2008/10/7 geni geniice@gmail.com:
- Wikipedia is written to a large extent by the type of nerds who
like complete sets. Thus for example even stations so obscure that they never actually got built get a mention:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_London_Underground_stations#Central_Line...
We don't quite get as far as the stations that never actually existed (the secret BBC one for example) but I'm sure we will in time.
Hey, I know, I'm one of those nerds. I :-)
In all seriousness, we can distinguish between several types of incompleteness.
a) There's incomplete subject sets - having articles on 90% of towns in a country, or all but two Turkish prime ministers, or what have you - which is usually quite easy to find and to rectify. In the most basic case, after all, we just have to get a list from somewhere, turn it into redlinks, and cross out the entries one by one. It also tends to be an obvious hole - they'll be mentioned elsewhere but with no reference.
However, there's also more subtle types.
b) Incomplete topics. These come in two types; explicit and implicit.
b) i) An explicitly incomplete topic would be, say, an article on the history of a city which covered the seventeenth century and then didn't mention anything until 1890. We have a lot of these dotted around - it's immediately apparent to the reader that something is missing, because there's a gap. Perhaps we might have an article on a ship which talks about its history, but never mentions anything about its physical construction. Again, it's a reasonably obvious omission to the reader - they know that there ought to be something on an obvious topic.
b) ii) Alternatively, there's subtly incomplete topics. For example, an article about Kings Cross Station that doesn't mention the 1980s fire. The reader wouldn't know it had happened, so wouldn't know that they were missing anything. Perhaps an article on a politician that forgets to mention one of the cabinet posts they held, or omits their involvement in a particular cause celebre - things where you can read the article without immediately noticing something is missing.
(It's a little hard to give examples here without seeming silly - any case famous enough to be recognisable is so obvious that we would be really stupid not to notice we'd missed it out.)
c) Finally, the most insidious kind: incomplete perspectives. If you look at many of our articles on World War II, for example, you'll find that they're quite one-sided; they do describe accurately what happened, but they do so overwhelmingly from the "viewpoint" of one side. The Germans moved troops here, the Germans decided this and that; the Soviet opponents read as merely reacting. This is rarely intentional, and sometimes hard to rectify; often, it's simply a matter of what the available sources provide, and one set of data being much more detailed than another. This might be a full-blown NPOV issue - but, more often, it's something we don't even notice.
It's all the same "undue weight" problem, when you get down to it, but there are differences in the way we need to handle them.