On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 7:56 PM, George Herbert <george.herb...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Thomas Dalton > <thomas.dal...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> We're shrinking because we've already written most of the stuff we >> want to include. > > This is orthogonal to the main conversation here, but this is not nearly the > case. > > We've picked off a lot of low hanging fruit, approaching all of it. Things > which haven't been dealt with include [...]
<snip> I wondered why this thread had exploded with activity. It's because it turned into a "low hanging fruit" debate! My approach to seeing how comprehensive Wikipedia's coverage is at the moment is, while reading a book or watching a TV documentary, to mentally make notes of things to look up on Wikipedia. I did that yesterday while watching "The Victorians" (a BBC documentary presented by Jeremy Paxman where he looked at the Victorians through their paintings). There was lots I could have looked up, including the program itself (no article, understandably enough, as it wouldn't have met notability guidelines), but the three things I made a mental note of were: Gustave Dore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Dore Manchester Town Hall: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Town_Hall 1888 International Exhibition in Glasgow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Festivals#Past_Festivals The first two had articles, but the third one doesn't have its own article. Turns out there are three big exhibitions that were held in Glasgow, in 1888, 1901 and 1911 that we don't have articles on. We do have one on the one in 1938: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_Exhibition,_Scotland_1938 And the Garden Festival in 1988: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Garden_Festival But it's the historical stuff that hasn't been written about yet (and that's not even mentioning the art history - I should have noted the titles of all the artworks and the artist's and seen which we had articles on). I was kind of hoping that an interesting set of murals in the Manchester Town Hall hadn't had an article written on them yet, but it has been fairly well covered already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchester_Murals History is an almost boundless area for new articles. Another way to assess how comprehensive Wikipedia is, is to take some document (or even one of our unwikified articles) and wikify it in some reasonably sensible way and see how many of the links are red. This is a bit more exciting than wikifying some index or list of entries in an old encyclopedia (though the latter is a more efficient way to do this sort of thing). One other thing that people sometimes forget to do is to check "what links here" for said redlinks and see how popular they are. See how many other people have been trying to link to it. Though you have to remember to do a search as well and pick up the plain text examples of the redlinked article that haven't been linked (some of which should be, some shouldn't). It's very satisfying to write a new article that has 10 or so incoming links already! :-) Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
