[WikiEN-l] Notability etymology and history (was Re: WP:EPISODE)

[Steve Bennett]

On 1/2/08, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> We do not have the capacity to maintain 500 million 1-3 line articles.

Geni is right here. There is a basic tradeoff between three factors:
1) The value of the article to the encyclopaedia
2) The potential for harm to us or others caused by that article
3) The cost in hardware and volunteer effort etc in maintaining that article

Any measure of "value" should include the value of comprehensiveness,
the value of authoritativeness etc, even if an individual article
appears to be unimportant.

"Potential harm" includes things like spam, the amount of time wasted
by people arguing on highly divisive topics, libel, misinformation
etc. History topics generally have less potential for harm than BLPs.

And in cost, I note that many stubs I've written seem to have had a
lot of maintenance effort put into them, as people trawl past,
updating categories, interwikis, stub tags etc etc. A sudden influx of
500 million stubs would cost far more volunteer effort than we have
available. Also, there are greater costs in distribution, selecting,
filtering etc, as we pass on our database to third parties. Articles
about currently trading companies and websites seem to require greater
volunteer effort in keeping them NPOV than do articles about defunct
companies, for instance.

I would like to see any policy on
inclusion/scope/notability/importance explicitly address the tradeoff
between these factors and offer different rules in different areas.

Steve