Tom,
The maintanabilty test strikes me as an interesting one, but I'm not
sure it scales. On Citizendium you had essentially one language and a
relatively small community, on Wikipedia you have:
*
* a much larger multilingual community so exponentially more difficult
to know if someone is sufficiently interested to update it when the
subject dies.
* a large proportion of editors who edit as anonymous IPs, so you have
no easy way to discover in advance whether an article would be updated
if the subject died.
* tools such as
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table
so you don't need someone on the Lain Wikipedia to be keeping an eye
on whether someone is alive, there could be someone on the French,
Russian or Tamil wikipedias and it then gets circulated as a death
anomaly.
* the critical mass that means that when someone notable dies a bunch
of newbie and IP editors often turn up at their Wikipedia article
As for the obscure English grocer, at present he wouldn't have an
article unless he was notable for something else - not every
sportsperson stays in sport till their retirement. I think you could
expand notability a long way without including every shopkeeper, but
as I said I think this is easier for IMDB and similar specialist
pedias than for us.
One area where I do think we could make a difference is to change our
policy to accept the concept of transient fame. For example anyone
signed as a player of a major football club is of interest to a
certain section of our readers, if they are dropped from the squad
without ever playing then they cease to be of interest. Currently our
policy requires them to have made a first team appearance, but
"currently in the squad or having in the past made a first team
appearance" would be more rational.
WereSpielChequers
On 8 April 2011 11:30, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Other options would be for a site that ended the
inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and
concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That
seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to
specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is
one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold
somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea
pigs.
One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast
notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on
Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not
explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism,
propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current
community of editors.
It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for
inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A
rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article
and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would
the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep
over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one
would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But
what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in
England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability
policy gets you.
The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles
don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton
is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor
and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable
presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has
an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the
evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to
be too drastic.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>