> ...ensuring that there is some limit on the scope of Wikipedia. It is this latter one that is the key facet.
Right... but in a world where I can store the entirety of Wikipedia on my mobile phone, you have to trabsitively ask why there is a need a "limit on the scope of Wikipedia". I see no a priori reason why Wikipedia needs or even should tolerate such limits, so one must examine te arguments used to defend that policy.
So far, the only reasonable arguments I have heard (as in, discounting technology problems that never existed: you can easily scale Wikipedia to have a bunch of mostly-ignored articles) come down to "verifiability" through the argument path I elaborated (and which britta seeded), and that is precisely the path used by people defending "deletionism" on behalf of Wikipedia editors.
Where does the scope of Wikipedia end? Should there be an article about "saurik"?
How do you actively police articles for e.g. defamation (note, we already struggle to handle this problem and it is getting worse)?
How do you stop spam?
I like to come at this argument from the opposite direction: what need is there for Wikipedia to give an article to every single trivial thing. Is what the president had for breakfast in 2011 sufficiently interesting to the reader?
Wikipedia is not a dump of knowledge, it is supposed to be a curated summary of the sum of human knowledge. And as with an article where you make editorial decisions about the level of detail to go into, so the entire Wiki is scoped to a reasonable level of detail.
Right... but in a world where I can store the entirety of Wikipedia on my mobile phone, you have to trabsitively ask why there is a need a "limit on the scope of Wikipedia". I see no a priori reason why Wikipedia needs or even should tolerate such limits, so one must examine te arguments used to defend that policy.
So far, the only reasonable arguments I have heard (as in, discounting technology problems that never existed: you can easily scale Wikipedia to have a bunch of mostly-ignored articles) come down to "verifiability" through the argument path I elaborated (and which britta seeded), and that is precisely the path used by people defending "deletionism" on behalf of Wikipedia editors.