Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of notoriety applied. My perspective is that while that might be a good set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized composits rather than paper.
Notoriety and notability are different conmcepts.
Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next one)..... Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound. I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without compromise.
I didn't realize that one of the aims of Wikipedia was to have a database small enough to be dumped entirely on anybody's drive. I suspect that most passive users have no need or desire for such a dump. Omitting the articles that you would like to see left out will slow the growth of database a little, but that will only delay the time before it won't fit on your pocket computer. When it comes to third world equipment, I'm sure that we have long since exceeded the capacity of that equipment. As to Wikimedia's own capacity for storing information, I would find the request "Slow down, we have too much stuff," more credible if it came from our senior developers.
I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was a good strawman, ( :) )
I'm glad to here that, but others may see it differently. Perhaps you could dispel those misunderstandings by providing data on the number of articles about such intersections that have been contributed to Wikipedia.
I also choose it because I'm aware of the level of information available, and could actually create a lot of these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs, construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial intersections with the data I have).
Fantastic!
Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?
I don't think that dumping material that you don't like into any other project is a friendly act unles you have an agreement with the people involved in that project.
Ec