Michael Nielsen has two of them:
Question 1: What’s the most notable subject that’s not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?
Let’s assume for now that this question has an answer (“The Answer”), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious.
Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?
Do you see where this is headed? Must Wikipedia include everything? There is more analysis at the link and note that the more these questions are asked, the more likely we encounter a paradoxical answer:
…suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines!
I wonder, as do you, whether this notoriety extends in transitive fashion to the seventeenth round of deciding who or what is the marginally deserving entry: "Well, you're not really notable, or even close, but all the others who were marginal became famous through the process of having had their lack of fame debated. Mick Jagger now invites you to his party." Not!
At some point these people under debate, once there are enough of them, all turn into a big group of Wikipedia nobodies.
That’s not a rarely asked question. That’s a common and well-known paradox in mathematical circles. One typical expression is the proof that all natural numbers are interesting. Suppose there are some uninteresting natural numbers. Then there must be a smallest such uninteresting natural number, call it X. But being the smallest uninteresting natural number is an interesting property. This leads to a contradiction.
It would be ironic if the subject were Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Another version is:
Proposition: All naturals can be described in 11 words or less.
Proof: Suppose not. Then there is a “smallest natural that can’t be described in eleven words or less.” But then we have just described it, in 11 words…
The standard answer is that the descriptors of the form “the most … that isn’t …” are too vague to be really meaningful, although they appear to be meaningful. At some point, the marginal topic for inclusion in Wikipedia is not interesting even given it being “the most interesting topic not included in wikipedia” This is why we have Twitter.
The answer to the second question is no. Merely being on the border between notable and non-notable, is not a notable characteristic of a subject (more accurately, it doesnt then make the subject notable)/ Thus if a subject was not notable to begin with, it stays not notable and thus, there is no need for wikipedia to include every subject under (and over) the sun.
This has already happened at least once. There was a one-hit wonder band that was included in a famous video game’s soundtrack (I think Grand Theft Auto). Wikipedia deleted their article on the grounds that they were not noteworthy enough, but it hit the news and after a few local newspapers wrote articles about the band, they were added. I wouldn’t be surprised it such a story is common.
Diagonalization is notable, but just barely, as both of the following posts are very short and don’t really explain the technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonalization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagonal_argument
The there are the finitely describable numbers and all the rest. I assume all the rest will wind up in the Wikipedia some day.
This is notable (haha) because there is significant debate about the currently extremely high notability requirements of the German Wikipedia.
it also is possible to create an article which cannot be neutral, remember: http://xkcd.com/545/
The answer is the marginal revelation.
It reminds of the 10 worst of the web from back in the day.
I have a thought on a possible “most notable subject…” inclusion for Wikipedia: a casual search turns up no results for my two candidates for best restaurant in my hometown (pop 3+ million in the metro area).
I would bet there are several large cities with good dining-out cultures whose most important restaurants are not mentioned. These would be businesses whose names would be known to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, but which would not be in Wikipedia.
whats the most marginal topic on marginal revolution?
Actually, I think the problem here is temporal. It’s perfect consistent to have a most notable topic that is not included in Wikipedia *now*, but then in the future have it included. In order for the paradox to work, there must be a most notable topic which *will never be* included in Wikipedia. But for a conference to be convened on this subject, it must know all the topics which will be included in Wikipedia in the future; which it doesn’t; so no paradox.
This is just a variation on Russel’s Paradox isn’t it: A Wikipedia article on subjects not mentioned on wikipedia. But of course the “fix” for this is to rely on constructable sets not abstractly defined ones – and surely “on wikipedia” is an actually constructed set with a defined construction process, not an abstract set. Hence no paradox. It either is or isn’t on. “End of”.
This is an interesting paradox, but it isn’t as good as the original interesting number paradox which states that every natural number is interesting. It is an interesting property if some number is the smallest natural number that isn’t interesting. This is a paradox so there can’t be any such non-interesting natural numbers. The Wikipedia version is more vague. The Answer becomes notable only because reliable third parties publish information about it (regardless of why they do). It doesn’t because notable solely for being just non-notable enough. When The Answer becomes notable enough to be included in Wikipedia, the previously published information is simply outdated. It doesn’t get destroyed, making the subject non-notable again. So there’s no real paradox.
There is an blog entry at http://www.nathanieljohnston.com/index.php/2009/06/11630-is-the-first-uninteresting-number/ that finds the smallest, non-interesting natural number. It is 11,630. The author first defined a non-interesting natural number as a number that doesn’t appear in The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS). The OEIS is a collection of lists of different patterns. For example, the first few prime number are listed as well as perfect squares. The author discovered that 11,630 doesn’t appear in any of the lists on the OEIS so it must not be interesting. He submitted a list of the first non-interesting numbers (according to his definition) to the OEIS, but it wasn’t accepted so there wasn’t a paradox.
Isn’t this a reworking of Bertrand Russell’s barber paradox. The example used in Logicomix (highly recommended graphic novel) is of a book which lists non-self-referential books – should it include itself thereby entering the paradox.
Similarly a Wikipedia page of subjects not covered by Wikipedia would negate itself.
Yeah, this paradox fails when you understand “notability” on wikipedia.
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