Talk:Sir Mildred Pierce

Hi 209.112.170.183. I know the novel and the film Mildred Pierce but I've never come across Sir Mildred Pierce -- sounds interesting though. As you may have realized, Wikipedia articles are usually written in complete sentences. Would you like to do that yourself? I'd rather you did because otherwise someone as ignorant as me might add things which are not quite true. KF 01:12 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

Is "Sir" a title or part of the name? And who or what is "76"? There's a problem linking to 76, because 76 is a year page. -- Tarquin 10:15 Feb 6, 2003 (UTC)

I don't want to seem like a spoilsport, but is this person really "worthy" (or however you want to put it) of a Wikipedia article? As far as I can make out, this person doesn't have any sort of fame, even in the "internet-music community" (whatever that is). If his notability extends no further than releasing some free mp3s on the net, then I don't think that's enough - thousands of people have done that. I suspect that this is self-promotion (though that's terribly cynical of me, I know). Do we actually have any solid guidelines as to what is suitable subject matter for the 'pedia? --Camembert

It wouldn't be the first time people have used this forum to publicise themselves, would it? (I'm particularly thinking of a certain person who's recently left and whose name I'd prefer not to mention.) If it's just the contributor under another name, I'd suggest that his "User" page is the best place to do it. That's where I do it. Deb 15:33 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

What is worthy of inclusion; how much can the server cope with? If every tiny village of the USA is worthy, why not every person? Who can decide that somebody else is not worthy? -( 15:40 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

A more important point is that it is not possible to write from an NPOV for an unknown person. Facts can not be easily, if at all, checked. Encyclopedia's are also the summary of human knowledge. The towns were easy and the facts were available and confirmable - so the rambot made the articles. Wikipedia is not a phone book, genealogical database, or personal homepage - people need to have done something worth noting. Something that has expanded human knowledge. Places are less of a problem since any one place has been around since before history - there is much to cover there (geology, ecology, human settlement and history etc).This isn't, BTW, the first time this has come up. --mav

True, but the criteria are interesting: a town can be checked, but on the other hand there may be nothing about it worth noting. Likewise, the existence of a person can be easily confirmed in many cases, e.g., by a phone book or a genealogical database, so this doesn't seem like a decisive factor. I think it's fair enough that any fact added should have a published reference somewhere, but in wikipedia this is impossible to enforce: e.g., a random fact added by somebody about their home town. -(

Yes - in a wiki things like that do pass-by - for a while. But somebody will see the inserted error sooner or later. But the more obscure the subject the more likely that this fact may not be checked for a very long time - if ever. All we can do then is reduce the submit rate of the types of articles we don't want. And we don't want articles on every person -- naming conventions are hard enough to deal with when we only have to worry about maybe 1% of all humans who ever lived (that still means many tens of millions - so we need to wrtie articles on all those people first - then we can rethink whether or not we should expand the net). --mav

Thinking about it some more, the published reference idea is good. After all, an encyclopedia is just a summary and pointer to information that can be found elsewhere. But the publication needs to be a good one: a printed publication that can be found in many libraries, (or better yet, reprinted on the net) or a web page that's going to persist for more than 10 minutes. Information based on an external link that no longer exists may as well be deleted. -( 16:30 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

There are just 75 hits on google for "Sir Mildred Pierce (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22sir+mildred+pierce%22)". That doesn't indicate a massive internet following. -- Sam 16:47 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

It's apparent self promotion: the three external links are all registered by Ian Cameron/Sir Mildred Pierce. But I can't say whether it should be deleted or modified. Releasing mp3s on the net for free may be perfectly good grounds for inclusion. -( 17:23 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

SUGGESTION: Drop a line to the contributor and ask him to voluntarily move the content to his own user page. Only if he refuses will you need to discuss the matter any further. Deb 17:39 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

The article was created by somebody without a user account. I don't care about the Sir Mildred Pierce article, pinning down the general principle is more interesting. I've seen this before when I nominated Juls for deletion, unnominated by The Cunctator -( 17:58 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

Ever heard of Benjamin Anker? No? Well, have a look. --KF 18:14 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

Don't forget Elias Disney, Flora Call, Kepple Disney II and the September 11 attack victims. -( 18:36 Feb 8, 2003 (UTC)

Those are not, nor ever have been, appropriate for Wikipedia. They should be moved to http://sep11.wikipedia.org . --mav

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I think it's impossible to decide objectively whether a particular topic (person) is "worthy" of inclusion or not. The best I can suggest at the moment is that if:

1. somebody has gone to the trouble to create an article on the subject
2. the information in the article can be found in the references that it cites

then the article is OK. It should be fair enough to remove the text if no references are cited or (later) if the references are to web pages that no longer exist.

Where some more thought may be given, is what constitutes a valid external reference: otherwise anybody can create their own websites and then say anything they like about themselves (or their enemies) in wikipedia. On the other hand, a person's home page and what they say about themselves may contain good information that can be found nowhere else.

-( 12:15 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

Ah, I like this suggestion! Except that the bit about links breaking worries me. When I'm pottering about on the computer, I don't usually have many books around me, so I use webpages a lot. I try to use the most reliable-looking pages I can find, such as official websites and various news websites. But even for a large and trustworthy institution, their pages might move, or be deleted, one day. But I suppose we can worry about that later. I think that "remove the text" should be "remove the text to the talk page", along with a note requesting that someone should search for alternative sources to corroborate the information. -- Oliver P. 12:34 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

It's a good point, it's a problem with the web in general and with lack of mirroring. Although http://www.archive.org/ was helpful to me once. I have more problems with printed sources, not having a reference library available. I suppose a worthless reference site would be one which makes claims that can not be corroborated elsewhere (such as a micronation site claiming it was a member of the UN or whatever). -( 13:04 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. I haven't had much luck with http://www.archive.org/ myself. For example, they haven't archived an old website of mine that died. That's probably a good thing, though. It actually had quite a few errors on it, and I'd been meaning to take it down anyway... :) -- Oliver P. 13:18 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)