Wikipedia talk:Historical archive/September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/In Memoriam

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I expect this will sound rather unfeeling, but it strikes me that a lot of this stuff has nothing obviously to do with the aim of this project, which is to write an encyclopaedia. --AW

At least leave the complaints till tomorrow, will ya? Jeez. --Brion
It's significantly later. This page STILL has nothing to do with the aim of the project, and moreover is incredibly US-centric. Shall we create a memoriam page for the two thousand odd people killed in our invasion of Panama? Or mayhap for the incredible tragedy of the invasion of Hungary, 1956? Or, as pointed out below, for the Sept. 11th coup by Pinochet? This has no purpose in an encyclopedia, as does any memorial. Take it out, i say.Graft

Removed from page:

September 11 (1973) US-backed coup overturns democratically elected government in Chile, leading to thousands of deaths, tortures and "disappearances"

True enough, but beside the point. That belongs in September 11 and 1973 pages.


Cunctator, I think it has been discussed enough. This is not an encyclopedia article. Period. It may be the most popular page in the web, but I don't care. We are building an encyclopedia here and this doesn't belong here. If we want popular pages, we should stop this project and start a porno website. We could even earn some money, then. Jeronimo

If this page is appropriate and 'NPOV' then I propose the following 'In Memorium' additions to the WIKI project for starters:

  • Allende/Chile Sept 11th In Memorium
  • Bhopal In Memorium
  • My Lai In Memorium
  • Hiroshima In Memorium
  • Nagasaki In Memorium
  • In Memorium to the thousands killed in Afghanistan since Sept 11th 2001
  • In Memorium thousands killed by sanctions on Iraq since 1991
  • In Memorium thousands about to be killed by Bushes war on Iraq

Oh sorry, am I being 'disrespectful'??????? quercus robur 08:32 Sep 25, 2002 (UTC)

Well, you can't spell, but otherwise I've no objection to any of those if you can make them into something interesting/useful/informative. Ditto with this one. --Brion 08:52 Sep 25, 2002 (UTC)
That's the entire point. A "In Memoriam" page cannot be informative. It gives no other information than "We remember these people that died", which is a very NPOV statement; would we for example put an "in memoriam" at the page of Winston Churchill, but not at Adolf Hitler?
In Memoriams are personal, and not encyclopedia material. So they shouldn't be here. Jeronimo
That's rather my point, J. If someone can find a way make them informative and encyclopedic, they are welcome to stay. If not... --Brion 09:26 Sep 25, 2002 (UTC)
I can tell you there's no other way to do represent such information in an encyclopedic way other than the current way: "John Doe (died January 1, 3002)", "In the bombing, 17 people were killed". "An estimated 250,000 people were killed during the war". And those sentences are in the articles, without having a seperate page for it, and without the words "in memoriam". Jeronimo

How much more can we discuss this?!? I think we're all in agreement that this is NOT an encyclopedia article and doesn't belong in Wikipedia, no matter how popular it is - Cunctator seems to be the only exception. Or am I mistaken? Does anyone else think this has a legitimate place in the encyclopedia? If not, Cunctator are you willing to accept that there's substantial agreement on this? Graft 16:55 Sep 27, 2002 (UTC)


I agree that long-term it shouldn't be in Wikipedia. But I'm not willing to accept the 1-line "this isn't an encylopedia article, contents at [1]" replacement. I am willing to accept a graceful solution, as I've discussed elsewhere. --The Cunctator
May i suggest then that you propose what you think an acceptable solution would be, since I'm at a loss to determine what you think would be a graceful solution... Graft


See http://www.nupedia.com/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-September/005409.html --The Cunctator

Well, I don't find that particularly graceful... in fact it's downright kludgy. I fail to see why this page deserves special treatment, just because some of us Americans happen to care about it particularly? This is NOT a unique event, or even uniquely or especially tragic. People are killed by horrendous violence on a daily basis. Events that killed off 2000 people are a long, long list, and they are all equally legitimate subjects for rememberance. BUT, that said, they DO NOT have any place in an encyclopedia, straight up. So why should this page get special treatment? Unless you're proposing hiroshima.wikipedia, cambodia.wikipedia, greatleapforward.wikipedia, mylai.wikipedia, jaliawallabagh.wikipedia, et cetera? Sorry for being blut, but your own emotional attachment is NOT sufficient reason for this page to exist. Graft
Alternately, as the content is GFDL'ed, and there'd probably be tons of people interested in it, why don't some enterprising people gobble up s11wiki.org and move the content there? We could turn this page into a link, nobody would have to bother being NPOV on a non-encyclopic (but still informative) site, you could let hundreds or thousands of people pour their heart out in a totally POV way, and we'd all be the better for it. DanKeshet

Actually it was my suggestion the sep11.wikipedia.org Many people considered meta.wikipedia.org an adecuate end for it, so the .wikipedia.org ending doesn't mean that it has to be bound to the NPOV policy, or that is part of the encyclopedia. I also thought that another name was possible, but that had to be bought (Jimbo said he would do it, anyway). Just dumping in into meta is not respectful enough. I'm sure Jimbo would not have problem in creating hiroshima.wikipedia.org, and all the rest if there were somebody willing to mantaing it as cunc is willing to work in the sep11 stuff. In short, the idea of putting it somewhere else is because www.wikipedia.org is not the adequate place, but neither is meta.wikipedia.org.

Also, I do not undertand why meta.wikipedia.org is OK, but something_else.wikipedia.org is not.--AN

I agree with AstroNomer. Besides, there's at least one practical point that makes the current "move(s) to meta" disrespectful: all links back to Wikipedia are broken in the process. The page needs to be edited before the final move takes place. --FvdP

I'm glad you guys wrote in while I was drafting a response, because you formulated better arguments, more concisely. --The Cunctator

I have no problem with *.wikipedia.org, but why should it get special redirects rather than just a regular link? Anyway, I'm tired of fighting about this, so I'll just back off. Just so long as it isn't here anymore, I don't care. Graft

I prefer the idea of having a general tribute.wikipedia.org for this type of stuff. Then no event in history is excluded from inclusion. 9/11 is way too focused. What about the next big terrorist act that kills thousands? Need we set up separate Wikis for all? Setting up each one is time-consumming. A general tribute site could have a Vietnam War area, a WWII area etc, a PanAm 103 area, etc. --mav


Seems reasonable to me. sep11 was just the first think that came to my mind. You just have to convice Cunc. --AN

I think memoriam.wikipedia.org is a better name, but of course with the magic of Apache, we can have sep11.wikipedia.org, tribute.wikipedia.org, memoriam.wikipedia.org, etc. all do what we want, be it point to the same page, or subpages, redirects, etc. etc. The naming is not a serious issue. Pretty much all that needs to be done is to set up a separate wiki instance, play around with it a bit to get it to do what we want, then redirect content over there. Right now we're trying to do this in the opposite direction. --The Cunctator

But what do we do with this page in the meantime? It is requesting material that we, or at least most of us, want to get rid of. I have thought about simply removing that, but then nothing remains of the page. If someone finds a way to turn this page into something that a majority of Wikipedians can agree with, it would be much appreciated. I have thought about doing it myself, but I see no actual contents to leave, and I don't want to remove this page either - at least not until we have decided where it should go. Andre Engels 15:05 Sep 28, 2002 (UTC)

Well, noone seems to have an answer to that one, so I just took out the material myself. Maybe it will finally set someone to actually do something about this situation. Andre Engels 19:14 Oct 21, 2002 (UTC)

Well if page popularity is the criteria, oral sex has had almost as many hits... quercus robur

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