[WikiEN-l] Partial solution to rampant deletionism
Daniel Mayer
maveric149 at yahoo.com
Sun Nov 9 22:52:22 UTC 2003
Adam Bishop wrote:
>Why not have entries about everyone who has ever died?
>An encyclopedia with billions of pages would be fine
>because it's not paper, right?
Wikipedia is not a phone book either. A person has to have had done something
noteworthy to merit inclusion. Otherwise naming conflicts would be
unmanageable and information on each non-famous person would be very
difficult to confirm - we could not even pretend to try to be 'accurate' if
we allowed information in Wikipedia that really can't be confirmed by
independent sources.
An encyclopedia is a comprehensive /summary/ of knowledge, or of a branch of
knowledge. Sure Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of encyclopedias (meaning it is
a concise, general, and many different specialized encyclopedias all
rolled-up into one) with supporting almanac-like and gazetteer-like
information, but it still does offer a summary of human knowedge, not an
all-inclusive exhaustive regurgitation of even nearly impossible to confirm
human knowledge.
My cats' names are Beybey, Mougie and Merlin - that's part of human knowledge,
but damn near impossible for anybody outside my circle of friends and family
to confirm. It also isn't interesting outside that sphere either.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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