Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
On 1/9/07, Michael Billington michael.billington@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Andre Engels wrote:
I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
is
that 50,000 would be too high a limit, I myself would be thinking of
2,000
or 5,000.
Absolutely. Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people. But for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000. Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too. But a lower limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one. Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than some very small places. But if you can point to the fact that a place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of mine.
However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links, such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
*And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just about every country
Michael Billington _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l