[Wikipedia-l] Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.

[Ray Saintonge]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my
>attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should
>include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of
>notoriety applied.  My perspective is that while that might be a good
>set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria
>for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized
>composits rather than paper.
>
Notoriety and notability are different conmcepts.

>Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix
>gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit
>it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need
>to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next
>one).....   Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on
>a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected
>communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the
>amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and
>database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound. 
>I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not
>paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without
>compromise.
>
I didn't realize that one of the aims of Wikipedia was to have a 
database small enough to be dumped entirely on anybody's drive.  I 
suspect that most passive users have no need or desire for such a dump.  
Omitting the articles that you would like to see left out will slow the 
growth of database a little, but that will only delay the time before it 
won't fit on your pocket computer.  When it comes to third world 
equipment, I'm sure that we have long since exceeded the capacity of 
that equipment.  As to Wikimedia's own capacity for storing information, 
I would find the request "Slow down, we have too much stuff," more 
credible if it came from our senior developers.

>I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was
>a good strawman, ( :) )
>
I'm glad to here that, but others may see it differently.  Perhaps you 
could dispel those misunderstandings by providing data on the number of 
articles about such intersections that have been contributed to Wikipedia.

>I also choose it because I'm aware of the
>level of information available, and could actually create a lot of
>these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in
>Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the
>right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to
>create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs,
>construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic
>information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial
>intersections with the data I have).
>
Fantastic!

>Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not
>wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis?
>  
>
I don't think that dumping material that you don't like into any other 
project is a friendly act unles you have an agreement with the people 
involved in that project.

Ec