Help desk
< October 19	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 21 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current Help Desk pages.

October 20[edit]

Notability guidelines for historical events[edit]

I've read over the Wikipedia notability guidelines and I don't see anything that specifically addresses notability guidelines for historical events. I'm wondering whether there is a policy and if not whether there should be one.

My main interest in this is the history of aviation. If we had articles for every single aircraft accident ever we'd be drowning in accident reports, but what connotes notability? I'd like to propose guidelines for including air accidents in Wikipedia but without general historical event guidelines it seems like proposing them is putting the cart before the horse.

We don't need to be the Aviation Safety Network, but some accidents are notable. --Charlene.fic 18:01, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you can find third-party sources asserting that the event was notable, it is. I don't know if that's the official guideline on the matter, but I think you're generally safe if you can find a source. I would go ahead and write the article - from first glance it seems plausible. If it's going to be deleted, it would probably be under a full AfD since it's not a clear-cut case, so you can definitely see whether community consensus is okay with it. But I think what you're proposing is fine. —K e akealani 19:04, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The accidents I'm planning to put in are notable in that they've been referred to as notable by third parties (although most of the references are paper, not online) *and* in that they're notable for some other reason (they prompted changes to government rules, highlighted problems with aircraft design, etc.). I added |one accident yesterday that addressed flight and controller training in Asia.

I'm more concerned that somebody is going to decide one day that every accident in the NTSB, TSB of Canada, AAIB (UK), etc. databases has to go into Wikipedia. That's something like 20 accidents and incidents a *day* worldwide over the last 80 years. We have an article on the very notable hockey player Bill Barilko, for instance; we don't need a separate article on the routine accident (if that can be said) that took his life. It would be nice to have guidelines, especially in the case of accidents in developing nations or before 1950 where despite the accident being notable there isn't much online. Sometimes it seems like we have 20 KB on an accident that cost two lives in the US but nothing on an accident that cost 300 lives in India and prompted massive changes to Indian air traffic control procedures.

Thank you for replying, by the way! I appreciate it. --Charlene.fic 19:45, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

For aircraft accidents, there has been a discussion going for quite awhile (unfortunately with no clear result) at Talk:List of notable accidents and incidents on commercial aircraft. If it's a subject you're interested in, contributions are always welcome! — QuantumEleven 08:11, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Search For Users?[edit]

Hello, how does one search through wikipedia users? More specifically, I'm looking for a user who is fluent in both Russian and English. Thank you. --Demonesque 21:18, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There's a list of users who speak near-native Russian at Category:User ru-4 and native speakers of Russian at Category:User ru-N --Casper2k3 21:29, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Is there anyway to search through users, though? Or anything that would be remotely helpful in that respect?--Demonesque 21:33, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You could look through Special:Listerusers. Thanks. --Alex (Talk) 22:28, 20 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You can restrict Wikipedia's search by namespace (search first for something that isn't found, like sdfsdfsdfsdfsdf), then on the search form you can search only user pages for whatever you'd like. You can get approximately the same result by adding 'site:en.wikipedi.org "wiki/user"' to a Google search, for example this Google search. -- Rick Block (talk) 01:02, 21 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you're looking for someone to help you with a translation, check out Wikipedia:Translators available#Russian-to-English, or, more generally, Wikipedia:Translation into English. — QuantumEleven 08:05, 22 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]