On Wed, 28 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
That sounds about right to me. For example, the current Mayor of Athens, Georgia, U.S. I doubt if we have an article about that person, but I see no reason why we shouldn't.
Okay, there's a bit of a fight over [[Sarah Marple-Cantrell]].
She's a 12-year-old girl who killed herself, and has a Web presence of little more than one local news article and one tribute site. So she's rather more obscure than the Mayor of Athens, Georgia, I expect. However, using Stan Shebs's "thousand-person rule", she could qualify. I'm sure everyone with a family member at her school (say 300ish pupils * 4 family members each) would have been affected by a suicide taking place in their school, and possibly a fair proportion of local people in Addison, Texas (pop. 14,166).
However, Erik's constraint that articles shouldn't be such that they will always remain stubs would probably disqualify it, if we accept his wish for articles to be 20,000 to 30,000 characters in length. It is currently less than 2,000 characters long. It could be expanded using the news article and whatever is sufficiently trustworthy on the tribute site, and padded with some relevant background about the school and neighbourhood and so on, but it would probably still be under 10,000 characters.
But isn't this length business just a matter of personal taste? Personally, I find long articles quite off-putting. [[Charles Darwin]], for example, only just barely qualifies as a decently sized article according to Erik, while I think it could do with being split into separate sections.
Clearly I don't have Erik's attention span. :) But do we *really* want articles that are over 10,000 characters long? And if so, why? I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it a daunting task to try to edit long articles, especially if there is major restructuring to be done. If we want Wikipedia to be open to everyone, and easy to edit, I think we should seriously consider aiming for shorter articles everywhere. A reader who wants to read 30K of information about a subject would still be able to; they'd have to read three articles instead of one, maybe, but it would only involve two clicks of the mouse...
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+