[WikiEN-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.)

Wed May 18 17:20:14 UTC 2005

[cc'd and reply-to wikien-l]

Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell at gmail.com) [050519 02:51]:

> 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 what you mean is, you don't want to create the articles?  Then don't
create them.

> 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?

The last time it was advanced as policy, it got a simple majority but
failed to make consensus. Jimbo also explained why verifiability is good
enough for *articles people actually want to write*:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Fame_and_importance#No

"'fame' and 'importance' are not the right words to use, they are merely
rough approximations to what we're really interested in, which is
verifiability and NPOV. I understand and appreciate where people are coming
from on the 'Yes' vote, but feel that they will only get the unanimity
necessary in a wiki environment if they rephrase the issue in those terms.
Consider an obscure scientific concept, 'Qubit Field Theory' -- 24 hits on
google. I'd say that not more than a few thousand people in the world have
heard of it, and not more than a few dozen understand it. (I certainly
don't.) It is not famous and it is arguably not important, but I think that
no one would serious question that it is valid material for an
encyclopedia. What is it that makes this encyclopedic? It is that it is
information which is verifiable and which can be easily presented in an
NPOV fashion. (Though perhaps only as a stub, of course, since it's very
complicated and not many people would know how to express it clearly in
layperson's terms.)"

Further down that page, he answers quite a lot of common contrived
counterexamples much like yours.

This issue is being brought up in the context of high-school articles on
en:, after someone started submitting thirty school articles at a time to
VFD. Thankfully, there is now useful discussion rather than confrontative
action, in progress at [[:en:Wikipedia:Schools]].

- d.