[Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

[Stirling Newberry]

>
> "'fame' and 'importance' are not the right words to use, they are 
> merely
> rough approximations to what we're really interested in, which is
> verifiability and NPOV. I understand and appreciate where people are 
> coming
> from on the 'Yes' vote, but feel that they will only get the unanimity
> necessary in a wiki environment if they rephrase the issue in those 
> terms.
> Consider an obscure scientific concept, 'Qubit Field Theory' -- 24 
> hits on
> google. I'd say that not more than a few thousand people in the world 
> have
> heard of it, and not more than a few dozen understand it. (I certainly
> don't.) It is not famous and it is arguably not important, but I think 
> that
> no one would serious question that it is valid material for an
> encyclopedia. What is it that makes this encyclopedic? It is that it is
> information which is verifiable and which can be easily presented in an
> NPOV fashion. (Though perhaps only as a stub, of course, since it's 
> very
> complicated and not many people would know how to express it clearly in
> layperson's terms.)"
>

Not as obscure as all of that, it's a theory by Dr. David Deutsch that 
attempts to find a version of quantum chromodynamics which looks as if 
all quantum operations are commutable, but which does not assume an 
infinite amount of information capacity at each point. It is the basis 
for several interesting ideas about the nature of the universe which 
far more people have heard of. I strongly doubt it only pops 24 hits on 
google, as more papers have referenced it than that.

The size problem will be solved by a distribution system, probably one 
that includes rating of articles. The local geography articles will get 
low ratings and thus not be in the "short" version of wikipedia.