"Stan Shebs" <shebs(a)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