On 13/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the
wikipedia and somebody
makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better
be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5
million other articles
This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How
would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri,
the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally
important to and for what?
You could do a straw poll, you could check sources, you could google
it. There's lots of ways to do that; including weighted combinations
of the above and others. None of them are perfect, but what ever is?
Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is
manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two
million concepts.
I completely disagree.
It provides a cut-off. It says some things do not make the grade and
others do, just like an exam gives a pass-fail mark. It's not that
exams are perfect measures, it's simply that exams give a *reasonable*
measure. And yes, an exam does compare.
It's only when you try to push things to extreme, to insist that
something *has* to be a *perfect* measure that bad things start to
occur. That leads to extreme inclusionism and extreme deletionism.
-Phil
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.