[WikiEN-l] 2007 Nobel Prizes and the Completeness of Wikipedia

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Eugene van der Pijll wrote

> Actually, it's not just "some of these" who have slightly differently
> named articles; I've just created 13 redirects, which accounts for
> almost half of your missing articles. So that would mean you can halve
> your estimate to 15,000 missing biographies.
> 
> (And don't edit that page to correct names; one should never do that if
> a page uses an alternate but correct spelling. Create a redirect!)

Right. This whole 'completeness' discussion prompts me to say something about 'sieving'. This is the basic required technique for finding topics. That is, we have

Stone Age technique: think of a topic, look it up in WP, oh it's there.

Sieving technique: think of an area. Compile a list of topics for the whole area. Post a project page of links, and first look at the redlinks. 'Sieve' by first treating them all as potential redirects. When the easy redirects have been filled in, reconsider the list (checking the blue links to see if they need disambiguation). You now have a good list of working topics.

I would then regard it as sensible challenge to create one article, before moving on to another area. Iterate, returning to the sieved list in a couple of months, reconsider.

This is not a novel technique: far from it. I'm not aware of it having a name, a WikiProject, any stature on the site. I just would like people to take it into account. Having the "completeness" argument with people who think of themselves as perfect random topic generators gets a bit wearing.

Charles 


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