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        Arimaa >> Arimaa Buzz >> "Notability" nonsense
        
(Message started by: megajester on Mar 19^th, 2011, 8:30am)

Title: "Notability" nonsense
Post by megajester on Mar 19^th, 2011, 8:30am

As of February 2011 the Arimaa entry on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa) sports the following notice:

"The topic of this article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted."

What on earth?? Who did this?!

EDIT: It turns out that anyone with a Wikipedia login can go into history and undo it. Apparently it was the work of a mindless bot. Maybe it was partly due to not having any references.

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by Fritzlein on Mar 19^th, 2011, 8:04pm

Yes, the notability tag is a new name for the lack of references. Arimaa clearly has enough general interest to qualify for an article, and there are enough sources to site to prove that Arimaa has notability. I find it faintly ridiculous that truth is no defense on Wikipedia. I find it utterly ludicrous that if I write something about Arimaa on Wikipedia it is "original research" and therefore deletable, but if I write it in Beginning Arimaa, which is self-published and vetted by no-one, I suddenly become credible, and my words can be quoted entirely within bounds of Wikipedia policy.

Oh, well. If you want to be on Wikipedia, you have to play by Wikipedia rules. Ultimately it is this simple: we add more citations to the Arimaa article, or else Wikipedia janitors will eventually delete it.

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by rbarreira on Mar 20^th, 2011, 6:06am

Didn't Arimaa win a few awards and references from some mainstream media? That should do the trick...

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by robinz on Mar 20^th, 2011, 7:27am

I don't know of any references to Arimaa in mainstream media, although it would be cool if there had been any. But I just googled "arimaa" and was pleasantly surprised to see the wide range of references that came up, including general boardgame sites, personal webpages, discussion forums (some totally unconncected to board games) and also commercial pages (there are Arimaa apps for iphone, apparently). So it's clear to me that Arimaa is at least as notable as many of the other modern boardgames that have their own pages on wikipedia (to say nothing of the thousands of pages covering utter trivia about minor aspects of popular culture), mostly without any kind of warning about "non-notability". I don't know if any arguments have been raised on the talk page about the notability of Arimaa, but if they are, there appears to be no shortage of material out there to prove these people wrong :)

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by omar on Mar 23^rd, 2011, 10:02pm

I thought the Footnotes section is where the reference citations in the article appeared. Maybe the bot just checks the References section only. I copied the first footnote to the reference section. Also added the Beginning Arimaa book to the reference section.

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by Fritzlein on Mar 24^th, 2011, 12:45am

Now would be a good time to watch the Wikipedia Arimaa article. There is a specific Wikipedia editor, namely Mschribr, who does not believe that Arimaa is more computer-resistant than chess. A year ago, he loudly made his case with bogus arguments, but lost interest and moved on after a while. Now after a year of hiatus, he is back, making even more tenuous arguments than before. He is not afraid to edit.

Thus we need two things; long-term we need to add references to make the article more respectable, and short-term we need to defend against vandalism.

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by UruramTururam on Mar 24^th, 2011, 2:06am

Bah! There are scientific articles in the arimaa.com repository. Link them...

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by omar on Mar 28^th, 2011, 3:02pm

on 03/24/11 at 02:06:23, UruramTururam wrote:

Bah! There are scientific articles in the arimaa.com repository. Link them...

Yes there are a number of technical papers that have been written. I've compiled them here:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/papers/

Anyone have any thoughts as to where best to link them; maybe we can link them under References also?

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by trojo on Apr 17^th, 2011, 12:07am

on 03/19/11 at 08:30:32, megajester wrote:

Apparently it was the work of a mindless bot. Maybe it was partly due to not having any references.

Or maybe the Wikipedia bots are rising up and taking revenge for the years of abuse their Arimaa-bot brothers have endured at the hands of humans...

Title: Re: "Notability" nonsense
Post by FireBorn on Jun 14^th, 2011, 5:24pm

on 03/19/11 at 20:04:07, Fritzlein wrote:

I find it utterly ludicrous that if I write something about Arimaa on Wikipedia it is "original research" and therefore deletable, but if I write it in Beginning Arimaa, which is self-published and vetted by no-one, I suddenly become credible, and my words can be quoted entirely within bounds of Wikipedia policy.

It makes sense. Now that your words are out there in book form it's in the public/cultural sphere, making it cite-able (verifiable). Wikipedia doesn't care about finding the truth; it only cares about presenting facts, including what other people have said is the truth. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a forum or an academic journal.