[WikiEN-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

Wed May 18 19:52:26 UTC 2005

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>
>[...] does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally
>using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.
>
The crux of the problem is that "notability" is a stubbornly
subjective concept. For instance, we have articles on extremely
obscure US Navy destroyers and submarines, with crews of under 100
and with only a couple of years in service, during peacetime, and
then scrapped - yet these are never challenged, while a century-old
high school with 3,000 students is likely to end up on VfD. So what
exactly is it that makes one topic "notable", and another not?

In a way, the old print encyclopedias had it easier - the
publisher could only afford to spend M months producing N
volumes, so one started at "most important" and went down
until the available space and time was used up.

Stan