[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Ian Woollard]

On 10/03/2008, White Cat <wikipedia.kawaii.neko at gmail.com> wrote:
> There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked
>  eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are
>  more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet.
>  Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article.

No. I sure hope you're joking or being sarcastic.

>  And it is
>  feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something
>  as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri)
>  is any indication.

No, since there isn't enough people on Earth to do that by a factor of
billions. And even if we automated it, who the heck would ever read
any more than the absolute vanishing tiny fraction of it? And how
would the wikipedia back up such an enormous database of articles? And
what are they all there for if, for all intents and purposes nobody
reads them?

And if it's automated why not just automate generating an article if
anybody actually wants that article from the databases? And in that
case if it's automatically completely generated it's not part of the
wikipedia per se. And tools that can process the data in multiple
different ways, not *just* generate *an* article for *a* star are
normally much more useful anyway. Again it's not something that the
wikipedia gets involved in, and I don't think it ever should.

> We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We
>  should expand them instead.

Look, at the end of the day, there's a law of diminishing returns.
Your email here is a poster-child to the absolute uselessness of
having an article on each entry of a large database.

No offense meant, but this is the dopiest idea I have ever seen.

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.