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Out of curiosity, why does this man have a wikipedia page? He seems utterly insignificant, despite his tangential role to the Indiana Pi bill.--Francisx 00:43, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
- When I read accounts of the Indiana pi bill, I got somewhat curious of this Waldo figure whose sad fate is to have become known for something that he himself probably regarded as utterly tangential to his own life. Basically the only thing one easily finds about him by googling is his involvment in the IPB affair, but natural curiosity demands to know more: which mathematics did he actually do, and so forth. Such things do not belong in the IPB article, but it is very convenient to have a repository for whatever information about the man history has passed down. The wonder of Wikipedia is that we can have that without inconveniencing those who don't find him interesting. I for one is happy to know the information that the editors of this article dug up. Is is so much to assume that others may be similarly curious, and is is not exactly the job of an encyclopedia to satisfy this curiosity? Henning Makholm 07:24, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
- Unless you can show that Waldo's mathematical work was significant, he clearly fails to meet wiki standards for notability (which explicitly excludes otherwise unremarkable college professors). His tangential relationship to a minor and only marginally notable political non-event does not make him notable either. I'm not going to push for the article's deletion, but it is a textbook vanity. I should add that there are lots of subjects I find personally interesting that are not notable by wiki standards, and there are lots of notable encyclopedic subjects that I find completely uninteresting; my personal interest in the man is irrelevent. --Francisx 23:24, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
- Textbook vanity? The man lived in the 19th century and is long dead. Do you propose that he has come back from the dead to create a Wikipedia article about himself? And why do you suppose that, simply because he was employed as a mathematics professor, the only thing that can make him notable is his mathematical work? It is an empirical fact that real living Wikipedia editors have found him significant enough to go out and actively look for information for a biography of him because they would have liked to be able to read it here and (correctly) assumed that others would like to read it here, too. An active search for information must have been made; this is not the kind of facts that anyboy memoizes for a hobby. Henning Makholm 23:36, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
