Andrew Gray wrote:
And nary an inclusion debate in the lot.
I agree that most things won't draw such a debate, and even if a lot of
the articles proposed for deletions really are deletable there is still
that small obsessive group determined to preserve our "bodily humours"
in the manner of Dr. Strangelove. They need to be more sensitive to the
efforts of others, and to understand that many of these most bitter
disputes are not about what's in the articles, but about a small group
that wants to control the work of others.
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 have several of these myself, including Allen's "American Biorgaphical
Dictionary" from 1857, Lippincott's Gazeteer from 1872, and three
different editions of Haydn's Book of Dates. That's a lot of
fascinating material, but the ambition that I felt when I bought these
volumes is not matched by the time that I have to do anything about
them. :-)
Ec