On 27/07/2011 08:49, Ray Saintonge wrote:
On 07/26/11 3:13 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
On 20/07/2011 10:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I missed reading this thread when it was active,
but my own estimate of
what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
high.
Yes, that is one area where the material seems available to do much
more.
An estimate of 20,000,000 English
Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative. The amount of work
to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
police.
On the other hand, the number of active Wikipedians who know where their
next 1000 articles are coming from is quite small, IMX. The emphasis on
enWP is hardly on being prolific: quality is more highly rated than
quantity. That may not be wrong, of course, but to some extent these
things are a matter of personal taste, and should remain so. We could do
with better support of the "good stub" concept, I think: probably an
example of "tacit knowledge" about the site, in that editors who have
been around for a while know what that means, while the manual pages
have a different slant.
All discussions of the "notability" concept we use seem to end up with
the generally broken nature of the thing. It is just that there is no
snappy replacement. WP:GNG is a bit objectionable in the insistence on
"secondary sources"; it is not completely silly but is not that helpful
either when you start pushing the limits.
Perhaps this requires a clearer description of what is essential to a
good stub.
I think a discussion of the nature of "good stubs", in relation though
to what we know (or rather guess) about the "long tail" of reference
material that is "out there" in some form, sounds like an interesting
one to have, and not one I recall having before. Basically there are
things that (a) people could want to look up, (b) for which
"footnote"-style answers exist and are verifiable, and (c) could appear
at that sort of length in WP, where they would be an asset rather than
an embarrassment. And we still don't know that much about the whole
population of such things.
The WP:GNG is opaque and bureaucratic. It is not suitable to much of
the 19th century material that I have. "Notes and Queries is a
fascinating publication where the readership answered questions posed
by others. Providing other sources for this could be extremely
difficult, and none of it comes close to being subject to BLP
requirements.
Yes, a kind of reference desk for those of largely antiquarian interests
in the 19th century (and onwards). The GNG has plenty wrong with it in
some topic areas, which is why specialised notability guides are
written. I don't think it has yet come up in the form "for
historical/antiquarian purposes, what is the minimum adequate kind of
answer to a query?".
One day I suppose we'll have an overview of "topic policy" based on a
census of actual "topics". I think we'll have to get through our second
decade before worrying about that, though.
Charles