On 0, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com> scribbled:
Headline on CNN right now is "Poll: War support
at new low" do we have an
article of this poll? We write articles on events unless they are notable
enough for the entire year rather than day.
A notable event would be Jimbo deciding to shut down the site (wikipedia)
for example which would IMHO only be notable enough to be mentioned on the
article on [[Wikipedia]]. Probably the coverage would be one or two lines,
max a paragraph. Not a full article, that can be on wikinews (maybe). Essjay
incident however isn't even worth a single line mention on article
namespace.
Only in [[Wikipedia]]? I don't normally descend to personal attacks, but either you
are making a rhetorical point here or are ignorant of the subject matter.
(Note that in the following rant, you can generally replace 'big' or
'large' with 'popular' or 'useful' and it will still be true.)
Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia *in history*. As in, since the encyclopedia form was
invented some 2 or 3 millennia ago, and of the hundreds and thousands of monumental
projects culminating in multiple thick volumes, not one is the size of Wikipedia; at best
they are perhaps 3/4s the size of Wikipedia (in October 2006, en WP had 609 million words
to the Yongle Encyclopedia's 370 million characters). And I'm not even counting
the foreign language non-English editions, which increase the size several-fold, and not
counting Commons and any of the other ancillary projects. En's bigger than the Diderot
Encyclopedia, bigger than any version of Encyclopedia Britannica or Encarta, bigger than
Cyclopedia, bigger than the Yongle Encyclopedia, bigger than that
100-volume-Spanish-one-whose-name-escapes-me-at-the-moment. It is not inconceivable that
within 5-20 years, just the English *encyclopedia* will be larger than the [[Siku
Quanshu]], which isn't even an encyclopedia! And the factor by which En is bigger than
even the nearest competitors is not a constant, but ever increasing (and the derivative of
this increase may even be accelerating). So even at the most pessimistic, the failure of
Wikipedia would merit a line in [[Encyclopedia]].
Further, Wikipedia is the largest [[wiki]] ever, the largest agglomeration of [[Free
content]] ever, the largest example of public participation in a scholarly project
(I'm sure we must have an article on this phenomenon somewhere, but I can't figure
out the right name to search for), etc.
I realize avoiding self-reference is a useful guideline since it's so easy to be
biased towards including Wikipedia-related trivia, but in this case (and others, such as
the Essjay article) I think peoples' urge to be NPOV have led them to disregard
manifest facts and to be biased in entirely the opposite direction.
....
- White Cat
--
gwern
GPMG Speakeasy humint GEODSS SORO M5 BROMURE ANC zone SBI DSS S.A.I.C. Minox