Oldak Quill wrote:
On 06/03/2008, David Gerard wrote:
On 06/03/2008, Wily D wrote:
Even today, as a vetern user of a couple years, I find it very easy to edit articles and only run into helpful, friendly people. I just follow a few simple rules.
I've been creating articles. It's fun. Today I started [[List of Ecma standards]], which (a) needs completion (b) needs articles on each standard.
It's not a matter of Wikipedia having all the "low-hanging fruit" - we have all the fruit that's fallen off the tree. Twenty million topics have been identified as being within arms' reach ...
Two million? We've barely started.
Definitely. See the following for just some of the subjects "at arms' length": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_comparisons
A selection: *"The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects searchable online." *"The British Library is known to hold over 150 million items." *"Genbank, an online database of DNA sequences from over 165,000 species , has over 46 million entries" *"The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named" *"Thomson-Gale's Biography Resource Center contains over 1,335,000 biographies." *"31 million CAS registry numbers have been allocated for chemical compounds." *"the Internet Movie Database claims to have records on 549,131 titles and 2,280,301 names."
It's great that some people recognize the size of the task at hand. I would add that a single monthly periodical publication that lasts for a century at 100 pages per month will generate 120,000 pages of material during that time. At 200 words per page that's already 24,000,000 words. That's alrady bigger than the /"Enciclopedia universal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_universal_ilustrada_europeo-americana". /All our notability debates do nothing to cope with the massive amount of data that is available. I've lately been buying up bound 19th century periodicals very cheap; One of the latest ones has been about 50 annual reprint volumes of "Gentleman's Magazine" at roughly $1.00 each . Libraries can't keep up with the storage, and the smart ones at least salvage a little cash by selling them on line. With many others it's a short trip to the dumpster.
Material that lacks notability is mostly harmless. Some of it can be the seed for some future bigger article in the distant future when it gets someone wondering. In the big scheme of things it does not take up a lot of disk space, but the arguments about deleting it take up far more disk space.
When presented in a respectful way that gives everyone a chance to respond, there is no argument over notability. In an atmosphere of trust nobody feels so beset by rapid-fire tagging, because they are confident that the deletion proposals have been carefully reviewed by humans with a sense of judgement. They don't have to feel like Lucille Ball in the chocolate factory.
A rule of thumb for the deletionists might be: For every article that you delete you must add one. Given the professedly high standards upon which someone relies for deletion, one should be able to expect that that person's inclusion standards will be just as high.
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