On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
It is a complicated issue, and "inclusionists" have a very good point: if it is verifiable, why not put it in the encyclopedia? It's not like inclusion of one article hurts another.
I am sympathetic to this point, I am, but I really think that it only goes so far. The truth is this: we *are* an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias should only contain entries that pass atleast some level of notability. Otherwise, if we let just any school, company, band, movie, tv-show character, &c in, we are creating notability that wasn't there before. An entry in an encyclopedia gives the subject some inherent notability. In my opinion, this is not desirable if we are acheive the standard of other encyclopedias. We should be careful to not let ourself devolve into some mass of facts, because that does devalue the things that really deserve an article.
What I'm saying is, on a longer timescale, using WP:V as the sole criteria for inclusion does hurt the encyclopedia as a whole. One mans opinion, anyway.
fortunetly we can mix it with NPOV to get "there must be enough stuf from [[WP:RS]] to produce a NPOV article" which means a reasonable number of sources.