On 9/24/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It is a complicated issue, and
"inclusionists" have a very good point:
if it is verifiable, why not put it in the encyclopedia? It's not like
inclusion of one article hurts another.
I am sympathetic to this point, I am, but I really think that it only
goes so far. The truth is this: we *are* an encyclopedia, and
encyclopedias should only contain entries that pass atleast some level
of notability. Otherwise, if we let just any school, company, band,
movie, tv-show character, &c in, we are creating notability that
wasn't there before. An entry in an encyclopedia gives the subject
some inherent notability. In my opinion, this is not desirable if we
are acheive the standard of other encyclopedias. We should be careful
to not let ourself devolve into some mass of facts, because that does
devalue the things that really deserve an article.
What I'm saying is, on a longer timescale, using WP:V as the sole
criteria for inclusion does hurt the encyclopedia as a whole. One mans
opinion, anyway.
fortunetly we can mix it with NPOV to get "there must be enough stuf
from [[WP:RS]] to produce a NPOV article" which means a reasonable
number of sources.
--
geni