On Fri, 9 Nov 2007 03:56:39 -0800, "Matthew Brown" morven@gmail.com wrote:
We obviously see it differently; I looked at the size of the country, saw it was a smaller population than my home town, contextualised it with the papers in my home town, and went from there. The entire circulation of that paper would not even half fill the football ground in my home town.
True, but - I'm not sure that this is always a valid approach. Notability doesn't always scale with population like that. (Especially in a historical sense, when the entire population of nations might not have fit in a decent-sized modern football ground, way back when)
Well, yes, with hindsight and looking directly at it (rather than tangentially from something else). On the other hand, what we have even now is just a directory entry. But I am going to try *really hard* not to care...
Webcomics at least have the useful property of being largely harmless if excessively covered within Wikipedia. Really, I suspect, it's way too recent a phenomenon to be truly able to give them proper context. However, if it's an area that becomes crufty, only webcomics nuts probably will notice or care. Over-representation is one of the lesser issues in our project, I feel.
I envy your sanguine attitude. I find it hard not to get wound up when a band that /just/ scrapes by notability by having all of two press mentions immediately gets a category, its own Wikiproject and an article on each member and every single thing it ever recorded. OK, a slight exaggeration, but only slight. We have many articles on sub-sub-subgenre bands (anything with "core" at the end and any variant of death metal, as a first approximation); being Uzbekistan's no. 1 melodic symphonic deathgrindcore band is only significant if there exist nos. 2 down to at least a couple of hundred.
I wish I could be persuaded that these zealous fanboys will one day contribute to something I consider worthwhile - but I can't really complain too much as I'm too cheap to shell out for a copy of Grove to help me with the things I think are worth covering.
Right now I am trying very very hard to learn to just walk away from the obsessives, but being an obsessive myself I find it very difficult.
Guy (JzG)