David Monniaux wrote:
But there's no reason we should have an article on my neighbouring highschool, unless we also want articles on every company or organization...
However, this "unless" is problematic. A printed encyclopedia in 20 volumes can only contain so many articles, and has to cut off the long tail. Wikipedia is far bigger and steadily growing. Small towns with 25,000 inhabitants in Sweden would never have an article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, but now have articles in the English Wikipedia, and everybody seem to agree that they *are* sufficiently notable. So where is the limit drawn? Should the three schools in that town also have articles? Maybe the answer is: Not now, when Wikipedia only has 1.6 million articles, because these schools are not among the 1.6 million most notable objects in this world. But in five years time, when Wikipedia has 20 million articles, this might be different.
Maybe if the article is added now, and in five years time it is still one of the least used ones, ranking not 1.6M but 20M, then we know that now was not the right time to add this article? In that case, notability is not a property of the topic itself, but an issue in which order to add articles to Wikipedia. But it is difficult to assess today if a topic has rank 20M when Wikipedia only has 1.6M articles.
Can we compute a rank of how much each article is used now, and relate this to how many articles existed at the time when each article was created? Then we would know how premature the addition of each article was.
Again, my position is not that of judging what should be included now. I'm only trying to understand the math behind this.