And if not, not. Which is why Page Three does indeed have a Wikipedia page, and Page 57 does not. One more case of Wikipedia working the way any sensible person would expect.

What continues to amaze me is how many Wikipedia critics (including CT’s resident scholar of online communities) are so fixated on the occasional trees of individuals on Wikipedia who they disagree with that they completely miss the forest of a free, comprehensive, reliable reference source whose collective decision making structure works astonishingly well the vast majority of the time.

God damn this internets! How do I turn it off?

You’re right that the zealot was just posting things to have them filled out…I’ve done the same for some things, and it’s worked; there are enough busybodies eyeing article creation for that to pay off I guess.

Still, Zora’s page 57 example is not about a silly creator but about the limits of inclusion. If page 57 is notable on its own it may need an article, like Page Three.

the young editor was creating articles that consisted of nothing much more than a title and a sentence. … He was expecting other people to fill out those articles, but no one ever did.

Obviosuly, articles without content should be deleted, no?

In general, it’s easy to imagine reasons why wikipedians’ decisions are wrong—or anyone else’s. Give me a one-sentence summary of anything you’ve ever done, and I can tell a stroy about why you were wrong. But what’s the point?

If you want to discuss actual wikipedia deletion policy, all delete discussions are archived here. My quick survey suggests that deleted articles are overwhlmingly spam and fanfic/gamer stuff. Whenever someone articulated a reasonable argument for keeping an article, it was kept. Yes, I’m sure there are deletions that you or I disagree with. (Fafblog for starters.) But that’s to hold Wikipedia to a standard of perfection that no organization or publication can meet.

Anyway, I suspect you’ll find that reading actual delete discussion is a lot more informative than speculating about them. I certainly do!

If that page 57 has been generating centuries of debate the need is obvious.

Whose hadith 1004? Bukhari? Muslim? Each of the six major Sunni collections has its own numbering. Or could this be from a Shi’a or Ibadi collection?
This is exactly why you need an entry for each one, to situate each one in the different traditions.

If I said, “That anthropology journal, page 57” and you couldn’t find it, does that mean that we need an article for page 57, listing all page 57s?

I don’t know where you got the hadith 1004 bit, but that’s not the way people refer to hadith. They say Bukhari 1.4.138 or Muslim 1.172. How many numbers you need depends on the collection.

(Had to look up the reference schemes; it had been a few years since I used the MSA hadith collection and I’d forgotten that hadith 1004 wouldn’t make sense as a reference.)

AHEM.

This is exactly why you need an entry for each one, to situate each one in the different traditions.

Plus, I would just love to read the tidbit about hadith 1004, which may have been composed in some valley in Yemen under some fascinating circumstances, which will only come up if it is easy for the person who knows about it to contribute to something like a Wikipedia page.

Whose hadith 1004? Bukhari? Muslim? Each of the six major Sunni collections has its own numbering. Or could this be from a Shi’a or Ibadi collection?

There’s nothing wrong with an article on a hadith or a Bible verse that has provoked a great deal of controversy. An overview of the controversy, and links to the doctrinal questions involved, would be useful. However, a project to write articles on ALL hadith or verses would be nonsensical.

Point for Seth and Walt.

Timon @ 39:

True Zora, if we have an entry for every hadith on the internet, we might run out of space. I mean, why would anybody care about the founding documents of one of the world’s largest religions? I hope no one gets the idea to record information about Zoroastrian, Inuit, or strip-mall Pentecostal religious texts, which would likewise detract from the other entries.

At the same time that the young editor was madly creating articles, there were articles re hadith; there were articles re the scholars who collected, sifted, and published hadith; there were articles re the prominent Muslims of early Islamic history. Rather than patiently expanding those articles, or writing extensively researched new articles about oft-cited hadith or prominent Muslims w/o articles, the young editor was creating articles that consisted of nothing much more than a title and a sentence. I think it made him feel important. He was expecting other people to fill out those articles, but no one ever did. We (in those days it was we, before I gave up in despair) were too busy working on topics of interest to more than one person.

As several people have observed, it’s of no use to create articles that no one else will ever edit.

As for the hadith: the canonical collections of hadith are available on the net (Muslim Student Association English translations) and should, when possible, be preserved in neutral fora like The Internet Archive or Wikisource. It isn’t a good use of anyone’s time or server space to break up those texts into separate articles, any more than it is to have a WP article for every dang verse in the New Testament. Yes to preserving religious texts; no to using WP to do it.