On 13/03/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:
If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5 million other articles
This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri, the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally important to and for what?
You could do a straw poll, you could check sources, you could google it. There's lots of ways to do that; including weighted combinations of the above and others. None of them are perfect, but what ever is?
Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two million concepts.
I completely disagree.
It provides a cut-off. It says some things do not make the grade and others do, just like an exam gives a pass-fail mark. It's not that exams are perfect measures, it's simply that exams give a *reasonable* measure. And yes, an exam does compare.
It's only when you try to push things to extreme, to insist that something *has* to be a *perfect* measure that bad things start to occur. That leads to extreme inclusionism and extreme deletionism.
-Phil