4 ms·

When space is free (well, very cheap) it makes sense to document these things if they bring joy to the reader.

• tptacek 8y ago
  It's not free! Every article in Wikipedia imposes a human cost on the editors and maintainers of the project. That cost dwarfs any conceivable storage cost now, at the inception of the project, or even in the decade before the project. (This is a great article and does illustrate something Wikipedia does better than conventional encyclopedias. At this point, I think the comparison to Britannica has become unhelpful; WP is sui generis, and one of the great (maybe the great) intellectual accomplishments of the Internet.
  • ceejayoz 8y ago
    I think you're missing the point, though. This article simply couldn't be justified in a printed encyclopedia - there's a finite number of pages you can reasonably expect people to shell out for (and Britannia used to be a status symbol even at that limited number; being able to personally own it meant you were quite well off financially, as it cost well over a thousand dollars).
    • jacobolus 8y ago
      Yes, the limit in Wikipedia is not number of physical pages... but to be honest that wasn’t really the biggest limit for Britannica either, just the most obvious one. The biggest limit is author/editor time. The Internet certainly provides a bigger pool of editors (and a lower implied quality floor) than a centralized company hiring authors/editors with a few people in charge of the organizing, the way print encyclopedias did. But even with a completely decentralized worldwide editor corps, there is still some amount of organizational overhead which continues growing as the project grows, and there is still a finite amount of author/editor attention. Wikipedia can’t in practice have an article about literally anything.
      • thebooktocome 8y ago
        At least, that's the way it's been since the deletionists won in 2007.
        • bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y ago
          [WP:NOTPAPER](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTPAPER https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:NOTPAPE...). > Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia, but a digital encyclopedia project. Other than verifiability and the other points presented on this page, there is no practical limit to the number of topics Wikipedia can cover or the total amount of content. However, there is an important distinction between what can be done, and what should be done, which is covered under § Encyclopedic content below. Consequently, this policy is not a free pass for inclusion: articles must abide by the appropriate content policies, particularly those covered in the five pillars. It basically says if the content is encyclopedic by nature, meets guide of general notability, well-written to meet the quality standard, it has its full rights to be included, and niche topics are usually deleted. However, if it has been mentioned multiple times in books or by the media, even as anecdotes, it can be included, so it depends...
          • thebooktocome 8y ago
            This is what the policy says, but this is not how the policy is implemented. https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]