On 01/09/04 at 08:07 PM, erik_moeller@gmx.de (Erik Moeller) said:
Already it is often very difficult to get rid of pages that contain nothing but trivia. You may feel that enumerating all the things in the world in which the number "101" appears is valuable, I think it is worthless trivia. I think that my view is supported by every legitimate philosophical understanding of the terms "knowledge" and "encyclopedia" (the latter being a sum of the former).
If we remove the VfD process entirely it will become even more difficult to remove these pages, and we will stray away even further from our goal of being an encyclopedia. Instead, our new goal will then be to be a loose collection of provably true statements. E.g. it is a true statement that the number 101 apperas in the film title "101 Dalmatians", but it is hardly of encyclopedic value. Such a collection is much harder to maintain and much more likely to be inconsistent than a true encyclopedia, and I also believe it tarnishes our reputation, because we claim to be something which we are clearly not.
These are excellent points. I think the concept of what is "encyclopedic knowledge" needs to be made more explicit. For my part, I feel I know it when I see it -- and correspondingly I know unencyclopedic material when I see it but I can't rationally explain what the difference it is -- it is an inituition. I've taken information out of articles which I consider "unencyclopedic" but when confronted about this I can't explain why.
V.