[Wikipedia-l] Limits to the non-paperiness of Wikipedia?

Mon May 26 15:07:04 UTC 2003

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone wanted to give their thoughts on the
applicability of [[m:Wiki is not paper]] to Wikipedia.

In the section headed "No size limits", someone says it should be okay to
have pages for every "Simpsons" character, and even pages for every
episode. This is followed by Jimbo saying, "I agree with this one
completely."

I take this to mean that there is barely any limit on the triviality of a
subject that could be allowed to have its own Wikipedia article. With
apologies to "Simpsons" fans if this is blasphemy... ;) As I interpret it,
it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the
usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.

So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact
on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a
small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published
sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.

If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy,
saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend
[[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+