Misplaced Pages

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Wikipedian since October 2003.

Redirects

My current passion is REDIRECTS. Let's remember to make redirects! Redirects save time. They lessen the chances of two separate articles on the same topic. They help people find what they're looking for faster. And they're fun and easy! Here's to redirects!

This is how bad it is: unbelievably, there wasn't, until I fixed it, a redirect for the article on the famous artist Christo from the page "Christo" to the non-intuitive (for most uers) actual article at Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Check "What Links Here" at that article to see just how many (dozens and dozens) of links were showing up red simply because no one, incredibly, thought to do a redirect from "Christo".

In my opinion, you can't overdo it on redirects, not unless you're doing redirects where there should rightly be a disambiguation page; and even in those cases a temporary redirect page, until someone puts together a dab page, is better than nothing at all. Several times I've come across duplicate articles, each under a separate namespace but about the same person or thing, and it's just because no one thought to do an obvious redirect.

Let me say it one more way: Creating redirects is part of writing a new Misplaced Pages article. If you haven't done redirects (or thought about the possibility of doing them and then decided there honestly weren't any potential ones), you haven't finished the job!

(Note: Since I wrote the above, I've been told there had been a Christo redirect, but that I just happened to come across the article at a time when it had been deleted, mistakenly, for about two weeks, as the namespace of the article moved. That makes me feel a bit better).

Notability

More and more on Misplaced Pages I'm seeing this "notability" creature raise its ugly head, and I'm seeing the vague term defined more and more broadly. I fear that some users' obsession with notability -- or, more precisely, enforcing their standards of notability-- has the potential to turn Misplaced Pages into a place of two warring factions. I'm a firm believer in that now-tired but still-true cliche that "Misplaced Pages is not paper." What purpose does it serve to delete articles that are supposedly "non-notable"? This is not, repeat not, a traditional encyclopedia, and we have the luxury to be able to include obscure and esoteric information that paper encyclopedias don't. I wouldn't actually call myself a rabid inclusionist -- I'm all for deleting vanity pages and the like -- but I've just seen too many examples lately, for my comfort, of people playing the "notability" card as a catch-all excuse to delete that which need not be deleted and that which does not harm Misplaced Pages.

A Favorite Quote That is Relevant to Misplaced Pages

"The Internet has created the most precise mirror of people as a whole that we've yet had. It is not a summary prepared by a social scientist or an elite think tank. It is not the hagiography of an era, condensed by a romantic idealist or a sneering cynic. It is the real us, available for direct inspection for the first time. Our collective window shades are now open. We see the mundanity, the avarice, the ugliness, the perversity, the loneliness, the love, the inspiration, the serendipity, and the tenderness that manifest in humanity. Seen in proportion, we can breath a sigh of relief. We are basically OK."

- Jaron Lanier

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