Jimmy Wales wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
[[Ambassadors from the United States]] and [[Ambassadors to the United States]] are quite likely the pages you want. The latter doesn't exist yet, and both may need renaming, but there is no reason why they could not hold the information in question. There is no reason to remove such information altogether.
I'm usually a 'completionist' not a 'deletionist' but in some cases, the work to continue including and updating some information probably isn't the best use of our time.
I too believe in a completionist philosophy. More than a very small number of people on an ambassador list may be enough to move it into a pathetic little stub of its own. Sooner or later somebody will find that stub, have pity on it, and improve it. Updates will work in a similar way.
One difference that we have from a paper encyclopedia is we cannot apply obsolescence as evenly as they do. Everything on the 1911 EB is now uniformly 92 years old. We have and can maintain variable obsolescence. We may at some point have a five year old list of US ambasadors, but we CAN update it when somebody (perhaps some newby) is so inclined. I agree that for most of us updating this kind of information is not the best use of our time, but this is a personal choice. It may be absolutely true for you and me, and probably true for most experienced Wikipedians. We do have the principle of "always leave something undone".
One suggestion that I would have for people inclined to work on ambassador lists, is that they should try to show appointment dates This will always leave an at-a-glance impression of just how obsolete an article is.
Ec