[WikiEN-l] Schools, notability, inclusionism, deletionism, etc.

[Daniel R. Tobias]

There's been some discussion here lately on the desirability of 
including or deleting the article for some smallish private school.  
Actually, it's my impression that, over the couple of years I've been 
involved with the project, Wikipedia has been steadily moving in the 
direction of inclusionism in a number of subject areas, including 
schools, roads, pop music, and TV episodes.  A while back, something 
had to be highly notable to be included in those subjects, but now 
there are articles on county roads, middle schools, upcoming as-yet-
unnamed pop albums, etc.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing?  At least in some areas, 
where there are bounded categories that are (fairly) well defined 
(one can always expect there will be a few edge cases though), 
there's some value to aiming for having a complete set of articles, 
even if some of them are of marginal notability and don't have all 
that much to be said about them.  Some past U.S. vice presidents are 
pretty obscure now, but it would be good to have all of them anyway 
(do we?)  We've got articles on all the popes (and various antipopes 
as well), though some of the early ones have practically no known 
facts beyond their regnal names and (sometimes approximate) dates of 
office.  We've got all the U.S. census-listed places, thanks to an 
early "bot" run, and probably should aim to get similarly complete 
coverage of the rest of the world, even including remote villages of 
tiny population; it's useful in the aggregate to be able to look up 
any place (particularly when this is integrated into applications 
where you can click on a spot on a map for more information).

So, should we be just as complete for schools, albums, songs, TV 
shows, and so on?  Would that just be duplicating IMDB, etc., or 
would it be helping to make Wikipedia a one-stop resource for more in-
depth info (including links where appropriate to other sites like 
IMDB) on everything in each of these fields?

-- 
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