[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[White Cat]

Only people with weak ideas dismiss and insult opinions of others. People
who wish to mass remove articles have this tendency.

   - White Cat

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>
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