[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Steve Bennett<stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> But still? A local library? I find it useful to look at things in
>> context with other similar institutions. So, I try and think of famous
>> libraries. The British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of
>> Congress, and so on.
>>
>> And then I try and think where my local library fits in on that scale.
>>
>> And I conclude: no article.
>
> Yes. I had a similar thought after browsing through [[Wikipedia 1.0]]
> recently, particularly with regard to its "importance" scale. A local
> library is certainly not "must have" or "important". It's not really
> even "contributes to depth of knowledge".
>
> One way to look at it: how big must the selection of articles be, for
> that article to be included? Is your local library in the top 100,000
> most important articles? Top 1,000,000? Imagine the whole
> encyclopaedia is evenly fleshed out, so that every town of 100,000
> people in Namibia has an article as good as a town of 100,000 in the
> US. Now is your local library in the top 10,000,000 articles?

No, but would still be mentioned in the article on the town. One of
the prime reasons for libraries appearing in the news, sadly, is when
they are closed down. :-(

I didn't realise we have this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library

That is an interesting sort of article.

"More than 2,500 Carnegie libraries were built, including some
belonging to public and university library systems. Carnegie earned
the nickname Patron Saint of Libraries."

I'll bet some of the people reading this list have Carnegie libraries near them.

And look at the architectural information in that article.

Not an article about a specific local library, but about something
that many libraries have in common, and actually quite a fascinating
article.

There are also several lists of Carnegie libraries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_Europe

etc.

>> Train station, just possibly.
>
> Once again I like my proposal to think in terms of length of article,
> not a boolean "is allowed to exist". Real encyclopaedias have short
> articles about unimportant stuff and long articles about important
> stuff. A train station might well be worth two sentences.

Well, I checked. There *is* an article on the train station. And on
the train lines as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Railway_lines_in_South-East_England

>> The big stately house and park that used to be here before it was
>> built over, yes.
>
> Yep.

No article (yet).

>> The current local park - probably not.
>
> Definitely a couple of sentences. In Wikipedia that probably means a
> reference in "[[Parks of xxx]]".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Green_London

But the local parks are too small to be on there.

>> The local supermarket - certainly not.
>
> Don't see why it wouldn't be appropriate to refer to it in the article
> about the supermarket chain, or to say that the town has two
> Woolworths and one Coles. But a whole article, no.

Dare I look? :-)

Nah. It's not mentioned. Shops get poor coverage in Wikipedia.

Big main article, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco

For the coverage of supermarkets in Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supermarkets_in_Europe_templates

etc.

>> The nearby main road - it does have an article already actually.
>
> I'm not up to date on the rules of road inclusion. It's pretty hard to
> draw a line. Again, articles about road networks would work better
> than articles about individual roads.

Well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roads_in_the_United_Kingdom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Roads_in_Europe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transport_templates_by_continent

I think you get the idea.

A big bias towards Anglophone countries.

Carcharoth