[WikiEN-l] I'm disappointed in Wikipedia.

[David Goodman]

Mangoe,

Just to correct the numbers, i said full professors. at most
universities that's between 1/3 to 1/4 of the tenure track faculty.
There are about 150 Research Universities, in the US; 500 each is
75,000. There is of course, the rest of the world. General estimate is
that US = 1/2 the total faculty size at such universities. We can
handle that. We can handle 10 times that, or 100 times that, as far as
technology is concerned.  What we need is the editors.

Thing is, we can handle as many notable people as there are, and we
can set what level of notability we want in different areas of life. I
am perfectly prepared to let those interested put as many [whatever]
stars as they want using whatever criteria they want, as long as it's
consistent enough so that it looks like they know what they're doing
and they have some reliable basis to write the articles.

I'm not too concerned about the 21st century academics. Post google,
they'll take care of themselves. What I really want is those from the
previous 9 centuries. (or earlier in some parts of the world). I want
to have every last one for whom documentation can be found enough to
give the name and approximate date and subject and university and
whatever they may have written. The last serious try was in 1574--see
[[Conrad Gesner]] Technology has finally caught up. (As the size of
academic institutions has grown approximately exponentially world
wide, the dead do not greatly outnumber the living. I think the
numbers would be about equal.) I think I could find the editors too,
if they knew that their work wouldn't be destroyed on a whim.

I don't want to force you to enter them, but I want you to stop
removing them when I enter them.  How's that as a fair deal?

DGG

On 6/15/07, The Mangoe <the.mangoe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/14/07, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > Saying all university presidents are notable is just the first step
> > towards a sane policy, and one which has i think been taken--saying
> > all research university full professors are notable has also been
> > consistently maintained at AfD. There are some things about which
> > consensus does form in a sensible direction.
>
> Well, if everyone in a certain position is notable, then we could go
> forth and say that all positions are notable. At any rate, there are
> some 1400 tenure and tenure-track faculty at UMD. Harvard has more.
> That makes hundreds of thousands "notable", just counting present
> faculty; the dead of course hugely outnumber them. The survival of the
> project relies upon the lack of interest most people have in entering
> these directories (for that is what they will largely be).
>
> _______________________

-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.