[Foundation-l] About the low-hanging fruit

[Samuel Klein]

There is certainly a lot of low hanging fruit.

I don't think we've covered more than a few percent of the topics
currently considered notable.
We still have a factor of 10 or more to grow covering things that
others have already included in existing summaries and references.

But the parallel to Feynman's idea of "the bottom" might be verifiable
and locally important/notable things which until now have not been
included in encyclopedias for reasons of size and cost.  At that
level, we could grow another few magnitudes while still organizing and
sharing valuable knowledge.

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 6:05 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Most unilingual English editors are surprised by the vast quantity of
> low hanging fruit. Out of curiosity at one time I looked up the fairly
> common Spanish name "Reyes" in the original 70 volume "Enciclopedia
> universal ilustrada". I found 30 individuals there with that simple
> uncompounded surname. Only two of these appeared in the English
> Wikipedia, and only one of the two in the Spanish Wikipedia.

Remembering a discussion about Wiki Loves Monuments, I believe there
are around 1M European monuments... most don't have an article in any
language, or any mention at all in a wikipedia.  And yet there are
public lists that indicate briefly their existence, importance, and
basic information.

It might be useful to expand lists of "topics in <foo>" for various
existing data sources, such as publishers' or libraries' lists of
published works or art; major non-english encyclopedias; major
specialist encyclopedias; and lists of monuments or public works.

SJ