On 20/07/2011 10:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
I missed reading this thread when it was active,
but my own estimate of
what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
high.
Yes, that is one area where the material seems available to do much
more.
An estimate of 20,000,000 English
Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative. The amount of work
to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
police.
On the other hand, the number of active Wikipedians who know where their
next 1000 articles are coming from is quite small, IMX. The emphasis on
enWP is hardly on being prolific: quality is more highly rated than
quantity. That may not be wrong, of course, but to some extent these
things are a matter of personal taste, and should remain so. We could do
with better support of the "good stub" concept, I think: probably an
example of "tacit knowledge" about the site, in that editors who have
been around for a while know what that means, while the manual pages
have a different slant.
All discussions of the "notability" concept we use seem to end up with
the generally broken nature of the thing. It is just that there is no
snappy replacement. WP:GNG is a bit objectionable in the insistence on
"secondary sources"; it is not completely silly but is not that helpful
either when you start pushing the limits.
Perhaps this requires a clearer
description of what is essential to a
good stub.