[WikiEN-l] Eternal Ephemeral

Fri Oct 31 23:33:17 UTC 2003

"Stan Shebs" <shebs at apple.com> schrieb:
> Beware of genealogical publications though. My mother's side of the 
> family is 
> Mormon, and they have lots and lots of confirmable people and dates. 

I also have at least two books that have been written of certain parts of my descent. I even
used one of them as my source for a (Dutch) Wikipedia article (although for someone who
had a more important claim to fame than just having been born and died and gotten
a family in between).

> So I think you do need some notion of importance. One of the ideas I've 
> thrown
> out is to count the people to whom the article subject matters in some 
> way; London
> is in because it affects billions of people, the cat in the tree is out 
> because
> it only affects the people on the street and the writer for the newspaper,
> 100 people tops.
> 
> I've been testing this mentally on various topics, and a number somewhere
> between 500 and 5,000 seems plausible. I don't think it would make sense to
> try and pick a number and impose it as a rule, but it makes a good sniff 
> test
> for things that seem obscure.  For instance, most consuls of ancient 
> Rome are
> very obscure today, but once upon a time they ruled millions, and are 
> for that
> reason encyclopedia-worthy.

I find this kind of rule little convincing. 'Affected' is much too
ill-defined. My mailman delivered post to hundreds of addresses today.
Leif Ericsson made a colony of a few dozen people in North America, and
fought with what may have been not more than a similar number of natives
there. So does this mean that my postman should be in, but Leif Ericson
should be out? Don't think so...

Andre Engels
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