Stan Shebs wrote:
Beware of genealogical publications though. My
mother's side of the
family is
Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.
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 [...]
I believe this is being discuseed at someplace like [[Wikipedia:Criteria
for inclusion of Biographies]]. Biographical entries seem to have the
greatest potential for the addition of pointless trivia to the project.
Much of this trivia is verifiable, as several recent article skirmishes
have shown.
Simple, objective criteria for importance have been elusive, and it does
not help that there isn't much agreement about the project mission in
this area.
Jimbo Wales wrote:
For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the
least
controversial rule is confirmability.
That policy doesn't help the project much. Shall we modify the Rambot
to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to 1890 (or whatever year they are
now available for)? There is all manner of data about people, that is
arguably of interest to at least someone, since, after all, people pay
for the tapes. And it may make more than a stub, in that census forms
then as now asked a variety of questions other than name and address.
Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line,
including photos. Shall we upload all this, and have an article on
every address? "No, they would just be stubs!" "Then merge them into
articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!" Clearly
importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.
Louis