On 03/10/05, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I see both
extremes as very BAD. Ferries may not appear notable to a
random individual, but if they're the longest running one on a certain
route, no one will doubt it needs inclusion. Animals, cities,
scientists, and historical events are covered in regular
encyclopedias, so we need to cover them too.
I see no reason any given field needs an *arbitrary* cutoff for the
sake of having a cutoff. If we can achieve actual completeness in some
area (e.g. articles on US towns), why the hell shouldn't we?
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