Axel Boldt wrote:
Like I just did: a person is unimportant if his or her biography is interesting/useful to almost no one.
If a contributor finds it worth the while to write a bio on a person, then that person is apparently interesting to that contributor.
I thought that Wikipedia would be self-regulatory in this liberal manner, but the flood of messages on this list in the last month has focused on what should *not* be in the Wikipedia (stubs etc.). I think this is sad and destructive. I wanted the liberal approach, where anybody could write what they liked as long as Jimmy could afford the disk space. Wikipedia is a radically new approach to creating a useful knowledge resource, but everybody seems to be fully occupied with reaching some obsolete 19th century ideals of what an encyclopedia should be. I wouldn't be surprised if next week somebody suggests that Wikipedia articles should be arranged in alphabetic order (yet another obsolete notion). I think putting "pedia" in the name was a mistake. This could be the Memex or project Xanadu or your own Interpedia, which should be so much more than an old printed encyclopedia. Wikipedia should not be compared to Britannica. We should aim for 100 million articles, not 100 thousand.
Some new ideas that are coming out of the deletion discussion are really useful, such as deleting a single version of an article rather than the entire article.
However, I don't want to be the one to just complain. I run my own wiki in Swedish, completely liberal, without the pedia ambition and without "pedia" in the name. Now in its 11th month of existence, it has become the world's 3rd biggest wiki after the English Wikipedia and Ward Cunningham's c2.com, with 10,000 articles (comma count) out of 16,000 pages. In August it had 112 logged-in active contributors to 11,000 edits (minor and major). Page deletion is not allowed, and nobody urges me to implement it. Edit wars are under control. It gets media attention and everybody thinks it is fun, relaxed, and not overly serious. I've had no problems with copyright violations, which is probably explained by the fact that file uploads are not allowed. I have no mailing list, so discussion about policies and software are kept to a minimum, and everybody can focus on writing articles.
Mine might be the world's 3rd biggest wiki, but my other website is ten times larger, with 100,000 web pages full of Nordic literature, and ten times older, since it started in December 1992. Still, that is a small hobby website with only 300 electronic books, only 100 of which in facsimile, when compared to the big American "digital library" websites. We're only seeing the beginning yet. This should not be the time to discuss how to reduce the amount of contents.