New subject: Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

18 May 2005

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.

I don't wish to bring the school debate to this list right now.
However, I would like to discuss the include-everything view that I
have seen being used to justify including schools.

When I have exchanges like this:

-------------------
[[Wikipedia:Schools]]
** David, as we discussed on IRC, this rule would allow for the
creation of articles for a huge number of roadway intersections in the
US.. Plenty of official documentation at the city and state offices,
and Federal records in many cases, plus newspaper reports of
construction and accidents (just like schools). We could fill an
article up with trivia such as the frequency of accidents, time of
first construction... Photographs. Is this really acceptable in the
inclusionist agenda? Sure intersections are verifyable and NPOV, but
the vast majority of them are not notable. I encourage all who support
David's proposed rules, or similar proposed rulesets to reply. :)
--[[User:Gmaxwell|Gmaxwell]] 15:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

** Actually that sounds pretty cool. [[m:Wiki is not paper]]. Accident
data on road intersections could be very, very encyclopedic. Not sure
how feasible it would be, however. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony
Sidaway]]|[[User talk:Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 15:31, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
-----------------------

I must question if I really understand the point of Wikipedia.

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.

Most of the facts that are in Wikipedia (though to not all) were
available elseware on the internet prior to Wikipedia, but often a
quick google search wouldn't find them because they were in a wash of
cruft, random inaccurate uncorrectable information, and
advertisements. Today much of that information is easier to find
because of Wikipedia, a beautiful accomplishment, but one which may be
lost if we lower the barrier to entry to be sufficiently low as to
include anything that anyone can cite.

I think it would be useful to have a universal repository for
verifiable and neutrally reported trivia, but just as we use
Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia for word definitions and wikisources
for freely licensed reference works, we should put material which is
not substantially notable in it's own project which can cater to the
special needs of that material and the special costs of providing that
service.

I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was
a good strawman, ( :) ), 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).  ... The point is that I haven't
spammed wikipedia with this data because I believe it is completely
inappropriate for an Encyclopedia, and I imagine many other people
have a similar ability to produce endless quantities of non-notable
material if that what we thought wikipedia was supposed to contain. 
... Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not
wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?

So, I'd really appreciate some commentary on this... Am I in a
minority in expecting a criteria of notability to be used in our
judgement of encyclopedic merit, or should we really be including
every fact we can cite?