On 08/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 7, 2008, at 1:02 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
On 07/03/2008, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
and scope.
Which should be "everything that exists."
We already have that project under way. It's called the 'Internet'.
Please feel free to use it instead of projects that try for more uniformly higher quality such as the wikipedia.
That's unfair on a number of levels.
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
The problem with our plot summaries and trivia sections has little to nothing to do with their quality - in fact, they're usually quite good for plot summaries and lists of odd connections.
Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher.
Encyclopedias are not an exact science, and never will be.
-Phil