Jimmy Wales wrote:
For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least controversial rule is confirmability.
That policy doesn't help the project much.
Is it that it doesn't help much, or that you don't like the answer that it gives? Do you see what I'm asking, here?
It seems to me that most objections to confirmability is that it doesn't encourage us to delete stuff that the objector would like to see deleted.
I gave up on Wikipedia being an encyclopedia long ago. It's not; it's merely an aggregation of articles. As a consequence of giving up the vision of an encyclopedia, I no longer have any interest in having things deleted. So, no, I myself don't seek out the deletion of anything.
We write articles reasonably well, with many excellent examples; further, the work of many have made for some excellent topic areas, particularly in the sciences.
Perhaps someday there will be interest in editing these articles into an encyclopedia.
Encyclopedias are unique works that share certain characteristics beyond topical breadth and NPOV: - They are secondary source works; - They are comprehensible to a lay person; - They are edited for a certain uniformity of style and content across articles; - They cover topics that in nearly all cases can be checked and researched further in any undergraduate college library - They are editorial in nature, that is, they are not mere aggregations of data such as sports scores or stock prices - They serve a specific niche in a reference collection, with other publications having related roles.
At present, Wikipedia is a repository and means for consensus editing for a wide variety of articles, perhaps putting it somewhere next to UseNet and GeoCities in 'netspace.
Also, we need not make policy for imagined problems that don't really exist. If lots and lots of people start adding confirmable but allegedly pointless information, *to the point where it looks likely to cause some actual problem* (like excessive namespace collisions, or a cluttered search engine), then we will have a problem.
If someone asks "Can I make a bot to upload the Census tapes?" we will just say no, but this has little to do with the current discussion, I think.
The main problem, as I have stated in earlier posts, is that the effort involved on the part of others to verify such trivia is high enough that it doesn't get done, so the trivial articles remain, unchecked and in most cases, inaccurate. Do you think that is benign? Moreover, this sort of policy issue is at the root of most of the ongoing friction at VfD. Imagined problems, indeed.
(If someone wants to start making a point by entering a bunch of information about their ancestors, I'll remind them that I am all in favor of social pressure to not do such a thing, and not absolutely opposed to deletion in specific cases designed specifically to troll us!)
Is it really too much work to try to agree on some sort of policy rather than have to start the conversation from the beginning for each and every case?
Louis