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

[Charles Matthews]

On 27/07/2011 08:49, Ray Saintonge wrote:
> 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.

I think a discussion of the nature of "good stubs", in relation though 
to what we know (or rather guess) about the "long tail" of reference 
material that is "out there" in some form, sounds like an interesting 
one to have, and not one I recall having before. Basically there are 
things that (a) people could want to look up, (b) for which 
"footnote"-style answers exist and are verifiable, and (c) could appear 
at that sort of length in WP, where they would be an asset rather than 
an embarrassment. And we still don't know that much about the whole 
population of such things.
>
> 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.
>
Yes, a kind of reference desk for those of largely antiquarian interests 
in the 19th century (and onwards). The GNG has plenty wrong with it in 
some topic areas, which is why specialised notability guides are 
written. I don't think it has yet come up in the form "for 
historical/antiquarian purposes, what is the minimum adequate kind of 
answer to a query?".

One day I suppose we'll have an overview of "topic policy" based on a 
census of actual "topics". I think we'll have to get through our second 
decade before worrying about that, though.

Charles