[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts (was: Newbie and not-so-newbie biting)

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:28 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Steve Bennett wrote:
>> Fwiw, my take is to use the more general approach of "do we have
>> enough editors to mantain this depth of coverage". For the Obama
>> transition we probably do, for the Truman one, probably not. As the
>> years go by, the scales will tip and eventually we'll have to scale
>> back our coverage.

Adjust for historical perspective, rather. The extensive coverage at
the time, including a sprawling mass of Wikipedia articles, should
still be part of the historical record.

> The better alternative is to scale up the shorter article. This is an
> extension of 'Wiki is not paper'.

That only goes so far, up until you run out of sources.

>> The only time this is a real problem is when one article has different
>> sections that are grossly out of proportion, making one event or
>> person look more "important" than another, simply because we have more
>> people writing on it.
>
> Why does that need to be a problem?  You can't expect all articles to
> grow at the same rate.

He said sections, not articles. WP:UNDUE applies within articles.
Whether a version of WP:UNDUE should apply across the whole
encyclopedia is essentially the question of notability repackaged. And
when you spin sections out of existing articles to form new articles,
then WP:UNDUE clashes with WP:NOTABILITY (expand a section - you may
be unbalancing the article; spin off section to form a new article -
you may be unbalancing the encyclopedia).

Carcharoth