My point is that far too often, it's not "someone else" doing the writing. Hence the use of the word vanity. We can be the most complete encyclopedia in the world without taking all of the incoming drivel. If there wasn't cut-offs then we could list all scientists (they're mostly listed on their university website or publication) it wouldn't be vanity because they didn't write it themselves, but if the scientist in question hasn't done any noted research we would only sooth their ego. If we didn't draw a line near professors, should PhDs be included, and if those are included we might as well start on students... Cut-offs are a healthy thing. There may be exceptions to the rule, but when sufficient information is included in an article it's easy to establish something needs inclusion. A band may not have done any tours, no albums or charted hits out and not have any notable members or awards, but if they appear on Oprah most people would agree they deserve an article regardless of [[WP:MUSIC]] regardless of missing the WP:MUSIC guidelines. It only gets problematic if people fail to provide enough information in the first place. You can't expect AFD voters to spend more than 10 minutes of research on their argument. In such a case simply expanding and providing such info to the voters is much more productive than arguing against deletion. --Mgm

On 03/10/05, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: And we're slowly inching towards making this coverage elsewhere - wikipedia-l had some discussion about "internationalising" the various rambot-like projects. It's not impossible, with the growing accessibility of census data, open geographical databases and the like, that we'll be able to have that level of coverage for all of the West within five years or so. It's surprising how many fields we can achieve completeness in. There are obvious things - biographies of all US presidents, say, or Nobel prizewinners, lists of all countries, articles on all known moons, that sort of thing. But given time, I expect to see an article covering every ship commissioned into the US or UK navies, for example - the framework is there, and people are slowly working on it. We currently have articles on every national election in the UK, Canada, and the US - and I suspect many others will follow. We have a framework in place for creating biographies for everyone returned by those elections. We have an article on every single manned spaceflight back to 1960, and I wouldn't be surprised to find one for every unmanned one in a few years time. We have the framework for articles on every major visible star, and indeed for every single named asteroid. That's quite a handful of very specialised reference works we'll have swallowed up and hardly noticed, and just mentioning the areas I've seen enough of to feel safe commenting on. And nary an inclusion debate in the lot. On the matter of completeness... a while back I bought a 1907 copy of Chambers' Biographical Dictionary, a massive collection of - well, {{bio-stub}}s. Repeatedly looking in it at random has so far turned up exactly two people who we didn't have articles already, and both of them we had as redlinks. I figure that says something. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk