On 10/22/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 10/22/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
One wouldn't be a problem, and neither would ten thousand. We've got thousands of articles on unremarkable cities, and I don't see a problem with that either. Anthony
The Rambot articles shouldn't be compared to other topic classes that contain articles on "non-notable" topics.
Taken as a group, the Rambot articles are _reasonably_ comprehensive (they include virtually every U. S. city, not just a minuscule percentage of them); uniform in style, content, and quality; and derive from good (though uncited) sources.
If anything I think that only makes my point stronger. If we have the resources to maintain an article on virtually every U.S. city, then
surely
we have the resources to maintain an article on a tiny fraction of the garage bands in the world.
Except that we actually have data that the subjects of the Rambot articles existed (censuses and the like). We have no way of verifying the existence of many garage bands.
I don't know why this agument keeps coming up because there's pretty much no one who's arguing that we should keep articles on unverifiable garage bands. The disagreement is over what to do with verifiable articles on garage bands.
I have two or three reasons for deleting things: violates [[WP:NOT]]
(eg. dicdef, spam, advertisment), violates [[WP:NOR]] (eg. lacks references, terminal POV problems), or is a CSD. Lately I've tried to work out where "article makes no claim of notability" and "article is unverifiable" - I think NOR covers these, but there's probably some overlap with WP:NOT as well.
Comparing Rambot articles to other topic classes is perfectly fine as
long
as you limit your comparison to the proper aspects. Frankly, I think the uniformity in style, content, and quality is a bad thing, but that
wasn't
related to the thread I was making the comparison in.
I don't. Uniformity in articles in a certain topic area is a Good Thing, because it lets readers (and editors) know what the article /should/ be like. We have the Manual of Style so that articles are presented in a logical manner; David Gerard has made much better arguments than I ever could about why we need a uniform and concise writing style.
Take a look at the unedited Rambot articles then take a look at the ones which have been heavily edited. Now tell me which you think the articles *should* be like.
I think the whole style, content and scope debate is best summed up as:
articles in Wikipedia should be Sane, Safe and Consensual.
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