Wikiid: Can Wikipedia make a Wikipedia page notable enough to avoid deletion?
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Claim: Every Wikipedia page ever made is notable.
Proof: Suppose at least one Wikipedia page that is not notable exists. Choose the one whose length in characters is smallest. Then surely this page is notable for being the short non-notable Wikipedia page ever created, making it quite notable, indeed. We have reached a contradiction and hence the proof is complete.
Or something like that.
The logic is flawed for the main reason that partitioning sets in any non-objective manner and then drawing conclusions from that is folly, which is the point of such so-called paradoxes.
Another cool paradox is the one surrounding "the smallest positive integer that cannot be expressed using twenty or fewer English words".
Yet somehow, we still communicate. I guess that says something interesting about our evolution.
On a related note, how many linguists does it take to change a broken light bulb? Two. One to decide what it should change into, and one to find out what kind of bulb emits broken light.
Why can't we just be well-defined formal systems? :/
Proof by contradiction means that you start by assuming the opposite of what you wish to prove, and then logically arriving at a contradiction. The existence of a contradiction implies that your premises were false, and since your premise was the opposite of what you wanted to prove, what you wished to prove must be true.
Proof by induction works by showing that a particular case (usually the first/smallest case) is true, and then showing that the fact that one case is true implies that the next case is also true. In other words, prove that your statement is true for n=1, and then prove that if the statement is true for m, it is also true for m+1. Since it's true for n=1, that implies it's true for n+1=2, and since it's true for n=2, that implies it's true for n+1=3, and so on, and thus you have proven that it's true for all n larger than your original case. Of course, it doesn't have to be that n implies n+1 -- it can be n-1, or any other variant, the point is that it chains up and leads to all values being proven.
There is probably a tie for shortest Wikipedia non-notable page at 0 characters. Filtering out 0s, we get a bunch of 1-character pages not worth ordering. Also, the distinction is always changing, since non-notable Wikipedia pages are always changing (page blanks, vandalism) and being deleted. The fact that the "shortest page" distinction is being passed around promiscuously to a bunch of different crappy pages means that it's a pretty meaningless one.
Wikipedia tries to keep its integrity, but I think sometimes they need to be more reasonable. Someone ought to create a complement to wikipedia which allows people to add things like this and other non-spam articles which wikipedia editors won't tolerate.
Hint: Check the alt text
I think this is more of a recursive humor than metahumor.
Well, it's a wiki page, so anybody can edit it and fix stuff like that.
Meta-joke refers to three somewhat different, but related categories: "self-referential jokes", "jokes about jokes" (see meta-) also known as metahumor, and "joke templates".
Recursive humor would be a subclass of self-referential jokes, going by the definition for self-referential jokes as given by (what else?) Wikipedia.
This kind of meta-joke is a joke in which the joke itself, or rather a familiar class of jokes, is part of the joke.
Topics are notable; articles are not. If a topic is non-notable in the real world, nothing written on Wikipedia should change that.
The answer was no, but I still hold that Wikipedia's belief that it can manage to stay NPOV when it's selective about what it deems relevant or not is a deluded one, and one of the most damning parts of the web site.