Thanks you David for forcing me to subscribe to a high volume list, just so I can receive all the responses to my non-language specific query about the intentions of wikipedia. Here is the entire message which David quoted part of... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> Date: May 18, 2005 12:51 PM Subject: Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit. To: wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org Through my participation in the schools debate, it has come to my attention that there are wikipedians who believe that we should include everything which is verifiable and NPOV, with no standard of notoriety applied. My perspective is that while that might be a good set of criteria for a dictionary of trivia, it is not a good criteria for an encyclopedia, even one made out of tiny bits of magnetized composits rather than paper. I don't wish to bring the school debate to this list right now. However, I would like to discuss the include-everything view that I have seen being used to justify including schools. When I have exchanges like this: ------------------- [[Wikipedia:Schools]] ** David, as we discussed on IRC, this rule would allow for the creation of articles for a huge number of roadway intersections in the US.. Plenty of official documentation at the city and state offices, and Federal records in many cases, plus newspaper reports of construction and accidents (just like schools). We could fill an article up with trivia such as the frequency of accidents, time of first construction... Photographs. Is this really acceptable in the inclusionist agenda? Sure intersections are verifyable and NPOV, but the vast majority of them are not notable. I encourage all who support David's proposed rules, or similar proposed rulesets to reply. :) --[[User:Gmaxwell|Gmaxwell]] 15:06, 18 May 2005 (UTC) ** Actually that sounds pretty cool. [[m:Wiki is not paper]]. Accident data on road intersections could be very, very encyclopedic. Not sure how feasible it would be, however. --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony Sidaway]]|[[User talk:Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 15:31, 18 May 2005 (UTC) ----------------------- I must question if I really understand the point of Wikipedia. Already the next database dumb of cur will likely be too big to fix gzipped on my Zarus (a pocket sized computer. The prior one just fit it's 1gb SD card and I find it amazingly useful ... I'm going to need to come up with some kind of filter to reduce the size for the next one)..... Soon we will begin brushing the size of what we can fit on a DVD, so what of access to our work by people in disconnected communities and third-world nations? As our working-set grows past the amount of ram we can reasonably expect to put in our caches and database servers, our performance will become increasingly diskbound. I think that many people mistake the the claim that [[m:Wiki is not paper]] with a claim that we have boundless storage without compromise. Most of the facts that are in Wikipedia (though to not all) were available elseware on the internet prior to Wikipedia, but often a quick google search wouldn't find them because they were in a wash of cruft, random inaccurate uncorrectable information, and advertisements. Today much of that information is easier to find because of Wikipedia, a beautiful accomplishment, but one which may be lost if we lower the barrier to entry to be sufficiently low as to include anything that anyone can cite. I think it would be useful to have a universal repository for verifiable and neutrally reported trivia, but just as we use Wiktionary rather than Wikipedia for word definitions and wikisources for freely licensed reference works, we should put material which is not substantially notable in it's own project which can cater to the special needs of that material and the special costs of providing that service. I didn't just choose the intersection example because I thought it was a good strawman, ( :) ), I also choose it because I'm aware of the level of information available, and could actually create a lot of these articles myself. Since I used to work for a county government in Florida, still have a copy of most of the GIS database, and know the right people in a few other counties, I could patch together a bot to create thousands of such articles, complete with aerial photographs, construction dates, and in many cases some level of traffic information (I have traffic counters for all the arterial/arterial intersections with the data I have). ... The point is that I haven't spammed wikipedia with this data because I believe it is completely inappropriate for an Encyclopedia, and I imagine many other people have a similar ability to produce endless quantities of non-notable material if that what we thought wikipedia was supposed to contain. ... Such trivia would only be useful as a raw reference, why not wikisource if any of the preexisting wikis? So, I'd really appreciate some commentary on this... Am I in a minority in expecting a criteria of notability to be used in our judgement of encyclopedic merit, or should we really be including every fact we can cite?