful entry, and do so.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'd feel better if I saw those who want to edit away this kind of information try their hands at contributing that kind of information first.

--The Cunctator

Why would I want to contribute content to wikipedia that I don't think is wikipedic? :-/

It's a long list of articles. Some of them, by fallible humanity, are going to be unwisely listed. If you're feeling up to it, drop comments by a selection of them to say whether they should be, in your view, moved or not. MyRedDice

I'm quite peeved that, once you knew that I didn't want you to do it, you started changing all the entries.

Not only that, you've done it in a poor fashion. If the right thing to do were to redirect nearly all the content relating to casualties to sep11, the correct way to do that would not be to redirect entries to the casualties page.

One of the most important things, I believe, of these entries, is their edit history. Copying things over to sep11 destroys that information. We can, however, do backend stuff that preserves those edit histories, as was done for the pages originally put on the sep11 wiki.

--The Cunctator

I agree that the edit histories are very important and are vital to the entries. But that information can be merged in later after all the entries are move to the sep11 wiki and the corresponding Wikipedia page names are cross wiki redirected to the entries' new homes. --Maveric149
Brion Vibber mentioned that he'd do this, and that he was only waiting on this list to get started. Brion, could you start moving these articles over now? You might want to start with all those ones which got moved and then were restored by Cunctator back on the english wiki, before any inconsistencies develop between the duplicated articles.
I'm getting a segfault in mysqldump, and I don't have time to diagnose it right now. I'll try another way later... --Brion VIBBER 21:26 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)
Ok, I certainly do cross-wiki redirects if people would prefer. That's no hassle. I thought they might be frowned upon because of certain side-effects, such as reversion difficulty, but I'm happy to be corrected. :) MyRedDice
en:User:MyRedDice/PagesToMove is a list of all those pages where Cunctator has agreed to the move (explicitly or implicitly), and therefore the histories can be uncontroversially moved across and sources deleted. All the moves I tried to make are marked in the list below. Note that some of these pages originally resided on meta (in these cases I've blanked out the equivalent meta article). MyRedDice


The casualties list:

People from the casualties list whose only claim to fame appears to have been being in the wrong place at the wrong time:

Regarding casualties, I think it might be interesting to have a list of notable or famous Sep 11 victims. When you went through the list of casualties did you also create a list of casualties who had a claim to fame besides dying suddenly?

I think should be moved

Martin

I thought of doing that when I was about halfway done the list, after already skipping a few. I will go back through the complete casualty list and fix my oversight tomorrow at some point. Bryan

What i started doing, tehn stopped as i thought it would get out of had was Titanic casulties. i mean you cant jsut have 1 disaster and no otherone as tahst nto NPOV in my opinion.

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