Why did the articles in Brittania keep getting shorter? Because printing on paper costs money. Storage on the Internet is  free by comparison. - So why do our editors insist on reducing what might be an interesting article down to something so brief it might as well be on paper in a book that will be recycled in a few years - or deleting content completely? This whole idea of editing for brevity and notability came from the TRADITIONAL encyclopedia business...  Wikipedia was supposed to be the opposite - big enough to include anything of importance to people. It is socially and historically interesting to compare very old edition of Brittanica to a newer edition. For example: an entry on battleships would evolve from a discussion of wooden ships powered by sail that enforced seapower of an empire to sidewheelers, to iron ships fired by coal to the current thinking that battleships are too expensive. In an online encyclopedia it is possible to include all these articles side by side into a section on the evolution of battleships. I find it bizarre that inclusion of information of local importance is encouraged in the internationalized local language wikipediae but discouraged in the U.S. English wikipedia.  So events of local interest in a town in Romania are desirable but the same cannot be said of a similar event in San Jose, California. On 3/14/2012 1:15 AM, foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org wrote: _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I find it bizarre that inclusion of information of local importance is encouraged in the internationalized local language wikipediae but discouraged in the U.S. English wikipedia.  So events of local interest in a town in Romania are desirable but the same cannot be said of a similar event in San Jose, California.