On 03/10/05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I see both extremes as very BAD. Ferries may not appear notable to a random individual, but if they're the longest running one on a certain route, no one will doubt it needs inclusion. Animals, cities, scientists, and historical events are covered in regular encyclopedias, so we need to cover them too.
I see no reason any given field needs an *arbitrary* cutoff for the sake of having a cutoff. If we can achieve actual completeness in some area (e.g. articles on US towns), why the hell shouldn't we?
And we're slowly inching towards making this coverage elsewhere - wikipedia-l had some discussion about "internationalising" the various rambot-like projects. It's not impossible, with the growing accessibility of census data, open geographical databases and the like, that we'll be able to have that level of coverage for all of the West within five years or so.
It's surprising how many fields we can achieve completeness in. There are obvious things - biographies of all US presidents, say, or Nobel prizewinners, lists of all countries, articles on all known moons, that sort of thing.
But given time, I expect to see an article covering every ship commissioned into the US or UK navies, for example - the framework is there, and people are slowly working on it. We currently have articles on every national election in the UK, Canada, and the US - and I suspect many others will follow. We have a framework in place for creating biographies for everyone returned by those elections. We have an article on every single manned spaceflight back to 1960, and I wouldn't be surprised to find one for every unmanned one in a few years time. We have the framework for articles on every major visible star, and indeed for every single named asteroid. That's quite a handful of very specialised reference works we'll have swallowed up and hardly noticed, and just mentioning the areas I've seen enough of to feel safe commenting on.
And nary an inclusion debate in the lot.
On the matter of completeness... a while back I bought a 1907 copy of Chambers' Biographical Dictionary, a massive collection of - well, {{bio-stub}}s. Repeatedly looking in it at random has so far turned up exactly two people who we didn't have articles already, and both of them we had as redlinks.
I figure that says something.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk