Jimmy Wales: observation

Transcript context

…Oh, the very, this instance- The very specific instance, and the answer is no, there’s not much known about it. I dare say, unless it’s very special to you and your great-grandmother gave it to you or something, you probably know very little about it. It’s a pen. It’s just here in the office. So that’s just to show there is a limit. In German Wikipedia, they used to talk about the rear nut of the wheel of [inaudible 00:17:10] bicycle [inaudible 00:17:11] a well-known Wikipedian of the time, to sort of illustrate, you can’t have an article about literally everything. So then it raises the question, what can you have an article about? What can’t you? That can vary depending on the subject matter. One of the areas where we try to be much more careful would be biographies. The reason is a biography of a living person, if you get it wrong, you can actually be quite hurtful, quite damaging. So if someone is a private person and somebody tries to create a Wikipedia entry, there’s no way to update it. There’s not much done. So for example, an encyclopedia article about my mother, my mother, school teacher later, a pharmacist, wonderful woman, but never been in the news, other than me talking about why there shouldn’t be a Wikipedia entry, that’s probably made it in somewhere, standard example. But there’s not enough known. You could imagine a database of genealogy having date of birth, date of death, certain elements like that of private people. But you couldn’t really write a biography. One of the areas this comes up quite often is what we call BLP1E. We’ve got lots of acronyms. Biography of a living person who’s notable for only one event is a real danger zone. Oh.…

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