On Mar 7, 2008, at 7:00 AM, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:
I sort of agree with this. However, we do want to stop some stuff getting in, like total crap that was dreamed up by some dud before breakfast and he added it to WP before lunch. We avoid the notion of adding what is "true" but have reached a compromise that we add stuff with sources. However, we are more and more deleting stuff that could have sources added. People work on deleting it, rather than working on finding sources or just leaving it for others to do that.
I think the better concept than notability is interestingness. Material is encyclopedic if people would find it interesting. It is *clearly* the case that most of our pop culture ephemera is interesting to people. It is far less clearly the case that people's unsigned garage bands are interesting to anyone but themselves.
Again, for the most part this is an interface problem. The problem with a massive summary of a television episode or a detailed account of everything a Pokemon has ever done is a problem for us because we still have articles formatted such that we could print them out and bind them if we wanted. That's a ridiculously old media solution - there will never be a paper volume of Wikipedia.
Accordingly, it's OK to have articles structured in a more branching fashion so that chunks of the article that are mildly esoteric or primarily masses of data are hyperlinked expansions of the article. Whether this requires coming up with a new namespace for sub-articles and expansions that we can use or not, this seems to me like a very good idea.
In literary studies we'd call all of these things the paratexts. That's probably not a good name for these things, but it's a concept we'd do well to have all the same. What should we call the chunks of an article that would best be treated as a break-out, hyperlinked extension of the article? Once we have a name it's a heck of a lot easier to begin thinking about the category meaningfully.
-Phil