[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Ray Saintonge]

Ian Woollard 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.
>   
I would read his comments as perfectly serious.  Not even the most 
extreme inclusionist will believe that it is possible to write an 
article on each of a trillion stars.  He is intelligent enough to know 
that if every Wikipedian were to devote himself to only that task to the 
exclusion of everything else that's interesting, it could not happen.  
If some individual is delusional enough to believe that he can get 
somewhere in that kind of endeavour, and sets out on the task with 
properly referenced articles every star that's worked on, the rest of us 
are confident that at some point he will get tired of the task and 
proceed to another delusion.  A very limited number of forgettable 
articles will have been created; the task will have been self-limiting 
without the intervention of deletionist drama.  The articles may be 
readily admitted as useless, but a campaign to expunge uselessness only 
becomes support for the meta-useless.

It seems to me that with some of the deletion programmes the 
participants have just discovered the uselessness of male nipples, and 
have used this discovery to justify a policy of compulsory surgical removal.
>>  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?
>   
Even you see the impossibility of the task.  Why worry about enormous 
database space for something that will never happen?  The US Patent 
Office is now up to around seven million in its main patent line.  It 
does not expunge the record of an old patent on the sole grounds that 
nobody will ever read it. While there is an ego-boosting quality to 
having someone discover our work on a specific article one cannot 
presume that the writer and the reader will stand in the same relation 
to the article.  Attaching utilitarian preconditions to articles stifles 
the creative interpretation of those articles.
> 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 *juEst* 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.
>   
I'm just as sceptical about the prospect of automatically generated 
articles, but until something like what you say becomes reasonably 
feasible there's not much to be concerned about.  I'm sure we all 
remember the fuss when the articles for small US villages were botted in.
>> 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.
The great thing about the law of diminishing returns is that it would 
still work even if there were no deletionists running around trying to 
enforce it.

Ec