[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in
> context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous
> libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of
> Congress, and so on.
>
> And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
>
> And I conclude: no article.

Yes. I had a similar thought after browsing through [[Wikipedia 1.0]]
recently, particularly with regard to its "importance" scale. A local
library is certainly not "must have" or "important". It's not really
even "contributes to depth of knowledge".

One way to look at it: how big must the selection of articles be, for
that article to be included? Is your local library in the top 100,000
most important articles? Top 1,000,000? Imagine the whole
encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000
people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the
US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?

> Train station, just possibly.

Once again I like my proposal to think in terms of length of article,
not a boolean "is allowed to exist". Real encyclopaedias have short
articles about unimportant stuff and long articles about important
stuff. A train station might well be worth two sentences.

>
> The big stately house and park that used to be here before it was
> built over, yes.

Yep.

> The current local park - probably not.

Definitely a couple of sentences. In Wikipedia that probably means a
reference in "[[Parks of xxx]]".

> The local supermarket - certainly not.

Don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate to refer to it in the article
about the supermarket chain, or to say that the town has two
Woolworths and one Coles. But a whole article, no.

> The nearby main road - it does have an article already actually.

I'm not up to date on the rules of road inclusion. It's pretty hard to
draw a line. Again, articles about road networks would work better
than articles about individual roads.

Steve