[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - An infinite number of lists

[Fred Bauder]

You greatly underestimate the efficiency of our deletion procedure and its capacity to adapt. Faced with a plethora of lists, it will kick into gear. Such lists are usually original research anyway. Who publishes such lists? 

Fred

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Santora [mailto:bobolozo at yahoo.com]
>Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 08:20 PM
>To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia - An infinite number of lists
>
>The number of articles which Wikipedia can have is
>limited by the number of at least marginally notable
>and verifiable things which exist.  After every
>notable person, place, movie, scientific topic, and so
>on have their own article, we'll run out of things to
>write about.  Whether this will happen at 2 million, 3
>million, 4 million, it will happen.
>
>On the other hand, the potential number of lists is
>almost infinite, as there are a virtually unlimited
>number of ways of slicing up portions of reality.
>
>For example, one could make a "List of birds native to
>the Chicago area".  If it were nicely wikified and
>contained a reasonable number of items on it, it would
>certainly not be deleted.
>
>However, what you've actually done is create the first
>example of "List of X's native to the Y area", where X
>is any one of dozens or hundreds of types of
>creatures... insects, mammals, amphibians, trees,
>flowers, and so on, while Y is any one of tens of
>thousands of towns, cities, states, counties,
>countries, provinces, geographic areas, and so on.
>
>Multiply 100 X's by 50,000 Y's, and you get 5 million
>lists.
>
>Take the roughly 500,000 of our article topics which
>have been mentioned enough times in popular culture to
>make up a list, and you get 500,000 "X in popular
>culture" articles.
>
>Take every one of the tens of thousands of diseases
>which exist, find evidence of notable people who have
>had the disease, and you get 25,000 "List of people
>who have had disease X" articles.
>
>And so on, and so on, and so on.
>
>Even removing the obvious silly and ridiculous lists,
>like "List of blind left-handed Canadians who have
>worn blue jeans" still leaves us with more reasonable
>sounding lists than any of ever imagined we would
>have.
>
>End result: en.Wikipedia, in the year 2050, will have
>5 million articles, and 500 million lists.
>
>
> 
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