Adam Bishop wrote:
Why not have entries about everyone who has ever died? An encyclopedia with billions of pages would be fine because it's not paper, right?
Wikipedia is not a phone book either. A person has to have had done something noteworthy to merit inclusion. Otherwise naming conflicts would be unmanageable and information on each non-famous person would be very difficult to confirm - we could not even pretend to try to be 'accurate' if we allowed information in Wikipedia that really can't be confirmed by independent sources.
An encyclopedia is a comprehensive /summary/ of knowledge, or of a branch of knowledge. Sure Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of encyclopedias (meaning it is a concise, general, and many different specialized encyclopedias all rolled-up into one) with supporting almanac-like and gazetteer-like information, but it still does offer a summary of human knowedge, not an all-inclusive exhaustive regurgitation of even nearly impossible to confirm human knowledge.
My cats' names are Beybey, Mougie and Merlin - that's part of human knowledge, but damn near impossible for anybody outside my circle of friends and family to confirm. It also isn't interesting outside that sphere either.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)