It's not just having a complete set--though that surely matters. (We can have a complete set by other means too, such as combination articles with enough information about the individual parts). It's also about consistency--the particular items kept are not necessarily the most important of them--our precision of deciding at AfD is nowhere near that good, and will never be while we refuse to recognize precedent. Lack of consistency makes us look incompetent to do the real work of building a good encyclopedia. Even more, it's about the practical operation of WP. The work of arguing each individual article is excessive. It's particularly hard to defend under the current system, for it's much easier to nominate and say all of this needs to be sourced, than to defend, and source all of it, while indefinitely repeated AfDs are accepted until an article is finally deleted. We could save all this trouble, and all this conflict, and have time for writing and improving articles, and stay on better terms with each other, if we accepted the notability of these sorts of articles. But as we do that, we should also accept the lack of nobility of other sorts of articles. (baring special individual circumstances). We do that with such things as bus stations, and elementary schools. Think if we had to delete each article on an elementary school at AfD rather than Prod! What we did is simple clear distinctions, adopted by true gneral consensus, not vague general rules that have to be individually interpreted for each of the 2 or 3 thousand articles a day. That, and mutual tolerance. I'll accept your computer games, if you accept my theologians.
On 12/21/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/22/07, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
When we have 90% or 95% of a set, the remaining 5% in many ways are significant and worth writing about simply for the value in having a complete set.
I'd set the bar lower. 70%. Maybe even 50%.
This does remind me of the time I wrote an article about a minor New Zealand skifield, and it was AfD'd on NN grounds. However, every single other skifield had an article, and was apparently notable. It sort of made that skifield notable by virtue of its unique status of non-notability...
Which is why we have articles on tiny townships, on nonentity politicians, on Popes who never even got ordained and died after five weeks*. Because being able to say "we have them *all*" makes us a better encyclopedia.
Hell yeah.
Steve
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