Talk:Kasarvadavali

Deletion debate (April 9, 2004 - April 19)

• Delete. No context, apparently an advert for a 30-house condo in India(?)Jorge Stolfi 11:29, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Delete - if we had articles about every housing estate.... LUDRAMAN | T 12:59, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. If we have articles about miniscule places in the US why not articles about 30-house condos in India? Wikipedia is not American-centric. -- Graham  :) | Talk 16:03, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
  • India is not a problem, but the town size is. While "Wikipedia is not paper", having some 10 million artciles on small towns (or 5 billion pages on common people) would weaken the projet by diluting the efforts (most of the work would be spent on editing those mostly useless pages) and making indexing a nightmare. So there must be a line drawn somewhere. (PS. Also the page is too weak - it doesn't even tell the country.)Jorge Stolfi 16:52, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• Keep. It won't dilute our efforts: people will work on what they want to work on. Everyking 20:51, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OK, let me try to clarify. The strength of wikipedia is that each article is the work of several people (currently 5-6, on the average, it seems) who have edited it, plus dozens or thousands who have read and implicitly "approved" it. For the concept to work, the total number of articles in Wikipedia must be comparable to the number of users, times the average number of fixes that a random user will make. (Consider also the number of users who watch each page, or watch the "recent changes" page, or fetch pages at random.) Presently these numbers are quite favorable, so that every page is as well-tended as a fungus blob in a healthy anthill. Now if one were to dump into Wikipedia the list of all places — buildings, condos, streets, farms, etc. &mdsh; with 5 or more people, the numbers would probably be completely out of phase. Chances are that 99% of those pages would not be read by anyone who can tell whether they are correct. A large fraction of those pages could be bogus or vandalized without anyone knowing. Imagine the problem of disambiguating all those links, searching for a page, etc.

So, yes, I do propose that ALL places with less than X inhabitants should be deleted, unless they have something that could make them intersting to at least a few thousand readers over, say the next 10 years.
Jorge Stolfi 23:39, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I don't understand how you got from A to B. Regarding the first part: I disagree. Yes, collaborative maintenance is an advantage of the Wikipedia; but its strength lies in collaborative contribution, and local-interest articles are a perfect example of that. Regarding the second: I'm of the "Wikipedia is not paper" school. Unless or until storage becomes a problem, don't worry about an article's popularity. If someone cares enough to contribute an informative, encyclopedic entry, that's good enough for me. I think more attention should be turned toward writing meaningful articles, rather than deleting others' contributions.
Cribcage 05:59, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

The problem is not physical resources, but human ones. Guessing that the average street has 100 people living on it, and most homes are on streets, there must be over 50 million streets in the world. With a couple of days of work, I could write a script that would dump a database of Brazilian street zipcodes (guessed at 1 million records) into Wikipedia. At one edit per minute, it would take about two years. (That is apparently how the US cities got added, BTW.) Presumably other people around the world would do the same. Now, many of those streets are named after people; the building I am now lies at the corner of "Pitágoras" and "Albert Einstein". Who would write the necessary disambiguation pages, the "List of places named after relativity physicists", etc? Who would check whether all that info is correct? And what purpose would be served by those pages?

If I were quite a few years younger, I would be sorely tempted to start right now with these entries:

Conselheiro Paula Souza is a street in Campinas, Brazil. It is about 1.2 km ( 0.74564543 miles ) long and gives access to about 240 homes. Besides being the home street of Jorge Stolfi, author of the now mercilessly obliterated self-describing Wikipedia article, its main claim to fame is that it has more homes than Vijay Park, India.

Clifford Glenwood Shull is a condo development in Itaquaquecetuba, Brazil. It is a wholly imaginary place that no one has ever heard about, but don't tell wikipedians about that — let them figure it out by themselves.

It has already been agreed that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so askance and perhaps do not get their own pages — even though each of those words is vastly older, more important, more useful, more permanent, and more looked up than Vijay Park or Conselheiro Paula Souza. People have been questioning whether Cleve Moler deserves a page, even though his name must be known to 100,000 people all over the world. So why isn't the same rigor applied to place names?
Jorge Stolfi 17:41, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Maybe I don't understand your point. I get the statistics, but as you said: The resources are human, and are thus exercised with human discretion. Putting aside the script hypothetical: The number of articles written will correspond exactly to the number of articles people choose to write. The disambiguation and fact-checking, presumably, would be done by those who cared enough to create the entries. I don't know what purpose would be served, other than to say this: If John chooses to write an informative article about his street, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he had a reason. Wikipedia relies on good faith. If the worst case scenario is that no one ever accesses John's article, then again: I don't see any harm, unless or until storage becomes critical. (I'd say that goes for people and places, equally.)
Cribcage 18:49, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Cribcage, the script example is not hypothetical: AFAIK it was used before, and if Vijay Park is OK, then people would be allowed -- indeed, impelled -- to add all streets in the world too, just for completeness. As for the point, it is not true that Wikipedia trusts the authors and relies on them to check their facts. If that were true then Wikipedia would be just a big pile of spam. The strength of Wikipedia is that each article was validated and polished by many readers that are unconnected to its author; and that will be true only as long as there are many checkers/fixers/censors for each page. So it is important to restrict the growth of the database in proportion to the number of collaborating users.
Jorge Stolfi 19:48, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• Non-vote, but...I was flipping through random page the other week, and distinctively remember a Nebraska town with population 85. Anyone want to bet that a 30-house condo holds approx. 85 people? Meelar 23:06, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, or delete all the similar US places from list of places with fewer than ten people
• Keep - to delete would be US-centric and hypocritical -- Cyrius|&#9998 04:57, Apr 10, 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. It was the wrong article anyway. Kaasar Vadavali is the 'village' (probably a respectable sized place since it has an engineering college in it). The housing development is in the separate article of Vijay_Park. Imc 21:07, 9 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Keep all articles about real places. RickK 19:57, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. Cribcage 22:00, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• OK, keep Kaasar Vadavali (sorry for the confusion) but delete Vijay_Park (See its deletion debate page). Jorge Stolfi 02:58, 11 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. I think there's a little misunderstanding: it's not the village that has 30 buildings, its the housing society. The whole village probably has a lot more people. Arvindn 18:39, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)
• Keep. BL 07:04, Apr 19, 2004 (UTC)