- Image by Joi via Flickr
Earlier today, I noticed a tweet from Lisa Green saying that a Wikipedia article on Timo Hannay had been marked for deletion. Other science folks have since jumped into the discussion.
The whole debate got me thinking. What does “notability” mean? I suppose that this is a constant philosophical discussion on Wikipedia, despite the guidelines, but from where I sit, notability is purely contextual. In the sciences, Timo is certainly more notable than Robert Scoble, who has a pretty lengthy one. In general, his work has probably added more to the world than Robert’s who is much better known due to the nature of his role. We talk a lot about context and field when we talk about scientific publishing. We talk about how it’s not just a numbers game, but is relative to the context or field under discussion. Perhaps the folks at Wikipedia should also take that approach.
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2 Comments
I thought about this recently: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/07/09/understandi.... People were impressed to see that I was a “notable inhabitant” of Keene, but from my perspective I was a pretty random choice. I thought I'd review Keene's revision history to show how random it actually was. But I got bogged down in the difficulty of analyzing the revision history.
I thought about this recently: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/07/09/understandi.... People were impressed to see that I was a “notable inhabitant” of Keene, but from my perspective I was a pretty random choice. I thought I'd review Keene's revision history to show how random it actually was. But I got bogged down in the difficulty of analyzing the revision history.
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