Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com writes in Message-ID: 2008Jun02.0717.scs.0003@eskimo.com
Mark Nilrad wrote:
Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
bobolozo wrote:
A small fishing village in Cambodia, or a community of 100 people in Kenya, may well have no internet access at all, and if they have it, they would not likely be visiting the English wikipedia as they wouldn't likely speak English.
Hmm. By the same token, I guess we shouldn't have articles on [[Troy], [[Pompeii]], [[Neolithic Europe]], [[Xanadu]], [[Atlantis]], or [[Mars]].
You're missing the point. I think anyone can agree that Troy and Pompeii have much more global significance than X fishing village, Cambodia.
Um, no, you missed my point. Arguing about notability or "global significance" is one thing. But it makes no sense to bring up the question of whether the location of an article has Internet access, or how many people there might speak English.
Hallelujah! Notability is a set of crufty guideline and no more. "When you wonder what should or should not be in [wikipedia], ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an *encyclopedia*."
Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I remember it there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page of places with coordinates. If all the bot does is add 2 million stubs, aka gazetteer entries, that's fine. I'd expect a non-paper encyclopedia to have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise possibly of use to readers. If 10% of them are expanded into "proper" encyclopedia articles, that's fine too, we're 200K real articles to the better.
Yes, there are lots of questions to answer about data quality and implementation details, but as far as I can see, this is a win, win deal. Creating even gazetteer-quality geostubs from scratch is quite time consuming. Even translating place stubs from another language is not all that simple thanks to all the template discrepancies and the fact that administrative district X has a different name. Let a bot do the scut work. That's what they are for.
Angus
Angus wrote:
Hallelujah! Notability is a set of crufty guideline and no more. "When you wonder what should or should not be in [wikipedia], ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an *encyclopedia*."
Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I remember it there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page of places with coordinates... I'd expect a non-paper encyclopedia to have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise possibly of use to readers.
Just so. We should remember that "notability", and our attempts to objectify it via reference to second-party reliable sources, are only means to an end. The end goal is: utility to our readers. Get hung up on notability if you like, but the encyclopedic inclusivity criterion I like to use is, "Might someone ever look this up and expect/want/need to find this information?
On Mon, 2 Jun 2008, Steve Summit wrote:
Just so. We should remember that "notability", and our attempts to objectify it via reference to second-party reliable sources, are only means to an end. The end goal is: utility to our readers. Get hung up on notability if you like, but the encyclopedic inclusivity criterion I like to use is, "Might someone ever look this up and expect/want/need to find this information?
I'm sure plenty of people have expected to find information about TV episodes and characters.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Mon, 2 Jun 2008, Steve Summit wrote:
Just so. We should remember that "notability", and our attempts to objectify it via reference to second-party reliable sources, are only means to an end. The end goal is: utility to our readers. Get hung up on notability if you like, but the encyclopedic inclusivity criterion I like to use is, "Might someone ever look this up and expect/want/need to find this information?
I'm sure plenty of people have expected to find information about TV episodes and characters.
Indeed. When someone goes to Google or Yahoo or whatever and does a search for something, if there's not a good Wikipedia article about it in the results that should almost always count as a failure on our part IMO. The focus some people have on deliberately limiting our scope and reducing our content is not easy to comprehend sometimes.
2008/6/2 Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net:
On Mon, 2 Jun 2008, Steve Summit wrote:
Just so. We should remember that "notability", and our attempts to objectify it via reference to second-party reliable sources, are only means to an end. The end goal is: utility to our readers. Get hung up on notability if you like, but the encyclopedic inclusivity criterion I like to use is, "Might someone ever look this up and expect/want/need to find this information?
I'm sure plenty of people have expected to find information about TV episodes and characters.
Quite. Applying the same logic to the FritzpollBot articles as was/is being applied to episodes & characters, it's only a matter of time before individual articles will be moved and redicrected to hundreds of thousands of articles like [[List of cities, towns and villages in Badakhshan Province]], which will then be further reduced to [[List of provinces in Afghanistan]] before being nominated for deletion. :)
It'd be funny it it weren't so sad.
Michel
Angus McLellan wrote:
Now I haven't seen a print Britannica in years, but as I remember it there were one (or more) gazetteer volumes, page after page of places with coordinates. If all the bot does is add 2 million stubs, aka gazetteer entries, that's fine. I'd expect a non-paper encyclopedia to have a bloody huge list of places, inhabited or otherwise possibly of use to readers. If 10% of them are expanded into "proper" encyclopedia articles, that's fine too, we're 200K real articles to the better.
That sounds like a better argument for list articles than hundreds of thousands of stubs. As you noted, Britannica doesn't list them among the normal articles, but in a separate set of gazetteer volumes.
If *all* we have is coordinates and maybe population, then we could certainly have something like [[List of cities, towns, and villages in SomeProvince, SomeCountry]] with lines like: * [[SomeCity]], pop. 1234 (coord x) * ... But there's no real reason to create a separate article at SomeCity until we have something more than that.
This is what we do with people too, generally. For example I *could* take a bot and expand all the redlinks in [[List of mayors of Houston]] to one-line stubs like: '''Neal Pickett''' was mayor of Houston from 1941 to 1942. '''Otis Massey''' was mayor of Houston from 1943 to 1946. ...
But I don't because that would be silly.
-Mark
For Michel's email to be followed up by Mark's email is almost too much. Was that planned?
Nathan
Nathan wrote:
For Michel's email to be followed up by Mark's email is almost too much. Was that planned?
Although we're both talking about lists, we're talking about somewhat different things. He's objecting to the listification of, for example, episodes of TV series and characters in movies, when we actually do have enough to at least write a short paragraph on each---instead they get merged into a huge article with a bunch of one- and two-paragraph sections. He objects to proposals to do this for cities as well.
I tend to be a bit of an inclusionist so I also object to that---if there's enough to write at least a small paragraph I'd prefer a separate article. But I also think it's a bit silly to article-ify what is literally a single line in a 3-element table. If we want to do that, I could easily create tens of thousands of articles just by expanding our redlink lists automatically. In addition to lists of officeholders, virtually any article on a family or genus of living thing, for example, could have all its redlink species lists expanded out into stubs saying: '''''Genus species''''', commonly known as '''common name''', is a species of [[general type]]. But what good would this mass creation do anything except the article count? If all we have is a list of species of ''genus'', with their binomial name and common name, and nothing else, why not just put the list in the article on the genus as a redlist and wait until we get some more information to write separate articles?
Now if we had a stubbish but not just-database-entry article on each of those minor species, I'd oppose an unnecessary merge into [[List of minor passerine bird species]] or something, which is another matter.
-Mark