On Mar 17, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
While I do agree with you on this article, your general point I find
very questionable. When did it become such a ridiculous idea that
subjects of articles in an *encyclopedia* should meet some criterion
of notability? That is the way encyclopedias always have been.
Argument from tradition seems to me difficult with Wikipedia.
Encyclopedias, after all, have always been written on paper, by
experts. Notability, in that case, was a factor of including only the
most important information - after all, if you add an article on
chicken hypnotism, you have to remove another article.
There are of course very pragmatic reasons for
requiring notability
(maintainability, privacy and original research, amongst others), but
there are very convincing philosophical arguments that convinces me
that it is a Good Thing. We are an encyclopedia first, everything else
second. With every decision we make, that should be our number 1
consideration. If we let non-encyclopedic topics in we will be a worse
encyclopedia, and therefore we shouldn't do it. How is that not all
that matters?
But see, this is where the argument gets strange - what's
"encyclopedic" is a factor of a restriction on paper encyclopedias
that we don't have. Since Wikipedia is vastly larger than any paper
encyclopedia, we've already clearly abandoned any standard of
encyclopedicness that can be derived from an external standard having
to do with "what encyclopedias are." The standards thus become very
much subjective - we delete articles, essentially, because a lot of
people don't like them, and describe this dislike in terms of whether
the article is encyclopedic.
The useful description is "if we let topics in that it is impossible
to write a good article about." But that has nothing to do with
notability as such.
-Phil
What we should be comparing ourselves to is the total sum of distinctive
articles in all paper encyclopedias including very specialised ones. We
would have to exclude topics for which there is no specialised
encyclopedia but where we have agreed to have articles. Has anyone done
that comparision?
When I look at some specialised encyclopedias in my speciualised areas,
we are still a long way short. Even on biographies of notable
scientists, we are still way behind.
Brian.
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Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au
[[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia.
Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity