Björn Lindqvist wrote:
Which leads me to another question I've been aching(sp?) to ask for quite some time. When is an article to narrow or not important enough to be on Wikipedia? Are there any rules or policies explaining it?
There are virtually no rules or policies. There are a handful of customs, not always followed.
1. *We* aren't worthy of enclopedia articles, nor are our families, but of course there could be exceptions. If nothing else, this sort of perhaps-feigned modesty keeps us from having to have embarassing discussions with people, explaining to them that they really aren't famous, or anyhow that their cats aren't. :-)
2. Verifiability rises to the level of a rule or policy, and often acts as a perfectly decent 'excuse' for eliminating topics that lack any tidbit of universal appeal. A lot of unencyclopedic stuff is also completely unverifiable in standard resources, online or off. My mother taught music lessons starting in 1963. I could prove it, if I could get to my parents house and dig up old photos and recital programs, but it isn't verifiable in the usual sense. But really, it isn't of encyclopedic interest, either.
3. If you're going to auto-bot add a lot of listings -- like the Rambot city entries, then uh, I think there's a rule about discussing it first, but anyhow, it's important to get feedback before doing so. This tends to keep obscurities out.
(Imagine, for example, stub articles for every Usenet newsgroup. There could be thousands of them. An automated system could probably 'write' a pretty decent article about them. But that would suck, and surely someone should discuss it *extensively* before doing it.)
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As to adding information on elections, even local elections, I don't see why not. Wiki Is Not Paper, after all. We have "room" for a LOT more stuff than a paper encyclopedia. Not all of that stuff could possibly make the cut someday for a paper version, but it's still perfectly o.k. in Wikipedia proper.
--Jimbo