[Wikipedia-l] Biographies of unimportant people (was: "In memoriam")

Fri Sep 27 05:01:58 UTC 2002

The Cunctator wrote:

>Axel Boldt wrote:

>>Imran Ghory wrote:

>>>How do you measure the importance of someone ?

>>Like I just did: a person is unimportant if his or her biography
>>is interesting/useful to almost no one.

>What's your quantifiable metrics of "interesting", "useful", and "almost
>no one"?

Not that we could ever measure this in practice with any precision,
but for a definition that we could officially attempt to estimate:
Ask each person to rank, on a percentage scale,
to what degree they find the biography interesting and useful.
Average these, and you have a percentage measure of importance.

I'd say that we should try to stick to important people now,
gradually adding the less important as we grow to insane size;
this is what I think that we should do in *every* field.
We cover the basics first; we eventually cover everything.

-- Toby