Talk:Melisende of Tripoli

Article traffic

"Melisende" has had more visitors in the last week than in the preceeding two years. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:03, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Is it typical for notable 12-th century persons to not have a date of birth, death, age at death? --Wtshymanski (talk) 18:38, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

It's not abnormal for their dates of birth to be unknown (especially for women). Adam Bishop (talk) 19:39, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, it's pretty routine. Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France and Gottfried von Strassburg are among the many notable figures during that time period whose dates are not known.--Cúchullain ^t/c 20:46, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I see her aunt has a birth year and a death date. --Wtshymanski (talk) 03:25, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

So does George Washington. So?Cúchullain ^t/c 14:50, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Tends to show that both these individuals are more notable than M of T. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:27, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

It's not a question of her being more or less notable than anyone else. It's a matter of her being notable, period. And she is. As I said there are a number of notable people we don't have birth and death dates for.Cúchullain ^t/c 17:54, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Lack of exact birth and death dates is not a sign of lack of notability. We have neither for Jesus or Buddha, for example. Edward321 (talk) 14:29, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I speculate that there are more books written about either of those than words written about M of T. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:48, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I think you should probably avoid looking at all the articles on members of the Ibelin family :) Adam Bishop (talk) 14:51, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Genealogical charts sure take up much more space when you write them out in words as linked articles, don't they? And we save valuable Wikispace by not giving any references. However, the last time I nominated a batch of unreferenced related articles for nomination, it was an acutely unpleasant experience. I wonder if there are more 12th-century nobles than Pokemon? --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:37, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, maybe it would be a more valuable use of your time to help add references, rather than try to delete them. Look, I'm a big deletionist, in theory...I don't think Wikipedia needs a lot of the crap that it has, but I realized a few years ago that this isn't really an encyclopedia. It's like a collection of encyclopedias, and the articles aren't always encyclopedia articles as much as they are little essays. Why can't we have a "Crusaderpedia" within Wikipedia? There is a Crusades Encyclopedia online, and it's good, but incomplete. There is an excellent 4-volume Crusades Encyclopedia published by actual crusades scholars, and I don't think we could top that, but Wikipedia has more space and more accessibility and can use that as a source. So, maybe it's not "Crusaderpedia", or "Pokepedia" or whatever, but...why not? What is it then? What do you think it is, and what do you think "notable" means? Adam Bishop (talk) 17:30, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I do add references, and I don't think I have ever deleted references (except as a byproduct of a prod or afd). Just how high do we turn up the magnification when building an encyclopedia? Elsewhere I've had it suggested that as long as one IEEE paper exists somewhere on a topic, it's notable enough for this encyclopedia - that opens the door to creation of a terrifying large number of articles. We already have many articles on obscure chemical compounds that are unreadable. The article on Pick's disease had a large number of journal references but didn't even tell me it was fatal disease of the brain until I fixed it yesterday. We have "articles" on individual asteroids that are nothing more than dots on photographic plates. We have compilations of imaginary hardware from video games, etc. I guess I'm having a real problem understanding what the criterion for inclusion really is (aside from being able to recruit fanboys to defend it at an AfD). --Wtshymanski (talk) 17:54, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

It's probably "whatever you can get away with". I don't know, I just ignore anything that doesn't interest me. It's better for your mental health! Maybe all those asteroids are notable to someone, somewhere...if not to you, then don't read those articles. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:37, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

That seems unsatisfactory. It's the dark side of not being paper - you can get a lot of really sketchy details in, if you're not concerned about the size of the encyclopedia. --Wtshymanski (talk) 02:08, 2 May 2011 (UTC)