Axel Boldt wrote:
What's your quantifiable metrics of "interesting", "useful", and "almost no one"?
Did I say I have or need one?
I actually tend to agree with Axel here. I think it would be difficult to specify a quantifiable metric, but I also think that this doesn't preclude us from acknowledging the general point.
For the 9/11 victims, if someone were to challenge an entry by saying "Who is this person? Why is this person's biography interesting or useful? Who cares?" then there's an answer: "This person is one of many _otherwise_ ordinary people who was a victim of an event of first-rank historical importance. Part of what makes his story interesting is precisely that he was so uninteresting (from a encyclopedic perspective, not, obviously to his friends and loved ones) before."
I do think that if someone starts writing dozens of biographies of random people who are not of any encyclopedic importance, not even tangentially as in the present case, we'll have to worry about how to deal with it.
But this is surely just a specific example of a more general problem we will face eventually, i.e. as all of the 'important' topics are covered, we will find that people are more and more writing on 'unimportant' topics, moving from the histories of big cities to the histories of small towns to the histories of each particular anonymous bland subdivision, to the history of Del Boca Vista West Phase III.
It'll be pretty exciting if we get to the point where the only things left to do are have ideological fights over existing articles on controversial subjects, add articles on new inventions, and add articles on useless topics. At that time, I think a significant proportion of volunteer energy will turn naturally towards "packaging" the raw content for various purposes. (For example, a paper version would have space constraints which would demand that we leave things out that are in the raw version.)
--Jimbo