Stan Shebs wrote:
Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the family is Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates.
So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've thrown out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some way [...]
I believe this is being discuseed at someplace like [[Wikipedia:Criteria for inclusion of Biographies]]. Biographical entries seem to have the greatest potential for the addition of pointless trivia to the project. Much of this trivia is verifiable, as several recent article skirmishes have shown.
Simple, objective criteria for importance have been elusive, and it does not help that there isn't much agreement about the project mission in this area.
Jimbo Wales wrote:
For [articles so trivial as to deserve deletion] the least
controversial rule is confirmability.
That policy doesn't help the project much. Shall we modify the Rambot to upload the U.S. Census tapes prior to 1890 (or whatever year they are now available for)? There is all manner of data about people, that is arguably of interest to at least someone, since, after all, people pay for the tapes. And it may make more than a stub, in that census forms then as now asked a variety of questions other than name and address.
Similarly, some states now have property tax information on line, including photos. Shall we upload all this, and have an article on every address? "No, they would just be stubs!" "Then merge them into articles on each street in each town that can be 32k long!" Clearly importance of the topic becomes a criteria, not just verifiability.
Louis