It's not just having a complete set--though that surely matters. (We
can have a complete set by other means too, such as combination
articles with enough information about the individual parts).
It's also about consistency--the particular items kept are not
necessarily the most important of them--our precision of deciding at
AfD is nowhere near that good, and will never be while we refuse to
recognize precedent. Lack of consistency makes us look incompetent to
do the real work of building a good encyclopedia.
Even more, it's about the practical operation of WP. The work of
arguing each individual article is excessive. It's particularly hard
to defend under the current system, for it's much easier to nominate
and say all of this needs to be sourced, than to defend, and source
all of it, while indefinitely repeated AfDs are accepted until an
article is finally deleted. We could save all this trouble, and all
this conflict, and have time for writing and improving articles, and
stay on better terms with each other, if we accepted the notability of
these sorts of articles.
But as we do that, we should also accept the lack of nobility of other
sorts of articles. (baring special individual circumstances). We do
that with such things as bus stations, and elementary schools. Think
if we had to delete each article on an elementary school at AfD rather
than Prod!
What we did is simple clear distinctions, adopted by true gneral
consensus, not vague general rules that have to be individually
interpreted for each of the 2 or 3 thousand articles a day.
That, and mutual tolerance. I'll accept your computer games, if you
accept my theologians.
On 12/21/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/22/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
When we have 90% or 95% of a set, the remaining
5% in many ways are
significant and worth writing about simply for the value in having a
complete set.
I'd set the bar lower. 70%. Maybe even 50%.
This does remind me of the time I wrote an article about a minor New
Zealand skifield, and it was AfD'd on NN grounds. However, every
single other skifield had an article, and was apparently notable. It
sort of made that skifield notable by virtue of its unique status of
non-notability...
Which is why we have articles on tiny townships,
on nonentity
politicians, on Popes who never even got ordained and died after five
weeks*. Because being able to say "we have them *all*" makes us a
better encyclopedia.
Hell yeah.
Steve
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