On Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 09:52:30PM -0400, Philip Sandifer wrote:
On Mar 17, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
While I do agree with you on this article, your general point I find very questionable. When did it become such a ridiculous idea that subjects of articles in an *encyclopedia* should meet some criterion of notability? That is the way encyclopedias always have been.
Argument from tradition seems to me difficult with Wikipedia. Encyclopedias, after all, have always been written on paper, by experts. Notability, in that case, was a factor of including only the most important information - after all, if you add an article on chicken hypnotism, you have to remove another article.
There are of course very pragmatic reasons for requiring notability (maintainability, privacy and original research, amongst others), but there are very convincing philosophical arguments that convinces me that it is a Good Thing. We are an encyclopedia first, everything else second. With every decision we make, that should be our number 1 consideration. If we let non-encyclopedic topics in we will be a worse encyclopedia, and therefore we shouldn't do it. How is that not all that matters?
But see, this is where the argument gets strange - what's "encyclopedic" is a factor of a restriction on paper encyclopedias that we don't have. Since Wikipedia is vastly larger than any paper encyclopedia, we've already clearly abandoned any standard of encyclopedicness that can be derived from an external standard having to do with "what encyclopedias are." The standards thus become very much subjective - we delete articles, essentially, because a lot of people don't like them, and describe this dislike in terms of whether the article is encyclopedic.
The useful description is "if we let topics in that it is impossible to write a good article about." But that has nothing to do with notability as such.
-Phil
What we should be comparing ourselves to is the total sum of distinctive articles in all paper encyclopedias including very specialised ones. We would have to exclude topics for which there is no specialised encyclopedia but where we have agreed to have articles. Has anyone done that comparision?
When I look at some specialised encyclopedias in my speciualised areas, we are still a long way short. Even on biographies of notable scientists, we are still way behind.
Brian.
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End of WikiEN-l Digest, Vol 44, Issue 140