[WikiEN-l] Scale of online resources, was Re: Rating the English wikipedia

[Ray Saintonge]

On 07/26/11 3:13 AM, Charles Matthews wrote:
> On 20/07/2011 10:17, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>> I missed reading this thread when it was active, but my own estimate of
>> what still needs to be done in historical biographies alone is quite
>> high.
> Yes, that is one area where the material seems available to do much more.
>
>   >An estimate of 20,000,000 English
>> Wikipedia articles seems increasingly conservative.  The amount of work
>> to be done is enormous even without having to fight with the notability
>> police.
> On the other hand, the number of active Wikipedians who know where their
> next 1000 articles are coming from is quite small, IMX. The emphasis on
> enWP is hardly on being prolific: quality is more highly rated than
> quantity. That may not be wrong, of course, but to some extent these
> things are a matter of personal taste, and should remain so. We could do
> with better support of the "good stub" concept, I think: probably an
> example of "tacit knowledge" about the site, in that editors who have
> been around for a while know what that means, while the manual pages
> have a different slant.
>
> All discussions of the "notability" concept we use seem to end up with
> the generally broken nature of the thing. It is just that there is no
> snappy replacement. WP:GNG is a bit objectionable in the insistence on
> "secondary sources"; it is not completely silly but is not that helpful
> either when you start pushing the limits.
>
>
Perhaps this requires a clearer description of what is essential to a 
good stub.

The WP:GNG is opaque and bureaucratic. It is not suitable to much of the 
19th century material that I have.  "Notes and Queries is a fascinating 
publication where the readership answered questions posed by others. 
Providing other sources for this could be extremely difficult, and none 
of it comes close to being subject to BLP requirements.

People who rate quality as more important than quantity fail to see the 
negative aspects of their condition. A simple "caveat lector" can be 
more reliable than any guarantee of accuracy.

Ec