[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Todd Allen]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:18 PM, White Cat
<wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to
>  observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of
>  material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any
>  other topic combined.
>
>  I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am
>  saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be
>  eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic
>  gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or
>  TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more
>  "manageable". This notion is wrong.
>
>  In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if
>  this redrectifying madness continues as it is.
>
>  I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles.
>  Any other topic is finite.
>
>    - White Cat
>
>
>
>  On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > On 10/03/2008, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
>  > > There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via
>  > naked
>  > >  eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that
>  > there are
>  > >  more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire
>  > planet.
>  > >  Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And
>  > it is
>  > >  feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if
>  > something
>  > >  as dull as Proxima Centauri (
>  > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
>  > >  is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft".
>  > We
>  > >  should expand them instead.
>  >
>  > Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some
>  > detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard
>  > red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting.
>  >
>  > --
>  > geni
>  >
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What's wrong with manageable?

There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single,
manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny
towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band
when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the
majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have
little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense
than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have
inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and
put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original
research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an
element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good
article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of
the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.