[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism

[Daniel Mayer]

Adam Bishop wrote:
>Why not have entries about everyone who has ever died?  
>An encyclopedia with  billions of pages would be fine 
>because it's not paper, right? 

Wikipedia is not a phone book either. A person has to have had done something 
noteworthy to merit inclusion. Otherwise naming conflicts would be 
unmanageable and information on each non-famous person would be very 
difficult to confirm - we could not even pretend to try to be 'accurate' if 
we allowed information in Wikipedia that really can't be confirmed by 
independent sources. 

An encyclopedia is a comprehensive /summary/ of knowledge, or of a branch of 
knowledge. Sure Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of encyclopedias (meaning it is 
a concise, general, and many different specialized encyclopedias all 
rolled-up into one) with supporting almanac-like and gazetteer-like 
information, but it still does offer a summary of human knowedge, not an 
all-inclusive exhaustive regurgitation of even nearly impossible to confirm 
human knowledge.  

My cats' names are Beybey, Mougie and Merlin - that's part of human knowledge, 
but damn near impossible for anybody outside my circle of friends and family 
to confirm.  It also isn't interesting outside that sphere either. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)