Andre Engels wrote:
"Stan Shebs" shebs@apple.com schrieb:
So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've thrown out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some way; London is in because it affects billions of people, the cat in the tree is out because it only affects the people on the street and the writer for the newspaper, 100 people tops.
I've been testing this mentally on various topics, and a number somewhere between 500 and 5,000 seems plausible. I don't think it would make sense to try and pick a number and impose it as a rule, but it makes a good sniff test for things that seem obscure. For instance, most consuls of ancient Rome are very obscure today, but once upon a time they ruled millions, and are for that reason encyclopedia-worthy.
I find this kind of rule little convincing. 'Affected' is much too ill-defined. My mailman delivered post to hundreds of addresses today. Leif Ericsson made a colony of a few dozen people in North America, and fought with what may have been not more than a similar number of natives there. So does this mean that my postman should be in, but Leif Ericson should be out? Don't think so...
Heh, that's why I haven't wrote it up on a [[Wikipedia:]] page. But speaking to your examples, I would refine "affects" to mean that which people are conscious of; the recipients of mail are not really aware of the postal carrier, and the maintenance person who fixes a phone switch and thereby enables a million people to make phone calls is still anonymous. Leif affects people via his story, which is taught to millions of students; thus his notability derives from being written about, just as it does for victims of sensational crimes - and voila, things are brought full circle. :-)
Stan