Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Archive 2

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents 1 "Worldwide view" 2 Formal gauge of interest for WikiProject 3 Actors and entertainers review 4 Inherent biases in Wikipedia 4.1 Place and culture 5 Removed entries for discussion 6 Suggested addition 7 Cities removed from list 8 Changes to the list 9 Architecture 10 Entry quantities to shoot for? 11 Titanium 12 Computer Science 13 Out of date info 14 Update Solar System status as FA by bot? 15 Britain? 16 Suggestion: Kalevala 17 Suggestion: tree simplification 18 Eurocentreism 19 Religious scholars and leaders 20 Vital articles' department 21 about eurocentralism 22 Athletes 23 Lack of Notability 24 Quick count 25 What we can remove 25.1 Sport 25.2 Measurement 25.3 Chemical elements 25.4 Middle Ages 25.5 Renaissance to present 26 Bible

"Worldwide view"

I agree that some lists are biased- see "Entrepreneurs" for example - and this should include a better variety. However, I think that an English language release should show some bias towards English language countries. For example WP:VA on a Pashtun Wikipedia might include more cities in Afghanistan than we would expect to find in this list. I would expect to see more French politicians in the French WP:VA than in this list. That is quite appropriate. Nevertheless, the list is a bit too one-sided at the moment, at least in some areas. Walkerma 07:28, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Formal gauge of interest for WikiProject

Now that there is a POV tag on the page itself, I would like to formally gauge interest in creating Wikipedia:WikiProject Vital articles. One of its objectives could be developing criteria for inclusion on the list, and perhaps it could provide for some supplemental collaboration on the pages themselves. If formed, I would like to be a member. If anyone is interested, please feel free to comment here. Thank you. Dafoeberezin3494 20:04, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Rather than starting a separate WikiProject, I wonder if we should just expand the scope of an existing project, WP:CORE to include Vital Articles. Although WP:CORE itself is fairly quiet, it does have an existing Collaboration of the Fortnight that is quite established, with people regularly contributing - take a look at the COTF page and its regular "advert". We could maybe focus efforts on improving Core Topics and supplement articles that are also on the VA list (many are), and in the longer term expand the COTF to include other VAs. If a separate project for VA is desired, then I would suggest that both groups at least work closely together. Walkerma 22:23, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

On a related note, we at WP:WVWP, another of the WP:1.0 projects, are planning on assessing all articles on the WP:VA list as part of our plan to include all or most VAs in our next offline release, (WP:V0.7). We have recently created a VA tagging page for this purpose, maybe people here would like to help? If a project is created, then that work would also naturally be part of the scope of such a project. This is just a relevant FYI, I don't want to lead the discussion away from the main topic - is a project desired or not? Walkerma 22:30, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Thank you for the information. It seems more practical to simply expand the scope of the quiet WikiProject. Do you know if WP:CORE has developed guidelines for what is and is not a core article, vital article, etc...? I think that issue needs to be addressed, and it seems to be in the scope of WP:CORE. Dafoeberezin3494 01:00, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think there are formal guidelines. The current list evolved (Wikipedia-style!) through debate. It started out as a list created by User:Maurreen (currently on Wikibreak) who tried to cover all areas, though of course it had some bias. We threw out a few from the original list, replacing them with better ones - often based on the quality of the article: "XXX is a stub, but the similar concept YYY has a much better article". Last spring, User:Silence argued vociferously for removing some and adding others, and after some debate many of those changes were made. Many of the "removed" articles were placed in the supplement.

It would be nice to have such guidelines, but I think these would best be done by someone knowledgable in the area of information science. Do you have any knowledge in that area? It would be really nice to compare VA and the two Core lists carefully - something I've never done myself. Silence has worked on both lists, but this stuff isn't the main area of his interest. We need to consider how best to get to work on this - any suggestions? Walkerma 05:38, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

If we are to formalize and widely apply these lists, I think some specific guidelines for inclusion, and review, might be helpful. One problem that frequently arose on WP:CORE was that people not only disagreed on the notability of various topics, but also on what we should even be looking for. For example, I felt that Society and Culture were some of the most important core topics, whereas others felt that Social sciences and Humanities were. Such disagreements reflect a disagreement not over notability, but over categorizational methodology: is it more important for us to list "broad" categories, even when the articles themselves are not very important (e.g., humanities and social sciences are recent Western academic categories, not phenomena as broadly important as life or art)? Finding a point of balance is made doubly difficult when we are approaching the problem from such different angles. We also need to address bias not only in terms of location (e.g., West getting hugely more coverage than East), but also temporally: are any of the actors and entertainers we list really sufficiently noteworthy to merit inclusion here? Do Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood really reach the level of importance of people like René Descartes or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? In any case, if WP:VA is not going to be merged with WP:CORE, we should probably avoid adding too much structure to it, since one of the defining differences between the two projects is that WP:VA is more informal and "loose" than that page, and more willing and open to revision. -Silence 06:22, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I do not have any knowledge in the area of information science. I was actually thinking of a more (Wikipedia-style!) collegial system for deciding inclusion on the list. Perhaps when I said "guidelines" I really only meant we should develop some sort of "agreement" on what articles should be on the list. I am making the assumption that a) we want to generally restrict the size of the list and b) some articles that are presently on the list do not belong there. Sorry for the confusion. Dafoeberezin3494 06:49, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

It would be good to consider guidelines of various sorts. The Core/Vital task is an fundamentally important project. And, Silence's points are well made. Given the variety of possible approaches to this work, for the sake of coordinating basic categories in Wikipedia and for the evaluation of most general content, I think it is a good idea to consider organizing the Vital articles project so that the category structure (beyond the first level and through the first several levels) is very similar to that of the 1.0 project (and Core subset of that). Further, if possible, i think it makes sense to define together (and circulate to the larger community for comment) a similar set of goals and methods of how to define what are general or important articles. For the group organizing and categorizing work, some sort of group approval process is obviously needed. But, inside of those commonalities, the Vital list process could still be more informal and dynamic and the Core process could be more rigorous and structured - since Core is partly aimed at generating relatively fixed/static publications, reproducible on CDs. A rough parallel might be the difference between how the WP:GA and WP:FA lists work, with GA list as more inclusive and relaxed in standards than the FA list. Vital articles could organically grow to be a significantly longer list than the Core top 1000 (or however many). Alternatively or additionally, the projects could be merged into the same process -- Vital articles being a nomination space and Core being a final agreement space (with both nominated and approved articles noted by a small icon in the VA list)? Anyway, whatever unfolds, I really enjoy categorization and plan to work on these lists somehow. --Reswik 14:35, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Excellent points - I look forward to seeing anything you come up with and commenting. It's certainly not small task you're getting yourself into :-) I think also though you will need to reference the meta list and we need to figure out how that fits into any future scheme of things here. SeanMack 14:59, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, good to be here. I've looked over the meta list. I see Silence has done work on meta. It seems there needs to be an ongoing process of reconciliation between Meta and the WP lists -- and I'm not sure which should be the final list (meta?). Such reconciliation would seem to be best made from the more stable and authorized (agreed) list to less stable lists. And what would be the most authorized list? Practically, here in the English WP, the extended Core topics list of 1000 might be the place to do the finalizing work, though, for the purposes of cross-WP language version inclusion, perhaps a group needs to be formed to work on the meta list? --Reswik 16:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

There is an organizing issue that can help us in coordinating the content of lists, and this is the creating a cross-platform cagetory structure for the lists. Regarding category structure, there was a discussion process last Spring in the 1.0 project that arrived it seems at a stable set of 10 top categories for the releases. These top categories are very similar to some other top level categorization schemes used in WP. If that work could be extended and carried down 3 or 4 or even 5 levels of specificity (which would amount to not only 100s of subcategories but also to 100s of main articles) and then reconciled across lists, it might go a long ways to fleshing out and coordinating the various key articles lists. Britannica did some extensive work along these lines in the Propaedia (sp?) project. So, perhaps a large part of the work to be done here first is approaching and deciding if and how to co-create an approved and effective multi-level, multi-project (and even multi-WP) categorization scheme or tree. --Reswik 16:25, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Actors and entertainers review

I question the inclusion of all the entries in "actors and entertainers". Most seem to be included for being "iconic" and/or "influential", both of which are very subjective and very difficult to judge in the short term. I particularly question the inclusion of Woody Allen, Marlene Dietrich, Clint Eastwood, and John Wayne. My current plan is to avoid controversy by simply deleting the section, and possibly moving "Madonna" (who, as the most successful female performer of all time, is the least controversial entry on that list) to the "Musicians" section, alongside Elvis Presley and The Beatles. If the section is to be kept, then good justifications will have to be made for including each of the entries. -Silence 06:38, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the above but not with your logic for removing Ireland and New Zealand from the countries. To my mind it's not bias to be interested in encyclopaedic entries of English speaking countries on an English language wiki if one is indeed English speaking. Also I'd appreciate a bit of talk page discussion on your removals of the cities and countries. I just want to make sure there is consensus, and you are not exchanging someone elses subjective views with your own. Do we have criteria for these things? Cheers SeanMack 12:17, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

To explain my POV further - I personally would not take an encyclopaedia seriously if it did not cover all the major countries, cities, rivers and lakes etc. Unfortunately since people volunteer their time people seem go with their interests which seems to be more related to pop culture and pokemon et al. For me that is all the more reason to have the less ephemeral topics as stated vital articles. There are some things that shouldn't be culled just to make a shorter list. SeanMack 12:39, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

"To my mind it's not bias to be interested in encyclopaedic entries of English speaking countries on an English language wiki if one is indeed English speaking." - The function of this list is not to provide a list of articles that are of interest to an English language speaker, but rather to provide a list of articles that are especially crucial for an encyclopedia written in English. Encyclopedias written in English do not write more about English-speaking countries than about non-English-speaking countries, all else being equal. Part of the primary function of WP:VA is to help minimize the natural bias of typical English Wikipedia editors; it should not encourage, exacerbate, or validate that bias. People already know what countries they tend naturally to prefer to read about; this is not a list of such articles, but a list of especially important articles. Importance is rarely, if ever, linguistically relative. As for the countries and cities list, I didn't arbitrarily remove them on a personal whim, but rather simply removed all the ones that had been added since the creation of the "countries" and "cities" sections of this article last year, since I failed to see a justification for their addition on the Talk page, or on the articles themselves. I'm perfectly fine with discussing them (and the), but the burden of proof should, in most cases, be on the people trying to add entries, not remove them, since it is much easier to demonstrate crucial notability than to try to prove a negative. -Silence 13:08, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

My main point is that countries per se are all important. It just so happens that this actually is the English language wikipedia and I see absolutely no problem with trying to have excellent articles on all English speaking countries. In reality these are more likely to get good contributions. Given that the vital articles page is featured prominently on the Good Articles page it was always my hope that because of this we point editors in the direction of creating and improving solid encyclopaedic articles as opposed to all the trivia I increasingly see, particularly to help improve any articles that would make it to CD or print. I personally believe that the vital articles page is a tool and now as I write this I can I see a huge benefit from a VA project if it existed, and was supported. One potential for VA is to act as an index of encyclopaedic content; a subset of classic encyclopedia type articles within the broader wikipedia at large.

Avoiding systemic bias is a good thing but removing English speaking countries seems to me anyway to be taking that too far. I'll restate my point in another way. Would you actually buy an encyclopaedia that didn't cover all major countries? I think that maybe vital articles should be better defined. To me core topics represent a line in the sand if you like, a subjective call on the most important articles. Whereas, to me, vital articles are those that a decent encyclopaedia would cover in reasonable depth, I personally don't believe this means it needs to be an FA, to me these articles should be a good B, GA, A or FA. That is my personal view.

Maybe in an ideal world all language wikis would concentrate on their strengths and through translation projects we could share the best articles. Given that premise we should strive as English speakers to cover our own ground as best we can.

At a more specific level related to just my edit that was reverted, clearly I am biased about the inclusion of Ireland since I'm Irish, but for a country that has provided a huge diaspora around the world and a disproportionate amount of recognized playrights and writers (Noted by the print Encyclopaedia Brittanica) it seems a strange omission. I added New Zealand for balance, and I genuinely still believe that if an English wiki does not cover all English speaking countries it is almost like positive discrimination gone mad. It's just my thoughts and I'm not going to push the issue. I guess the way forward is to attempt a consensus criteria - then neither of us could be accused of solely subjective edits. Kind regards. SeanMack 14:28, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

"My main point is that countries per se are all important." - WP:VA is not a list of "important" articles. It is a list of vitally important articles.

"It just so happens that this actually is the English language wikipedia and I see absolutely no problem with trying to have excellent articles on all English speaking countries." - Neither do I. Unless we do so to the exclusion of non-English-speaking countries. Then it goes from "area of interest" improvement to crude bias. But the function of WP:VA is not to list every article that "I see absolutely no problem with trying to have excellent articles" for; such a list would span the millions, not the hundreds.

"To me core topics represent a line in the sand if you like, a subjective call on the most important articles." - I agree. That's why we have multiple lists for the different "lines" one could potentially draw, like WP:VA and WP:CORE and the expanded lists for each of those areas. As long as we are internally consistent, our list remains useful, no matter how arbitrary the specific line we chose to draw is. So our main duty should be removing articles that clearly don't belong, and adding ones that clearly do; most "borderline" articles can probably simply be removed (or at least moved to the Expanded list).

"Whereas, to me, vital articles are those that a decent encyclopaedia would cover in reasonable depth," - That criterion is too loose, and very debatable. Besides, most encyclopedias (with the exception of very large ones) haven't had articles "in reasonable depth" on every country in the world.

"I personally don't believe this means it needs to be an FA," - They don't "need to be", but ideally they should be. (Or at the very least an A or GA.) The primary, short-term function of WP:VA is to keep people alerted to the current state of Wikipedia's most essential articles, so as to better-organize efforts to clean up ones with major problems, and expand ones that are currently stubs. However, WP:VA's longer-term goal is to try to make the quality of all these articles excellent, and ideally Featured. ... But that doesn't mean that every article that Wikipedia should have an FA on needs to be on this list. There are many, many, many articles Wikipedia should have FAs on that are not absolutely essential.

"Maybe in an ideal world all language wikis would concentrate on their strengths and through translation projects we could share the best articles. Given that premise we should strive as English speakers to cover our own ground as best we can." - That's an absolutely horrible idea in practice, because there are many times more English-speakers than non-English-speakers on the Wikipedias, and because a very large number of English Wikipedia's editors speak non-English languages too. Plus there are countless billions of excellent English-language resources on non-English-language topics; why ignore them just to perpetuate our bias?

"At a more specific level related to just my edit that was reverted, clearly I am biased about the inclusion of Ireland since I'm Irish," - I can't say I'm surprised.

"but for a country that has provided a huge diaspora around the world and a disproportionate amount of recognized playrights and writers (Noted by the print Encyclopaedia Brittanica) it seems a strange omission." - Well, it isn't. You are just too close to the subject matter, and too far away from the dozens of other countries that also weren't included on this list, yet are more noteworthy than Ireland.

"I added New Zealand for balance," - How is New Zealand a "balance"?! If you'd added an African or Asian country, it might have been a "balance", but adding another English-speaking country just exacerbates the bias.

"if an English wiki does not cover all English speaking countries it is almost like positive discrimination gone mad." - You are, quite frankly, completely mistaken here. First, "positive discrimination" is an absurd accusation to lobby, as it doesn't even make any sense in this context. Second, WP:VA is a list of the most absolutely essential articles on Wikipedia; is it not a list of every article that the English Wiki should cover! Even the Expanded version of WP:VA is not a list of every article that the English Wiki should cover! There are tens of thousands of articles that the English Wiki should cover.

"I guess the way forward is to attempt a consensus criteria - then neither of us could be accused of solely subjective edits." - I agree here. We should determine what to include through consensus-building discussion like this, and gather people's opinions on the matter. -Silence 08:37, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Inherent biases in Wikipedia

The actors & entertainers discussion above brings out a much broader issue - one which is largely ignored across Wikipedia as a whole, but which is critical (even "vital") in assembling this list - the issue of inherent biases. Some of those biases are valid, some are not. My time working at WP:V0.5 has helped me see a lot of that. As a Brit living in America, I can often see two sides of things - ideally I should see many sides. Here are some of the biases I have seen: (I will sign at the end of each section, Walkerma 21:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC))

Place and culture

This is a very tricky one, and the major topic we need to address with the POV tag. We all know that the English Wikipedia has much stronger coverage of topics from the US and from the UK, because that's where most of our editors live. People are more likely to write a decent article about their home town than an "obscure" town in Africa. I spent some time trying to find information last week in our (US) college library (a pretty good one) on Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania; the only book with any detail on the topic had information on where I could buy American food, meet other Americans, etc. There was nothing outside the CIA factbook to say anything about the culture of the city, demographics, etc. If it's like that for a capital city with a population of one million, what would it be like for a smaller town? Yet in my college library I can probably find much more information on towns in the US, or even Europe, that are much smaller and less important. So we are handicapped from the start - the information available to us in the English-speaking world is limited mainly to Anglophone culture. Google hit numbers aren't the answer either, since the Internet has the same bias that Wikipedia does.

At the English Wikipedia we face a unique problem; the fact that our culture is at present the dominant culture of the world. The reality is that The Beatles are far more popular around the world than any Russian or Japanese pop group. George W. Bush ranks as more important than any other current world leader. Star Wars will be ranked more highly worldwide than even the most popular Bollywood films, even though the latter may include some English. So there remains a major question - how do we separate the natural prominence of English-speaking culture from our ethnocentricity?

I think editors on Wikipedia rarely have glaring ethnocentricity like the headline, "Fog in English Channel, Europe cut off". However, I have seen American editors happily select an American topic for Version 0.5 they consider important, then reject a similar UK topic of equivalent importance (from my perspective as a Brit in the US). Apply that thinking worldwide - and you have a much bigger gulf. We need a formal system to try and offset that. We could try to judge worldwide importance - one way would be to ask, How many interwikis are there to other language versions of the article (excluding Simple English)? For example, Boston Red Sox has 18 and Real Madrid has 41, though most Americans wouldn't have heard of the latter (at least until the recent Beckham deal!).

Some bias is natural and reasonable. We should not aim for some silly version of "cultural parity" where we rank Wuhan (the "Chicago of China") (23 interwikis) with Chicago (56 interwikis), despite their superficial similarity. Clearly Chicago is more prominent on the world stage than Wuhan - though Wuhan is definitely a very important place as well. This represents the prominence of English culture in the world, as shown by the interwikis - we can't ignore it.

But even beyond that, we should allow for the fact that many English speakers are likely to live in or visit Chicago compared to Wuhan. In other words, we should show a moderate bias towards our readers - there is nothing wrong in that. I would expect the Polish Wikipedia to have better coverage of Polish football teams, villages, etc than the English Wikipedia, and vice versa, and that is quite right. A much higher % of Polish than English speakers are interested in Polish football teams! Would we demand that Scunthorpe United F.C. be included in the Polish Wikipedia, for balance?

Encyclopedias written in English do not write more about English-speaking countries than about non-English-speaking countries, all else being equal. Yes they do - it's not even close! Contrary to what Silence says, I think traditional encyclopedias do have some bias. Try looking up Watertown in [Columbia] and you get lots of medium-sized towns in the US. Try looking up similar or larger towns in Poland such as Chojnice (cf [1]), Kwidzyn, Reda. If Poland, an EU member, gets less coverage, what about China, India, Indonesia, Brazil? I could give more examples from print encyclopedias.

Narrowing down to the VA list in particular, I think this list should cater to the English reader. It is not written for an imaginary audience that reads articles about Polish football teams as often as those about English teams. I think Silence is blurring the distinction here between a meta list, and an English list:

• m:List of articles every Wikipedia should have: Represents a true (if that's possible!) "worldwide view", free of cultural bias (as much as possible).
• [[en:Vital articles]] (this list): Should represent the above, as well as a few additional articles that are of interest to English readers.

If the consensus is that these pages should be completely identical, then I will nominate this page for deletion and set up a redirect to the meta page (if that's possible!). The only reason for VA to exist as a separate project is to allow us to add things that English speakers consider "vital". I only expect that list to be no more than 100 articles - perhaps 50 at most - but it would help reflect the interests of our readers.

Silence is certainly right, though, when he says Part of the primary function of WP:VA is to help minimize the natural bias of typical English Wikipedia editors; it should not encourage, exacerbate, or validate that bias. I interpret that to mean, "we shouldn't make things worse, we should try to tilt things in the right direction". There is a middle way between rampant ethnocentricity and realistically catering for the readers. We should not be like the old-style BBC patronisingly educating the ignorant masses about what they should be interested in, but at the same time we don't want VA to be filled up with characters from Star Trek. Currently I think the tag is right - it is too biased towards the Anglo cultures - it needs fixing. We can do this!

I will add sections on other biases later, I must get on! Walkerma 21:11, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

This is an absolutely superb analysis of the problematic situation we're in, and resonates well with the troubles I've had in the past with distinguishing "the natural prominence of English-speaking culture from our ethnocentricity". For example, is it really so clear that George Washington merits inclusion on WP:VA when other countries' founders don't? Is it really clear that Miguel de Cervantes and Dante Alighieri merit inclusion in large part for helping define their respective languages, while writers in countless Asian and African languages don't? Ultimately, all we can really do is try to combat the most egregious biases; we can't rewrite Western academia from the ground up all on our own, simply because we lack the expertise. However, I do like the idea of counting InterWiki links, and I've used something similar in the past on the longer list. I think another strategy that could be very helpful if we find a way to organize it at some point in the future is to try to actually find Africans, Asians, South Americans, etc. and ask them how they'd "rate" the various included (and non-included) topics on a scale, to try to help balance our own bias against theirs and thus find the safe "middle" that all the cultures more or less agree on. Even better would be to find academics from each region, rather than just laypeople, of course.

"Yes they do - it's not even close! Contrary to what Silence says, I think traditional encyclopedias do have some bias." - You misunderstand. I was saying that English encyclopedias shouldn't have bias towards English-speaking countries. Where bias creeps in, it's never explicitly intentional; no English-language general encyclopedia has as part of its mission statement "We want to devote most of our efforts to the English-speaking world!" And the English Wikipedia certainly qualifies as not adhering to that mission statement either. Bias towards the English-speaking world is something Wikipedians need to fight, not endorse.

"Narrowing down to the VA list in particular, I think this list should cater to the English reader." - First, "the English reader" consists of people from all different cultures; just because most English-speakers live in the "English-speaking world" doesn't mean that all do, and we should not be biased towards the larger group over the smaller whenever it's possible to satisfy both. Second, I think we need to draw the line between two different types of "catering". One type of catering is reasonable and good: that's taking the commonsensical approach of choosing articles that will most benefit English-speakers, over ones that are "politically correct". Political correctness and artificial globalism should not get in the way of our encyclopedic utility.

However, the other type of "catering", which I think was going on with the interjection of New Zealand and Ireland, is catering that is harmful to our readers because it conforms more to their biases than to the real world, and therefore is much less informative than a more objective listing. I believe that in the overwhelming majority of cases, we should not favor the English-speaking world significantly over the rest of the world on WP:VA, because doing so makes our list less useful, not more useful, to English-speakers, but failing to inform them about extremely important topics that might otherwise be under-covered on Wikipedia (because they aren't focused on our specific part of the world). Only in certain rare cases, if ever, should we permit any bias towards English-speakers, and most of those should just be linguistic biases: for example, the way the English language works might require that we have more articles on a certain topic than other language Wikis would. For example, other languages might not list both art and visual art, because they don't have the same semantic redundancy we do. Or they might not list both blue and green, if they only have one word for both of those colors. That sort of "bias" is perfectly acceptable. What isn't acceptable is shortchanging our readers by sacrificing neutrality for conformity to their biases where we don't need to. For example, although George Washington might be a "borderline" entry, it's pretty clear, despite our America-centric biases, that we don't need to include Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson on the list. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform people about things they misunderstand or are ignorant of; it is not to parrot back what they already think and believe.

Also, this list is supposed to be the same as the meta list. They are the same project, I just renamed this one from its original meta-styled name for the sake of simplicity (because the older names were much harder to remember). The original title of this page, indeed, was Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have. Ideally, the only difference should be that this listing is shorter, and the Extended list should conform exactly to the meta list (both through changes to the meta and changes here, depending on which is superior).

And no, it is not possible to set up a redirect to the meta page, nor is it advisable. As mentioned, WP:VA is meant to be a greatly shortened version of the meta list; Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded is the page that keeps the same relative length, and would be what we'd redirect if anything. Secondly, because this page is only for the English language wiki, we can use Wikipedia's simpler wikicode rather than the more complex code used for the MediaWiki page. Really, those are the only two reasons for the existence of this page; this page was not created just because we wanted to insert a couple more Anglocentric articles here. If anything, the reverse is the case, and we wanted to shorten the list because the Meta list is far too Anglocentric (and that bias is harder to deal with because the list is so much longer). Now, I'm not saying that we can't include at least a few articles that are of primary interest to English-speakers; all I'm saying is that that is not the purpose of this page, and should play little, if any, role in our overall selection process. It should only come into play in situations where it greatly increases our encyclopedic usefulness, and does not greatly decrease our encyclopedic neutrality, to do so. In most cases, it simply should not be part of our decision-making process; we shouldn't let Ernest Hemingway hedge out Fyodor Dostoevsky just because he's an English-speaker.

"but it would help reflect the interests of our readers." - No. Our Anglocentric additions should reflect the needs, not "interests", of our readers. We don't need to include a Super Bowl article because of the "interests of our readers", whereas I could see a stronger argument being made for including separation of church and state because it's such an important topic in the English-speaking world (though I don't see a need for either on this listing). Encyclopedias are not hobby books. We should include articles based on their informational value, not based on how interesting our readers should find them; World War II would merit inclusion even if the entire affair had been deadly dull and monotonous.

"I interpret that to mean, "we shouldn't make things worse, we should try to tilt things in the right direction"." - Roughly, yes. I am not advocating that we make the list Politically Correct, but rather that we minimize our natural biases in our selection process, because this list, despite being written for English Wikipedia, does, in fact, have an intended reader base that is international; one of the main purposes for the original creation of Wikipedia, for example, was to eventually pass out free copies of this encyclopedia to schoolchildren in Africa. And because the English Wikipedia is so much larger than the other Wikipedias, foreign-language Wikipedias (especially the smaller ones) are often heavily dependent on our decisions here to determine what they do there; it is therefore our responsibility, not to try to be 100% objective, but to minimize our bias as much as possible when it doesn't significantly improve the neutrality and usefulness of this listing. Besides, the English language is currently the most internationally widespread language in the world; although it doesn't have the most , it is the language that the largest number of disparate countries, even outside of Europe and North America, recognize. It should therefore, if anything, be the most global, pluralistic, and culturally neutral of any Wikipedia project in existence (and no, Meta is not a Wikipedia project). Although this might not always be possible in practice, what matters is that we keep that in mind in theory so as to prevent the opposite trend (towards increased Anglicization and insular isolation from the outside world) from gaining strength. -Silence 03:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Good, it appears that we are roughly in agreement. I apologise if I misunderstood your comment about other encyclopedias. I like the idea of talking to people from other cultures, and we should also look at the different language versions of the page on meta. My interpretation of this page as equal to "meta+" comes from the definition given at the top of the VA page, but I know how things can evolve differently over time - I think you're saying that this page is now more like what the meta page should be! I suggest that we try to find some alternative articles that we can add to improve balance, along with their "interwiki ranking", and then discuss what goes into VA. We also need to list some articles (+their interwiki ranking) we could remove, then discuss which of those comes out of VA. Reswik should have some good ideas on this stuff, he's very knowledgable. Walkerma 05:40, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

No need to apologize, I wasn't clear in what I meant with my encyclopedia comment (and one could argue that even what I meant wasn't entirely accurate, as there may indeed be some general-use English encyclopedias that explicitly favor English-language topics; but regardless, that is not the case here, or shouldn't be to any significant extent). In any case, I agree. I'll be glad to compile the "interwiki rating" for the current list of files—though it should be remembered that in some cases it will be the rating, not the entry, that needs changing. (i.e., there are some important topics that receive poor international coverage.) But, I don't see any reason not to have another useful resource to appeal to, as long as we are flexible in our interpretation of this information (i.e., there won't be any hard limit of "minimum interwikis" for inclusion on WP:VA). Also, I will list below all the entries I've removed recently from WP:VA, in case anyone wants to discuss any of them. -Silence 05:51, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Great, thanks! Yes, I agree we shouldn't have our hands tied by ratings, though they can help. Things may get busy for me at 0.5 again soon (release in a couple of weeks?), and at work, so my time here may be temporary - but I'll try to help as much as possible. Incidentally, your comment about putting this knowledge into the hands of African children struck a chord with me, since (a) all VAs are to be included in the next offline release and (b) one of our active 1.0 people is, literally, putting these releases into the hands of African children. So yes, what we do here does matter! Have a good night (time-centric comment from someone in New York time zone), Walkerma 06:05, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Removed entries for discussion

Listed by interwiki ranking (partly as an experiment to test interwiki links' reliability):

101: Argentina

92: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Frankfurt

89: New Zealand

88: Thailand

86: Venezuela

80: Madrid

78: Singapore

65: J. R. R. Tolkien, Brussels

64: Seoul

62: Linus Torvalds

61: Los Angeles, California

60: Milan

58: San Francisco, California, Lake

57: Chicago

56: Suez Canal

55: Richard Stallman

54: Charlie Chaplin, Ireland, Zürich

53: Sarajevo

52: Edmund Hillary

50: Mexico City

49: Marilyn Monroe

47: São Paulo

43: Woody Allen, Josip Broz Tito

42: Marlon Brando, Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, Oort cloud

41: Snake

37: Joseph Fourier, Michel Foucault, Francis of Assisi

36: Donald Knuth, Pierre de Fermat

35: Humphrey Bogart, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Neutron star

34: Aral Sea, HIV

33: Marlene Dietrich

32: Srinivasa Ramanujan, Mutation

31: John Wayne

30: Clint Eastwood, Frank Sinatra, Bernhard Riemann, Ivan Pavlov, Rabies

29: Headlands and bays

28: Beach, Valley

27: Thomas Samuel Kuhn

25: Benedict of Nursia

24: Poliomyelitis

23: Fred Astaire, Howard Hughes, Hans Morgenthau, John Rawls, Historiography, Plateau

20: Diophantus, Canyon

18: Donald Trump

16: Ted Turner, G. H. Hardy, Isaiah Berlin

14: Sexual reproduction

12: Sam Walton, Asexual reproduction

9: Hans Morgenthau

7: George Westinghouse, Vladimir Arnold

2: Seymour Martin Lipset

0: Fossil record

Keep in mind that while interwiki ranking might be a valuable method for countering cultural bias, it does nothing for Wikipedia's other biases (e.g., our bias towards popular entertainers vs. more historically important figures, and towards computer-related figures vs. figures in other sciences, neither of which are restricted to the English-speaking world, but which are nevertheless biases to be avoided). It should also be noted that some figures, like J. R. R. Tolkien, are so well-represented on interwiki partly because of converted efforts by English-language Wikipedians who included Tolkien in the early draft of the SimpleWiki list of "articles all Wikis should have", which was copied to almost all of the foreign-language wikis as a "guideline" of the most important articles, even though that list had received much less review than the current WP:VA one. Consequently, many of the ratings need to be taken with a grain of salt, although they're valuable information nonetheless.

Also, for the sake of comparison to entries on the VA list: Mao Zedong gets 51, Otto von Bismarck gets 54, Abraham Lincoln gets 58, Bill Gates gets 64, Plato gets 73, Leonardo da Vinci gets 77, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart gets 85, Paris gets 103, Japan gets 123, United States gets 140.

And, for further comparison, here's a sample of the rating of entries that aren't on the VA list: Ignacy Łukasiewicz gets 6, Casimir Funk gets 12, Langston Hughes gets 13, Empress Dowager Cixi gets 22, Aretha Franklin gets 26, Vitruvius gets 27, Dennis Ritchie gets 29, Abel Tasman gets 33, Aristophanes gets 37, Ludwig Wittgenstein gets 38, Pol Pot gets 40, George Lucas gets 43, Leif Ericson gets 45, Walt Disney gets 49, Thomas Jefferson gets 60, Barcelona gets 63, Marie Curie gets 65, Cairo gets 66, Arthur Conan Doyle gets 70, Istanbul gets 70, Warsaw gets 80, Monaco gets 90, Netherlands gets 107, Kazakhstan gets 115, and Ukraine gets 123. -Silence 10:35, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

This list is amazing! How did you manage to get these interwiki numbers so quickly - can you use AWB to do this somehow? I spent much of my coffee breaks today browsing the numbers - they make interesting reading. Walkerma 05:18, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggested addition

Suggestion:

• W. S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan and/or Gilbert and Sullivan

Why?

• Hugely influential. W.S. Gilbert was a major contributor to the reform of the English theatre, and his works with Sullivan basically set the foundations for the modern musical. As well, The Mikado is one of the most performed theatrical pieces in the world. Adam Cuerden ^talk

Wouldn't an article about English theatre be more "vital" than an article about a major contributor to the reform of English theatre? -Silence 02:13, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

While I agree with all the comments you give, and I am definitely a fan of G&S, I don't think they're in the same league as Shakespeare. Also, using our interwiki count to look at entries in other languages, none of these articles has more than 15 represented; contrast that with some of the articles listed above. I don't necessarily agree with Silence - we have Shakespeare (obviously!) but don't have English theatre, we have Hitler but not History of Germany, because clearly one has to have some biographies - but possibly Musical theatre would be a more suitable choice here. Musicals are certainly an important part of modern culture. Meanwhile, I'd like to see G&S represented at WP:V0.7 and WP:CONCISE, where they deserve a place IMHO. Walkerma 02:44, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

But Shakespeare is widely considered one of the greatest (and certainly one of the most influential) authors in the world, not just in the English language. That's why we include him but not Hemingway, and why we include the greatest Italian writer (Dante) but not the greatest Danish writer. That's why his notability transcends English theatre. Likewise, Hitler's importance is not limited to German history, but has enormous global relevance and significance. Adam's description of Gilbert, on the other hand, doesn't establish his broad essentialness as thoroughly; he might be essential if we were listing important English playwrights, but we're listing important topics in general. However, if he reaches the noteworthiness level of, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald or W. B. Yeats, then I don't see any reason not to add him (or Gilbert and Sullivan) to our expanded list at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded. -Silence 03:34, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

They certainly reach at least that minimum - perhaps they're not quite at the level for this list, but they were pretty much the fathers of a musical genre, as well as immensely popular for the last century and a half. (W. S. Gilbert, by the way, is V0.7) Adam Cuerden ^talk 09:30, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

Cities removed from list

Some city articles were recently removed but I think many of them should be on the list. Specifically the following:

1. Brussels - de facto capital of the European Union
2. Chicago - alpha world city
3. Frankfurt - alpha world city
4. Los Angeles - alpha world city
5. Mexico City - population of 19.2 million (GMA), capital of Mexico
6. Milan - alpha world city
7. São Paulo - population 16 million (GMA) 29 million (EMA), largest and most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere
8. Seoul - population 23 million
9. Singapore - alpha world city

Alpha world cities are listed at Global city.

—dv82matt 08:22, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

A city is not vital just for having a big population, nor merely for being an "alpha world city", nor merely for being the capital of Mexico (a country which itself barely made the list). Also, you flubbed the numbers a bit there by giving the population for Greater Mexico City rather than Mexico City proper, for Seoul National Capital Area rather than Seoul proper, and for Greater São Paulo rather than Sao Paulo proper. If your argument for including these articles is their population, why are you advocating adding the city rather than the surrounding area? Mexico City proper actually only has a population of 8.7 million (9th in the world), and Sao Paulo 11 million (4th in the world), and Seoul has 10 million (7th in the world); all three are thus beaten out by Karachi (2nd in the world) and Delhi (3rd in the world), neither of which are included in the VA list either. The cities list here should ideally only have about 20 truly globally and historically critical cities; your additions would lower those standards far too much. They are thus better-suited to Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded#Cities. The only one of the cities abpve which currently seems worthy of consideration for addition is Brussels, but I'm still a bit skeptical that it's necessary. -Silence 09:20, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

A city is not vital just for having a big population, nor merely for being an "alpha world city",

Population is an important factor for assessing a city as a vital article. If the population is large enough I would consider that, on it's own, to be sufficient for inclusion. As for "alpha world cities" the factors that went into determining them are critically relevant to the standards for inclusion in this list.

nor merely for being the capital of Mexico (a country which itself barely made the list).

Good thing I didn't advocate Mexico City for inclusion merely on the basis of its being the capital of Mexico then. ;-)

Also, you flubbed the numbers a bit there by giving the population for Greater Mexico City rather than Mexico City proper, for Seoul National Capital Area rather than Seoul proper, and for Greater São Paulo rather than Sao Paulo proper.

GMA stands for 'Greater metropolitan area' so I didn't 'flub' the numbers. I think the greater metro population generally does a better job of reflecting the importance of a city than the city proper numbers do.

If your argument for including these articles is their population, why are you advocating adding the city rather than the surrounding area?

The city is generally the focal point of the metro area. Also, I doubt you are suggesting that we begin adding metro areas to this list so your question is not serious.

Mexico City proper actually only has a population of 8.7 million (9th in the world), and Sao Paulo 11 million (4th in the world), and Seoul has 10 million (7th in the world); all three are thus beaten out by Karachi (2nd in the world) and Delhi (3rd in the world), neither of which are included in the VA list either.

As I mentioned above I think the GMA is generally a better gauge of importance, but you raise an interesting point nontheless.

The cities list here should ideally only have about 20 truly globally and historically critical cities; your additions would lower those standards far too much.

Why is 20 the ideal number to have? It seems like we have a difference of opinion here.

They are thus better-suited to Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded#Cities.

But that's just a copy of a list on meta.

The only one of the cities abpve which currently seems worthy of consideration for addition is Brussels, but I'm still a bit skeptical that it's necessary.

Well I'll hold off on adding anything to give others a chance to chime in.

On a somewhat related note I noticed that you did not remove Toronto from the list. Was that an oversight? It certainly seems less notable than some of the cities you did remove.

BTW, I appreciate your efforts on this page. The biography section in particular was getting extremely cluttered. —dv82matt 10:58, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

• "Population is an important factor for assessing a city as a vital article." - Certainly. But, as I said, it's not the only factor. It's not even one of the most important ones. This is not simply a list of the most populous cities in the world; we already have plenty of articles on that topic already, and making WP:VA a copy of those articles serves no useful purpose.
• "GMA stands for 'Greater metropolitan area' so I didn't 'flub' the numbers." - I'm aware of what they stand for; I didn't say that you flubbed them accidentally. You misrepresented the populations of those cities by failing to list both the populations for the city proper and the populations for the general area they're in, thus distorting their actual population status (which is inappropriate even if you're correct that the area around the city is more important than the city itself; you should have raised that point for discussion rather than trying to slant the evidence in your favor).
• "Good thing I didn't advocate Mexico City for inclusion merely on the basis of its being the capital of Mexico then. ;-)" - But you mentioned it as though it were relevant. It's not. If Mexico is important, we should include Mexico. An important country's capital city needs to be important in its own right; VA status is not inherited. Plus it simply doesn't make sense for you to mention what Mexico City is the capital of without doing the same for the other cities.
• "I think the greater metro population generally does a better job of reflecting the importance of a city than the city proper numbers do." - An interesting POV, but not especially relevant here. Neither gauge of importance is very reliable. Jerusalem is one of the most important cities in the world, yet it has a population of only 724,000. Washington, D.C. has a population of less than 600,000. If population was our primary criterion for including or not including a city, then we'd remove Jerusalem, Athens, Mecca, Washington, D.C., and probably most of the rest of the cities from the list and add Karachi, Jakarta, Tehran, Cairo, Bogotá, Lagos, Lima, Dhaka, Kolkata, etc. instead.
• "The city is generally the focal point of the metro area." - But if the city is not noteworthy enough for inclusion in its own right, but rather depends upon the overall metro area in order to reach the appropriate level of notability, then the fact that it's the "focal point" for what would (arguably) be a notable thing is irrelevant. We don't even have an article on metropolitan area in WP:VA; how can you argue for basing our city inclusion on a nitpicky aspect of that topic when the topic itself isn't important enough for inclusion here? The fact that X is the focal point of Y, and Y is noteworthy enough to include on WP:VA, doesn't, in itself, make X noteworthy enough to include in WP:VA (especially when Y isn't included anyway).
• "Why is 20 the ideal number to have? It seems like we have a difference of opinion here." - 20 is the ideal maximum. I'm perfectly OK with discussing lowering the maximum even more, to 15, or 10, or 5, or possibly even 0. The reason we don't want a lengthy list here is because it makes the list (1) harder to maintain, (2) less useful to editors, (3) redundant to the expanded version of this list at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded, and (4) dramatically more difficult to make acceptably neutral or to reach any consensus on. The looser our inclusion standards are, the more they are likely to continue to gradually loosen over time, as we are forced to include more and more marginal or "almost" entries in order to please various interest groups, etc. The same problem is likely to arise in the "countries" list if we don't keep an extremely tight leash on it; everyone wants their own country or city included, and if we don't keep the list as short as possible, our basis for rejecting those insertions here will become flimsier and flimsier over time. This is exactly the reason that the "Expanded" list was created: it allows a compromise between lowering our standards and simply rejecting articles that are indubitably very important, but don't quite meet the requirements for being altogether "vital", at least for a list that's meant to be as concise as this one.
• "But that's just a copy of a list on meta." - What's your point? The list at meta is in English, and is based on the English Wikipedia and created by English-speaking editors. I don't see how it's any less relevant to us than the shortened version here.
• "On a somewhat related note I noticed that you did not remove Toronto from the list. Was that an oversight? It certainly seems less notable than some of the cities you did remove." - Yes, that was an oversight. I was simply removing the entries that had been added since June 2006 and didn't seem to clearly merit inclusion; I didn't take the time to do an in-depth review of the entries already there, but in retrospect I see no compelling reason to keep Toronto there. Feel free to remove it. -Silence 12:12, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

• "Certainly. But, as I said, it's not the only factor. It's not even one of the most important ones. This is not simply a list of the most populous cities in the world; we already have plenty of articles on that topic already, and making WP:VA a copy of those articles serves no useful purpose."

I do not claim that it's the only factor but it is a factor that comes into play moreso for a very populous city than for a smallish city. Just as historical significance is the major factor for Athens, for a very large city population may be the major factor. I have not advocated making this list into a list of the most populous cities so that part of your statement is disingenuous.

• "I'm aware of what they stand for; I didn't say that you flubbed them accidentally. You misrepresented the populations of those cities by failing to list both the populations for the city proper and the populations for the general area they're in, thus distorting their actual population status (which is inappropriate even if you're correct that the area around the city is more important than the city itself; you should have raised that point for discussion rather than trying to slant the evidence in your favor)."

Interesting POV you have there. I wasn't trying to slant anything. If I did, it was not intentional. Do you often assume bad faith like this?

I assumed no bad faith on your part. People have motivations, goals, and intentions without acting under bad faith. You are acting in good faith in that you are doing what you think is best for the encyclopedia; but you were also deliberately framing these cities' populations in a way that inflates their population, without explicitly addressing that issue. -Silence 11:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

• "But you mentioned it as though it were relevant. It's not. If Mexico is important, we should include Mexico. An important country's capital city needs to be important in its own right; VA status is not inherited. Plus it simply doesn't make sense for you to mention what Mexico City is the capital of without doing the same for the other cities."

Being the capital is somewhat important (why else would Washington, D.C. be on the list), but in the case of Mexico City it is certainly only a secondary reason. Perhaps I should not have mentioned it.

• "An interesting POV, but not especially relevant here. Neither gauge of importance is very reliable. Jerusalem is one of the most important cities in the world, yet it has a population of only 724,000. Washington, D.C. has a population of less than 600,000."

The fact that Jerusalem and Washington, D.C. are notable for factors that don't have to do with population does not negate population as a factor for other cities. (Incidentaly, I'll not accuse you of POV pushing by your failure to include the metro area population numbers for Washington, D.C.)

• "If population was our primary criterion for including or not including a city, then we'd remove Jerusalem, Athens, Mecca, Washington, D.C., and probably most of the rest of the cities from the list and add Karachi, Jakarta, Tehran, Cairo, Bogotá, Lagos, Lima, Dhaka, Kolkata, etc. instead."

Just because population is the primary reason a for three particular cities to be on the list that doesn't make it the primary reason for all the cities on the list. In the same way the inclusion of Athens and Rome does not reduce this to a list of historically important cities, and the inclusion of Mecca and Jerusalem does not reduce this to a list of holy cities.

True. But in order to avoid turning this into a list that's solely about historical cities, or about holy cities, or about populous cities, we need to restrict the number of cities on the list in any of those criteria. We shouldn't have more than around 3 cities on the list that are mainly there for being "holy" (though the "holy cities" are really there more for their historical, political, and cultural significance than for being "holy" per se; but I suppose that's an easy way to categorize them), and for the same reason we shouldn't have more than around 3 cities on the list that are mainly there for being populous. Expanding that number to almost a dozen, as you seem to be proposing, unbalances the list. If you want to include all the extremely populous cities in the world, a better place to include them is on the Expanded list, not this one. Besides, I'd argue that population is the least important of all the criterion that have been mentioned. The reason for this is that population is merely a number; if the only reason we're including cities is because of how populous they are, then we don't even need to include articles on the cities. We can simply include the names, their population number, and move on. The purpose of having any articles on any world cities on this list is not to tell people "these cities have lots of people in them", but rather to inform people about cities that are truly essential knowledge for understanding world history, world politics, etc. -Silence 11:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

• "But if the city is not noteworthy enough for inclusion in its own right, but rather depends upon the overall metro area in order to reach the appropriate level of notability, then the fact that it's the "focal point" for what would (arguably) be a notable thing is irrelevant."

It's just a convention. As cities grow they often run into other cities and towns and merge together. When this happens we in effect have one large population centre rather than two or more seperate ones. It might be more technically correct to list "New York metropolitan area" and so on but that seems unnessessary to me.

• "We don't even have an article on metropolitan area in WP:VA; how can you argue for basing our city inclusion on a nitpicky aspect of that topic when the topic itself isn't important enough for inclusion here? The fact that X is the focal point of Y, and Y is noteworthy enough to include on WP:VA, doesn't, in itself, make X noteworthy enough to include in WP:VA (especially when Y isn't included anyway)."

It's hardly nitpicky. It's just that for large cities that have effectively merged with other cities the metro area population is often a better gauge of importance than the population of the city proper. I don't see why the fact that we don't have an article on 'metropolitan area' in WP:VA is relevant to whether we can use the population of such as a factor for determining importance.

Yes, I see your point. I have no problem with considering the metro area population, as one among several factors that can contribute to an article's significance. But my problem is that I consider this a grossly insufficient factor, without lots of other important factors to make the city one of the few dozen most essential countries in the world. The metropolitan area/city disagreement just highlights the fact that metropolitan area, on its own, is a very weak basis for including something on the WP:VA list (except, perhaps, the one city with the largest metropolitan area population; beyond that, the listed entries become dramatically less relevant). -Silence 11:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

• "20 is the ideal maximum. I'm perfectly OK with discussing lowering the maximum even more, to 15, or 10, or 5, or possibly even 0. The reason we don't want a lengthy list here is because it makes the list (1) harder to maintain, (2) less useful to editors, (3) redundant to the expanded version of this list at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded, and (4) dramatically more difficult to make acceptably neutral or to reach any consensus on. The looser our inclusion standards are, the more they are likely to continue to gradually loosen over time, as we are forced to include more and more marginal or "almost" entries in order to please various interest groups, etc. The same problem is likely to arise in the "countries" list if we don't keep an extremely tight leash on it; everyone wants their own country or city included, and if we don't keep the list as short as possible, our basis for rejecting those insertions here will become flimsier and flimsier over time. This is exactly the reason that the "Expanded" list was created: it allows a compromise between lowering our standards and simply rejecting articles that are indubitably very important, but don't quite meet the requirements for being altogether "vital", at least for a list that's meant to be as concise as this one."

Good reasons all. Here's my take. I think we should allow this list to be slightly longer than the list at meta. As the largest wikipedia I feel we can handle a somewhat longer list of articles that are especially important to improve. I do realize that the list at meta was intended as a basic article list for new language editions not as a guide for featured articles, however, even bearing that in mind, I think English wikipedia has grown to the point where it would be useful to slightly increase the scope of this list from what it was originally. That's not to say that some trimming isn't in order though.

Yes, we can handle a larger list of entries than Meta can. And I absolutely agree with you that we should be expanding WP:VA. But we shouldn't be expanding the WP:VA concise list (i.e., the one at Wikipedia:Vital articles). We should be expanding the list that is already as large as the Meta list: Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded. The purpose of moving that list to the English Wikipedia was to allow us to make a more expansive list for the English Wiki, whereas the WP:VA list would be much shorter. (That, plus the Meta list is pretty poor and gets little attention because it has much fewer active editors than English Wikipedia, so probably the most important reason for making a copy of the list here is to make this list more reliable, consistent, useful, etc. than the Meta list is.) It makes no sense to me to try to expand the concise list at WP:VA to larger than Meta when that would make the list redundant to the Expanded list, it would take away the useful shortened list we currently have here, and it would take infinitely more effort and time than just starting with a list that's already long and working to trim and expand that one to be more comprehensive and high-quality than the Meta list. I'm all for shifting our focus to work much more on our Expanded list, which has not received as much attention as I'd hoped since I moved it from Meta (after several months of very hard work on raising its quality to a more acceptable level); I just don't see either list as unimportant, useless, or redundant, which seems to me to be the only possible justification for saying that we should make one list like the other. -Silence 11:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

• "What's your point? The list at meta is in English, and is based on the English Wikipedia and created by English-speaking editors. I don't see how it's any less relevant to us than the shortened version here."

The point is that it won't remain a copy of the meta list if everyone starts editing it. In any case I'd rather not fork this list.

Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded is not supposed to be an exact copy of meta. (Or, if anything, Meta should be altered to conform to that list, since it's a better-quality list.) It's supposed to be an improved version of a list that's about as long as the Meta one. There's no reason to have such a list on the English Wikipedia (since we can always link to Meta) except that it's easier for English-Wikipedia editors to edit the list here than at Meta, and because putting it here makes it more directly under the scope of the English Wikipedia. And, Expanded isn't a fork of this list, it's an expanded version. It's like the daughter article of a page, serving to cover the same topic but in greater detail. By having a more concise parent (WP:VA) and more thorough parent (the Expanded list), we make both lists more useful by giving people who want a short list what they want, and giving people who want a more expansive (though still not bloated to the point of uselessness) list what they want as well. -Silence 11:21, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

• "Yes, that was an oversight. I was simply removing the entries that had been added since June 2006 and didn't seem to clearly merit inclusion; I didn't take the time to do an in-depth review of the entries already there, but in retrospect I see no compelling reason to keep Toronto there. Feel free to remove it."

Will do. —dv82matt 15:37, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

I must say, I support the inclusion of more places on this page. I think it's right to use the metro area as a better representation of a city's perceived population; that's why all city articles include both figures in their infoboxes. The population of a city alone is often based on administrative districts, and can be misleading, as with my home city Newcastle upon Tyne.

Since I have been beta testing the Version 0.5 dataset, I must say how glad I am that we elected to include all countries and all global cities in our set of ~2000 articles. Virtually every biography article reads like, "XXXX was an American author. He was born in New York, but he grew up in London, England. He met his wife in Paris, then they settled in San Francisco...etc. It has made me realise how much we use place as a reference point.

I'm not proposing we include here all countries, or all global cities, as we did at Version 0.5. I do note, though, that this page originally did include all countries, and that versions of this article in other languages still do (i.e., people did not edit them out as "unworthy". I think we should trim down from that list of 243, and only include sovereign states. I think we could remove some of the minor countries from that list - perhaps countries with a population under one million would be the most objective (least controversial) way to do that. That would give us perhaps 150 articles on significant countries - that alone would restore much of the "worldwide balance" we are seeking. Regarding cities, I think we should include all 10 alpha cities and all 10 beta cities, then the top 20 cities represented by List of metropolitan areas by population. That should give a list of about thirty cities, which does not seem at all excessive to me.

As I see it, there are five main types of articles at VA - places, people, things, events and ideas. I think places are vastly under-represented at present. We can make way for these places by removing some biographical articles and some "idea" articles. By the time we have removed some of the less important American people and European ideas, and replaced these with cities in Latin America and countries in Africa, we should have a much more balanced collection. Walkerma 21:19, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

"It has made me realise how much we use place as a reference point." - Of course we use place as a reference point often. But we use time as a reference point even more often, yet we currently have many, many more specific places on our list than we have specific historical periods and events.

"I do note, though, that this page originally did include all countries," - Indeed. And by far one of the most important improvements this article has undergone since that time was the removal of that bloated, useless list from this page. The value of WP:VA is that it provides a concise starting point for improving the most crucial Wikipedia articles; listing everything (or even most things) entirely defeats the project's purpose, and is as absurd as requiring that WP:VA list every single element on the periodic table, as opposed to just listing the most crucial ones (gold, helium, etc.).

"I think we could remove some of the minor countries from that list - perhaps countries with a population under one million would be the most objective (least controversial) way to do that." - And the least useful. Many of the countries with a population under one million are dozens of times more noteworthy than the relatively generic, unimportant countries with a mid-level population. The only two options are to make the list less useful, by resorting to a strict, inflexible minimum population for countries, or to make it more controversial, by relying on our personal judgment to determine which countries "aren't important" (and hope that those countries don't have many interested Wikipedians!). Or both.

"that alone would restore much of the "worldwide balance" we are seeking." - ???? There isn't any significant unbalance in the current list. Why are we trying to fix something that isn't broken? Even dv82matt doesn't allege that there's any major bias in the coverage; his problem isn't with the idea that the current list is indeed essentially the 20 most important countries in the world. Rather, his problem is that he thinks we should have many more than 20 countries listed. And that's what your argument is too. So no one has alleged, or provided any support for the view, that there is any significant bias in the current listing (which is quite an achievement in itself for such a tricky area!!). People are only complaining that the list isn't long enough (when in reality the reverse is probably true; the list is so long that I'm one of the only people who ever bothers to update it, and country/city articles tend to fluctuate in GA and FA a lot more than average articles do).

I've spent many, many months trying a wide variety of different strategies to try and craft the most useful and neutral listing of important countries possible; believe me, many of the attempts I've made have used exactly the strategies you're recommending (i.e., I've tried both starting from a few and then gradually expanding them, and starting from the complete list and gradually trimming them), and the only remotely successful versions that we've been able to produce are the ones listed here and on the Expanded list. So, although you're free to try to make such a list, I don't see how it would be very valuable (since it would either trim so few entries off that you might as well simply link to the list of countries article, or would trim so many entries off that it would spark endless squabbling and revert wars over which country meets our newly-lowered standards for inclusion).

I am skeptical of any attempt to provide a list that doesn't say that "countries X, Y, and Z are the most important", but rather says that "every country except X, Y, and Z is important"; for obvious reasons, the latter has much more potential to be offensive than the former. It's one thing to not have one's home country listed among a very tight, compact list of 30-40 pages; it's an entirely different thing to see your country exluded from a list of hundreds, essentially a slap in the face to anyone living in those places! So, for purely practical reasons (both to avoid time-consuming revert wars and trivial squabbling, and to avoid making the list so large that it's of minimal value to editors looking for a short and compact list of crucially important articles to keep an eye on), I don't think that this is a very good idea. But, you're welcome to give it a try.

"Regarding cities, I think we should include all 10 alpha cities and all 10 beta cities, then the top 20 cities represented by List of metropolitan areas by population." - That seems rather arbitrary. What about cities that are of historical importance, but are not current major metropolises? What about smaller cities that have great global importance for one reason or another, like Jerusalem? Any attempt to try to strictly quantify is going to be extremely lacking. Not only will it miss out on numerous entries that should have been included, but it will also include marginal entries mainly on technicalities, and, perhaps most importantly, will be redundant to the lists we already have on our "alpha cities" articles and so on, which any editor can already use if they just want to monitor cities based on that standard.

Additionally, it is important to consider the fact that countries are many, many, many times more important than cities. I am surprised that we are spending so much time on the relatively trivial topic of cities, when the issue of countries is so much more central (maybe because countries are even trickier to neutrally deal with than cities, making people more hesitant to broach the issue?). Regardless, we need to keep in mind, because of the much greater importance of countries over cities, that we should have at most half as many cities as we have countries. We should also keep in mind that it would be much, much, much easier to use Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded for the expanded-list purposes mentioned above than to try to completely change the high inclusion standards of the current WP:VA listing. That page already has more than twice as many cities as this one, so it's much more likely to be the one that you'd want to add these important, but not quite top-level vital, city articles to. (And many of them, in fact, already have been added there.)

"As I see it, there are five main types of articles at VA - places, people, things, events and ideas" - That level of oversimplification serves absolutely no value whatsoever in understanding the relative significance of topics. People are not, by and large, as important as things, for example. This is because people are generally unique, historical individuals, whereas things will be more regularly encountered in daily life, and are more likely to play a key role in the future. For example, electricity is an infinitely more important article than Benjamin Franklin. Hell, to be perfectly frank, it's more important than the likes of Jesus and Adolf Hitler!

"I think places are vastly under-represented at present." - That is because of your absurdly oversimplified subdivision of the types of articles above. There are two major fallacies in your reasoning here. First, you assume that all articles fit into those categories; this is clearly untrue, because what about organisms other than humans, like plants and animals and bacteria? Are you categorizing those life forms into "things"? If so, then why are humans not categorized in the same way? It seems arbitrary to consider people to not be "things", of a sort, when all other "living things" are. One could also argue that the distinction between a "place" and a "thing" is very ill-conceived, if there at all; is the universe a place or a thing, for example? What about the entire Earth? Another seemingly arbitrary factor in this subdivision is that one could argue that "people" are a subdivision of "events", at least in that the biography of any person will be solely concerned with events. Indeed, the only real difference between biographical and historical articles is that the former are generally more limited and focused in scope, which often makes them less useful than the latter (e.g., Adolf Hitler contains vastly less mportant information than World War II, and vastly more useless trivia; yet both are equally historical, if you really think about it).

The second error in your reasoning, and probably the most important one, is that you assume that just because articles are categorized in a certain way, that each category must be equally important (or even anywhere near equally important). Suppose I categorized all articles on Wikipedia into "animals", "minerals", "vegetables", and "other". (And in your system, "things" is essentially the word you're using for your "other".) Would I then be justified in saying that all four of those categories are equally important? Clearly not. To assume on "autopilot" that once we've categorized articles in a certain way, that all those categories are on the same "level" of essentialness for actually understanding the world we live in, is profoundly lazy. Actually thinking about the issues involved clearly debunks the idea that a "place" and an "event" are equally important, for example. How much valuable information is there in Oceania, for example, compared to how much there is in Cold War? A simplistic view might take Oceania to be equally as important, or even more important, because Oceania spans a larger percentage of the world's surface than the Cold War spans of the world's history; but a commonsensical analysis tells us that most of the information in Oceania will be quite trivial to the vast majority of people in the world, compared to the essential and necessary facts that anyone in the world could glean from Cold War. Likewise, it is an error to say that places are comparably important to non-locational "things". Even the biggest, broaded places in the world, like Asia or the Atlantic Ocean, are nowhere near the level of importance of core VA topics like Life or Science or Water. Likewise, to move on to less dramatic examples, it is infinitely less important to have a working understanding of New Delhi, even though it's one of the largest cities in the world and the capital of one of the most important and populous countries in the world, than it is to have a working understanding of Poetry, or Ecology, or Brain. We should not leap to the assumption that places, or people for that matter, are all that important just because they're sometimes categorized at the "top level" for the sake of convenience.

"By the time we have removed some of the less important American people and European ideas, and replaced these with cities in Latin America and countries in Africa, we should have a much more balanced collection." - And if those American or European ideas or people were more important than those Latin American or African countries or cities, will it have been worth it? I'm not questioning the idea that we need to make the list more balanced, but I think we should improve the balance, and gauge articles' importance, on a case-by-case basis, rather than losing sight of the big picture (i.e., the actual purpose of WP:VA, which is to provide a useful service to editors, not to promote or attack any cultural POV; further NPOVing the list is only a means to that end, not an end in itself). -Silence 22:57, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

One problem here is that there are two related, but distinct senses of the word important - fundamental vs. vital. By fundamental I mean that in an academic/philosophical sense, it is in the top level of concepts. Clearly Shakespeare is less fundamental than England or Theatre, but I think most people would agree that Shakespeare belongs on this list - it is vital. Which article is likely to be read more often, New York City or Life? No one would debate which one is more fundamental, yet I think NYC is more vital to include. In my mind, WP:CORE is more suited for the fundamental topics (not that we should totally exclude them from here!). This VA list, though, should focus mainly on the articles that are likely to be most vital - the articles that most people find useful, that they think MUST be there.

Of course my categorisation was simplistic, but that does not invalidate the underlying general point I was making- there aren't enough places on this list. Is relativism more important than Argentina? Is Jackson Pollock more important than Mexico City? Let's compare some statistics:

• Relativism: 329 mainspace links in, 20 foreign language versions
• Jackson Pollock: 228 mainspace links in, 26 foreign language
• Argentina: 12095 mainspace links in, 101 foreign language
• Mexico City: 3457 mainspace links in, 49 foreign language

I don't believe in living and dying based on such numbers, but I think there is a strong case for including many more countries, and even a few more cities. I agree cities are less important than countries in general - but I think Mexico City should rank higher than Saint Kitts and Nevis. If there are specific low-population countries that are really important, we can discuss including them as well - but other than that, if people complain, "Why did you exclude Saint Kitts and Nevis?" it is not based on a subjective view of importance. You're quite right about Jerusalem, Mecca and the like - there are a few cities that have historical/cultural importance well beyond their 2007 population and world city rank. One thing that concerns me with the current list of countries is the arbitrary choice. Why Niger, but not Nigeria? Other than Niger and RSA, the main criterion for a sub-Saharan African country to be included seems to be that some horrible war/genocide/famine occurred there recently. And even in Asia, why Afghanistan and Bangladesh but not Pakistan (population 170 million)?

The original discussion was precipitated by the "Worldwide view" tag attached to this page - that's why I posted on this page. I think we need to address that issue, and I think this is one way to do so. We need to ask questions like, "What would a Nigerian find in this list relevant to his/her life and interests?" I suspect they would be shocked to find that their country of 140 million people doesn't warrant a mention anywhere. I think the list is generally pretty good - otherwise I wouldn't have proposed automatic inclusion of all VA articles (unless really bad!) into WP:V0.7. I just want to see if we can make it better, and avoid the criticism of cultural/geographical bias. Walkerma 00:54, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

Are there any objections to adding Nigeria and Pakistan to the list immediatly? I wouldn't think that they were intentionally left off the list to begin with.

I think that the country listing should also be somewhat expanded, although I would probably balk at there being anywhere near 150 country articles. I would be more comfortable with say 60-80 country articles and 30-40 city articles as soft maximums.

I also tend to agree that pure history articles are underepresented. Some possible candidates for inclusion might include Indian Emergency (1975–1977), Great Leap Forward, Chinese Civil War and Information Age, to name just a few. —dv82matt 03:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

• "Which article is likely to be read more often, New York City or Life? No one would debate which one is more fundamental, yet I think NYC is more vital to include." - Disagree. Wikipedia articles do not assume that someone already knows about the topic in question when an article on that topic is being written, even if it's a topic like Human. If someone doesn't know about life, that person can't understand anything about NYC (or about cities or communities at all); therefore life is more vital than NYC. I agree that we should keep practicality in mind in our selections, but disagree that understanding NYC is so much more useful or practical than understanding Life that it outweighs the latter for the purposes of this list. Both merit inclusion, but the list would lose much less in giving up NYC (which is not needed to understand any of the other articles ont his list) than in giving up Life (which is necessary to understand any of the topics in Biology, and, in a lesser and secondary sense, all of the topics in People and History as well). The main distinction between WP:CORE and WP:VA is not its motivation or inclusion criteria (a core article doesn't necessarily have different characteristics than a vital one), but rather its methods; both are equally concerned with fundamental, foundational topics. (The other main distinction is that they have different goals: WP:VA is more concerned with monitoring and improving articles, whereas WP:CORE is more a part of the CD selection process.) It's just that the shortest WP:VA listing, being ten times longer than the shortest WP:CORE listing, naturally has many other articles alongside these "super-vital" topics (Life, Universe, etc.) which are not explicitly placed "below" the less fundamental ones.
• "Is relativism more important than Argentina? Is Jackson Pollock more important than Mexico City?" - I see your point, but I would say yes, considering how integral and necessary they are to their respective topics on a global scale. One does not need to understand Argentina to understand world politics or geography or history in general; one does need to understand relativism to have any grasp whatsoever on politics, philosophy, ethics, etc. One doesn't need to know about Mexico City to understand world politics or geography or history in general; one does need to know about Pollock's contributions to understand 20th-century art in general. However, I am entirely willing to see Pollock, and possibly even relativism, removed from the list, if it is felt that these entries are not noteworthy enough. This seems more reasonable to me than lowering our standards to fit in Argentina, which failed to even meet the top-50 list of countries in the Expanded list (which includes a number of countries that are much more important than Argentina, like Kazakhstan, Monaco, Mongolia, Nepal, Netherlands, Peru, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ukraine. The country of Pakistan also failed to meet the strict (but much looser than this list) criteria for inclusion there.
• "Why Niger, but not Nigeria?" - Partly because Niger is considered the least developed country in the entire world. See List of countries by Human Development Index. If you don't consider this (and Niger's other characteristics) significant enough to merit inclusion on this list over and above ones like Nigeria, then I'm perfectly fine with removing it.
• "why Afghanistan and Bangladesh but not Pakistan (population 170 million)? " - Likewise, I'm fine with removing Afghanistan and Bangladesh. If you think Pakistan merits inclusion, we can add it (and keep Afghanistan and Bangladesh) at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded; that seems like a good compromise, and will help both shorten this list and expand the expanded one. Likewise fir Niger and Nigeria (which are both listed at the Expanded page).
• "We need to ask questions like, "What would a Nigerian find in this list relevant to his/her life and interests?" I suspect they would be shocked to find that their country of 140 million people doesn't warrant a mention anywhere." - You've just clearly demonstrated why that's a terribly useless question to ask: anyone in any country in the world would be roughly equally shocked to not find his or her country not on the list. A better question to ask would be: "What countries other than Nigeria would a Nigerian expect to find on this list?" If a Nigerian would be shocked to find a certain non-Nigerian country included, or not included, that's a much stronger case than measuring the degree of national pride or arrogance in a certain country. That's why ideally we should eventually get this list reviewed by as many people (and especially scholars) as possible from all different parts of the world, both to get ideas on articles to add and ones to remove. However, in the meantime, I think the best way to help make this article more globally neutral is not to expand the article greatly (which will just make the list more biased, in that the topics it doesn't discuss will be all the more glaring), but rather to remove entries that are not of global interest. This is much easier to do: rather than trying to think of every topic that isn't included (though certainly we can also expand the list, if we do think of more globally important topics), we should review the ones that currently are included, and see which ones are only (or largely) there because of our bias. This seems like a more productive way to make the list neutral, at least for now.
• "Are there any objections to adding Nigeria and Pakistan to the list immediatly?" - I object. What makes those countries more important than Ukraine, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Sudan, Monaco, Switzerland, Mongolia, Thailand, Netherlands, Sweden, Peru, or the dozens of other countries not on the list?
• "I would be more comfortable with say 60-80 country articles and 30-40 city articles as soft maximums." - Then I strongly recommend using that as a guideline for how long the list of country and city articles at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded should be, as that sounds very reasonable indeed for a list longer than this one. But WP:VA itself, I strongly suggest, should be about half that long (30-40 countries, 15-20 cities). There are plenty of lengthy country lists out there, but there are no short, concise ones; WP:VA should strive to fulfill that need. The fact that we can have it both ways (thanks to the separate concise and expanded lists) is all the more reason to use both maximums. -Silence 16:13, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Changes to the list

OK, where next? I think we could perhaps add some history articles to the list, but we should first settle the cities/countries issue. How should we judge what goes in? The other thing - what comes out? I think we could look into the biographical listing, and I think we could cut some from the philosophy and religion section too. We need to make sure, though, that the result gives us more of a "worldwide view" than before. Walkerma 05:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

In the above section you mentioned the idea of listing all countries with a population greater than 1 million. If the population requirement were raised a bit, say to 5 million, I think that would be an acceptable guideline. (Note that this would not preclude countries that do not meet the population requirement from being listed provided they qualify for other reasons.)

As far as cities go I'm happy with the current entries. I'd be fine with including beta world cities in the list as well but I don't think it matters too much one way or the other.

For biography articles I find it's difficult to get a feel for the relative importance from the Wikipedia article and I'm hesitant to go through removing those that I don't feel are important especially when the main reason I don't think they are important is because I've never heard of them. I do think that Sitting Bull and Steve Jobs should be removed from the list though.

For the philosophy and religion section I don't really see too much of a problem with it. Do you think it is biased or just over-populated? —dv82matt 09:49, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Quick reply - yes, I agree with everything you say, though I don't know enough about Sitting Bull to know if he is considered to be the leading figure in Native American history of the last 200 years (I suspect he may be - need to check on that!). Yes, I do think mainly the philosophy & religion section is just over-populated, though I think it is fairly balanced in terms of worldwide view. I think that something like Tehran (same size as LA) is more important than Zoroaster, bearing in mind (a) we have Zoroastrianism already and (b) Zoroastrianism is largely of historical interest at this point anyway. I suspect we could trim a few "isms" as well - not a lot, but a few. Let's see what others think on that stuff, though. Steve Jobs- nice guy, but not in the VA list IMHO. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Walkerma (talk • contribs) 04:55, 15 February 2007 (UTC).

"If the population requirement were raised a bit, say to 5 million, I think that would be an acceptable guideline." - There are 113 countries in the world with a population of over 5 million. This seems like a clearly unacceptable guideline. The 1-million population requirement is barely even any worse (there are only 42 countries that meet the 1,000,000 mark but not the 5,000,000 one). Both are ridiculously inclusive for the scope of this list. They also seem useless for distinguishing important from unimportant countries; are Vatican City, Monaco, Andorra, Samoa, Iceland, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Cyprus, Fiji, East Timor, Swaziland, Latvia, Kuwait, Jamaica, Armenia, Macedonia, Estonia, Lithuania, Uruguay, Lebanon, Palestine, Singapore, Costa Rica, Croatia, and Norway, which have a population under 5 million, really significantly less noteworthy than Kyrgyzstan, Benin, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Tajikistan, Togo, Laos, Angola, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon, which have a population over 5 million?

You have made my case for me - I think countries like Jamaica, Singapore and Armenia do warrant inclusion (but not the really minor ones, under 1m, that you list). I think something like Azerbaijan is far more important than many of the articles we currently include on this page. Walkerma 05:03, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

"I think that something like Tehran (same size as LA) is more important than Zoroaster, bearing in mind (a) we have Zoroastrianism already and (b) Zoroastrianism is largely of historical interest at this point anyway." - I'm not sure I agree. Zoroaster's importance is not just for establishing Zoroastrianism, but for establishing the major beliefs of popular doctrines in the entire world today: Judaism, Islam, Christianity, etc. To say that he is "largely of historical interest" is like saying that Abraham or Jesus is largely of historical interest: his historical impact has changed the modern world in almost incomprehensibly profound ways. However, your point that we already have a Zoroastrianism article, and that the founder is less important than what he founded, is a valid one: if we trim the "religion" section down to about 15 entries, I'll be fine with removing Zoroaster, as I consider him more important than most of the current entries there. -Silence 16:30, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Architecture

Talk about American bias! The Sears Tower on the architecture list? You must be joking. The only mildly remarkable thing about the building is that it is currently the tallest building in the US. Now that's what I call important! What about the Chrysler Building, the White House, the United_States_Capitol? What about the Palace of Westminster, or the Great_Stupa_of_Sanchi, what about Angkor_Vat, the Great_Mosque_of_Djenne, the Forbidden_city, Saint_Basil's_Cathedral, the Seven_Sisters_(Moscow), the Moscow_Kremlin, or the Harimandir Sahib, to name but a few? I would consider every one of these buildings to be of greater cultural importance than the Sears Tower. Burschik 07:23, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Well it's not just the tallest building in the US, by one standard it's the tallest building in the entire world. Nonetheless you have a point. We should probably remove it and add Taipei 101 which has a better claim to being the world's tallest building. —dv82matt 08:08, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I strongly recommend including neither building on the list. If there is no absolute agreement on what building is the tallest in the world, then all the candidates for this are borderline enough to not merit inclusion. The only architectural structures that should be included on WP:VA are ones that meet the level of noteworthiness of, say, the Great Wall of China. Neither the Sears Tower nor Taipei 101 qualify. -Silence 08:39, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I totally agree with Silence on this point. I wished to point out that the Sears Tower is not notable, and that there are many more notable buildings in the world. Being the tallest building in the world at some arbitrary point in time is pretty much irrelevant. Lincoln Cathedral may have been the tallest building in the world for nearly 250 years, but who cares about that? But what about the Empire State Building? Is it as notable as the Great Wall of China? I think not. In my opinion, the only structures in the US that might approach that level of notability (or at least instant recognizability) are The_Pentagon, the Golden_Gate_Bridge and the Statue_of_Liberty. Burschik 11:44, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Entry quantities to shoot for?

Although I've been resisting a move in this direction for a long, long time because I wanted to keep this list flexible, it seems to me that continued disagreements over how broad this list should be render it almost impossible for us to discuss whether an entry actually merits inclusion in this list or that. If one person think that we should have 100 biography pages and another thinks we should have 200, then even if the two people agree that a certain person isn't anywhere near the top 100 biographies in importance, there can still be strong disagreement over whether to include that biography on the list. It seems to me that this sort of sitution is too unproductive. We should at least come to a very rough agreement regarding how many entries to include in each broad section of both Wikipedia:Vital articles and Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded, so as to minimize arguments over length. These should not be absolute, final decisions on how long to make each section, and should be open to further discussion and revisal later, but at least for now it seems like the most sensible thing is to come to some sort of consensus regarding general length, while keeping in mind that these should be used as guidelines and tools, not absolute limits. My current recommendations for the length of each section (though I'm certainly open to changing my mind on any of these, following discussion) are:

Total (concise): about 1000 entries (currently 1100; exact total of below "about Xs" is 985)

Total (expanded): about 1500 entries (currently 1376; exact total of below "about Xs" is 1520)

• Biography (concise): about 100 entries (currently 167)
• Biography (expanded): about 300 entries (currently 323)
• History (concise): about 60 entries (currently 49)
• History (expanded): about 100 entries (currently 79)
• Geography (concise): about 100 entries (currently 127), including about 40 countries, 20 cities, and 40 other articles
• Geography (expanded): about 150 entries (currently 147), including about 50 countries, 40 cities, and 60 other articles
• Arts (concise): about 40 entries (currently 47)
• Arts (expanded): about 60 entries (currently 79)
• Philosophy (concise): about 40 entries (currently 45)
• Philosophy (expanded): about 50 entries (currently 17)
• Religion (concise): about 40 entries (currently 55)
• Religion (expanded): about 50 entries (currently 67)
• Everyday life (concise): about 80 entries (currently 85), including about 20 recreation, 20 language, 20 food and drink, and 20 other articles

• (note: this section should probably be split up and merged into more descriptive ones, as it's currently basically an "other" category; these were formally, along with "arts", under a "culture" overcategory, but the split has left this rather useless category covering things as unrelated as "language", "mind", "sports", and "food")

• Everyday life (expanded): about 140 entries (currently 122), including about 30 recreation, 40 language, 30 food and drink, and 40 other articles
• Society (concise): about 80 entries (currently 94)
• Society (expanded): about 120 entries (currently 117)
• Science (concise): about 180 entries (currently 209), including about 30 astronomy, 60 biology, 40 chemistry, 20 earth science, and 30 physics
• Science (expanded): about 300 entries (currently 269), including about 40 astronomy, 150 biology, 40 chemistry, 30 earth science, and 40 physics
• Technology (concise): about 100 entries (currently 128)
• Technology (expanded): about 150 entries (currently 109)
• Mathematics (concise): about 40 entries (currently 49)
• Mathematics (expanded): about 60 entries (currently 27)
• Measurement (concise): about 25 entries (currently 45)

• (note: this section should be merged into "mathematics")

• Measurement (expanded): about 40 entries (currently 30)

These seem like reasonable short-term goals, highlighting both sections that need expansion (like History) and sections that need trimming (like Biography), without being too demanding or dramatic in the changes it will make (e.g., I made Biography's goal 100 rather than 50 in "concise", and 300 rather than 200 in "expanded", partly because a more extreme change will be much more difficult in this situation). However, I'm bringing this up mainly so we can discuss people's different views on how specific areas of the lists, and how the two lists overall, should be handled, in terms of general inclusion standards, length, the relative difference between the two lists, etc. So feel free to voice your thoughts on which aspects of the above proposed rough guidelines of article numbers to shoot for you agree or disagree with. -Silence 12:49, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I question the utility of having two lists. (1) Two lists will be much harder to maintain than one and (2) the lists would in large part be identical anyway. I would much prefer to merge the two lists or have the "expanded" list remain a copy of the meta list, rather than diffuse our efforts across two such similar lists. Having entry quantities to shoot for could certainly be helpful, but I strongly recommend against forking this page. —dv82matt 17:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

The two lists will be easy to maintain if one of the two lists is very short. Only if both lists are long will it be a big problem. Yes, the two lists would in large part be identical; part of the reason for this is that I had originally planned to give the two lists a very different format. The shorter list would keep real-time info on the status of all articles on the list (cleanup tags, FA status, etc.), while the longer one would be intended to contain other information (perhaps even in table format) on all the articles that wouldn't change as often. I've entertained and experimented with a wide variety of potential things to add to the expanded list. However, if we decide never to use that list for anything more than what WP:VA is used for, then I could see an argument being made for eliminating the redundancies by simply deleting everything from the Expanded list that is also on the concise list. This keeps all the benefits of having two lists (particularly the benefit of keeping this list from becoming a bloated, useless POV battleground by shunting off borderline articles to the other page), but makes the longer list a bit more manageable. It's something to think about, at least, though I also like the utility of having the lists repeated in that it allows someone who wants to to only use the Expanded list, while others can choose to only use the concise one. This is a bit more flexible of a system than making the Expanded list dependent upon using the concise one. But there are other ways to get around that problem (e.g., something like the system used at List of Latin phrases, which found a way to incorporate different sub-pages into one article).

As for keeping the "expanded" list as a copy of the meta list, that seems absolutely senseless to me. There is no purpose whatsoever in having an exact copy of the meta here; we can much more easily just link to the meta page itself.

"but I strongly recommend against forking this page." - The page has been "forked", by your definition, since its creation. That forking is integral to the value its had over the years. Without it, this page would have been profoundly useless for its entire history. It seems unreasonable to me that you are unwilling to accept the value of having a WP:VA list that is 1,000 entries, rather than 1,500+ or 2,000+ entries, long. It should be obvious that the shorter, more concise page has great value over the longer one in a great number of ways, and deleting it (which is essentially the only major change you are proposing; we already have the long page you desire available at Expanded, but you want to destroy this page) will take away most of the value of this entire project—that value being its conciseness and simplicity, which is what allows editors to scan over and update this page easily. -Silence 17:47, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

In your last paragraph you have grossly misrepresented my position on this. I suggest you calm yourself and reread what I wrote. Nowhere have I advocated deletion of this page and I certainly do not want to destroy it. I do not think this list should be 1,500+ or 2,000+ entries long, nor do I deny the utility of a list that is 1,000 entries long. We simply have a minor difference of opinion. It's not really worth getting upset over or casting aspersions is it?

As for the lists being easy to maintain if one is very short I respectfully disagree. The short list will still have approximatly 1,000 entries will it not? Perhaps if the concise list were dramatically shorter (-300 entries) or much of the maintenance could be done by bot I could see it. What I am concerned about is that one page (probably the expanded page) will become inactive due to the chore of keeping a subpage that is less likely to be used up to date.

As for it being "senseless" to keep a copy of the meta list I'll take your word for it. That appeared to be what it was and I assumed that whoever created it may have had a reason for doing so.

You mentioned that forking is integral to the value of this list. I take it that you are refering to the fact that it was originally copied from meta. That may be true but it doesn't follow that further forking this list will further improve it.

I should add that I don't think we are actually that far apart in this particular. Ideally I'd like to see around 1,200 entries total but I'm not stuck on that number. We seem to disagree more on the details of what to include than on the total entries.

Speaking of details I see that you've removed the "contested" city and country articles. I realise that 2 to 1 isn't exactly a robust consensus but come on! Compromise a little. —dv82matt 19:57, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I neither cast aspersions nor got upset at any point in my above comment; I recommend rereading it for what I said, rather than what you read into it. You advocated making dramatic loosenings of the current article inclusion standards for this list (like including every article for a country with a population over 5 million on the list), which would have the effect of making this page closer to 1500 articles than its original intended maximum length, 1000 articles. This means that you are eliminating any utility in having the shortened version of the page currently at this location (because you are making it as long as the Meta list), which is indeed effectively destroying it (since the other option, having two clones of the exact same page, is absurd).

And if you are concerned about the Expanded page becoming inactive—then why not work on it? It is not difficult to keep a page active. All it takes is one or two people working on it from time to time. Advocating the effective destruction of one of the pages rather than advocating putting any effort in is inconsiderate to the dozens of editors who have worked hard on both lists over the years. As for the Meta page, I am the one who created the Expanded copy here from Meta! And the reasons for its creation are exactly the ones I just told you above. I gave you the reasons for its creation; did you simply not read that section of my post?

As for forking being integral to the list, yes, I am talking about the Meta fork, but I am also talking about the fact that we've long needed forks of various sorts in order to keep cruft from accumulating on the lists, and to keep editors' valuable time from being excessively wasted by endless, cyclic debates over whether borderline articles should be included or not.

"Compromise a little." - I did exactly that. I removed both the entries that were added by you that I contested, and the entries that were added by me that you contested (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Niger, and Toronto). -Silence 02:01, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I think both of us could spend our time more productively by not continuing to bicker on this talk page and I don't see much chance of a reasonable dialog developing so for now I'll take a break from editing this page. —dv82matt 05:03, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Incidentally, I do see your point about a 1,000-long list being somewhat difficult to regularly maintain, and that the fork would be more justifiable if this list was shorter. The fork would also be more clearly justified if the other, Expanded list was a bit longer. I'm fully open to both possibilities. For example, I'm open to shortening the WP:VA list to, say, 800 rather than 1,000, and to expanding the Expanded list to 1800 or even 2000 articles, etc. I don't think this is necessary at this stage, but it's something to consider, at least for the longer-term. Having the list be automatically checked and updated by a bot has also been proposed in the past, and if necessary I think we could arrange exactly that; however, the list is updated at this point at least semi-regularly without one, so I do not see this as absolutely necessary to justify the two-list split. -Silence 02:07, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the compromise we expected was that minor topics would be replaced by major ones - not that everything would be removed and nothing added! We now only have 34 countries, more than 200 less than this page originally started with, and 16 less than even the lowest proposal! The consensus (I thought) was that we would start by removing around 60-80 articles from areas like biography, and replace these with areas that need expanding, like countries and history. Rather than starting an edit war, I think the way forward is to agree on overall numbers in each area, then discuss what is removed or added. Silence has already given us an excellent outline of his viewpoint - thank you for that. I think we all need to do the same. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to research the numbers myself and create a nice table to compare numbers, but let's at least start with Geography, which seems to be the main area of contention at this point.

This list (created by David Gerard and Tarquin in 2004) originally contained 243 countries (only 203 on meta?). Just under a year ago, Silence renamed the list, and removed nearly all of the countries. After the list was tagged as too pro-Western, I (Walkerma) looked at statistics indicating high importance of country articles, and proposed a compromise between the two extremes, 155 countries. dv82matt has proposed restricting it to only 113. Below is a table summarising these positions, along with the French Wikipedia to add more of a "worldwide viewpoint". I've left a couple of spaces for others to add their opinions.

Proposals for numbers countries

User	Meta	English WP (WP:VA)	French WP	David Gerard	Silence	dv82matt	Walkerma
No. articles	16 concise, 40 expanded	34 concise, 48 expanded	193	243	30-40 concise, 50-60 expanded	113+	155
Criteria	Case-by-case analysis and discussion	Case-by-case analysis and discussion	All internationally recognized sovereign states	All countries	Case-by-case analysis and discussion	All sovereign states with pop. <5m	All sovereign states with pop. <1m

Once we come to a consensus, we can decide what to add. Walkerma 05:04, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

"I think the compromise we expected was that minor topics would be replaced by major ones - not that everything would be removed and nothing added!" - Considering that you consider the "major" ones all the ones you want added, and the "minor" ones all the ones you want removed, that's not a compromise, that's just you getting everything you want and giving nothing in return. It is in the best interests of the list to keep the list short, and not uselessly lengthy.

However, I will propose another compromise: how about if, rather than forcing editors to deal with an absurdly long list, but also rather than preventing them from using such lists if they so wish, we leave the smallish list on WP:VA, and the slightly larger one on the Expanded page (albeit with whatever revisions to each of those pages we deem fit, but staying within the basic size limits that keep those lists viable), but we also provide links at the top of the "countries" sections to pages listing (1) all the countries (and sovereign states) at List of countries; and (2) List of countries by population, to satisfy those who (incorrectly) think that the most important criteria for judging a country's importance is simply its raw population. That way we provide all three lists—the two longer ones via links, to avoid making the WP:VA pages too long to easily deal with. After all, the criteria proposed by you and dv82matt would be nothing but carbon-copies of the "List of countries by population" (with possibly a couple of other countries thrown in), but with an arbitrary line drawn at a certain population with everything below that line excluded from the list. With that in mind, wouldn't it be a lot easier on everyone to simply link to the list and let editors decide for themselves where, if anywhere, to draw that line?

If you don't find the current Wikipedia lists for these topics satisfying (though I don't see why you wouldn't, they're both excellent and one is an FA), then you can also feel free to make a sub-page in Wikipedia-space for listing the countries in whatever format you prefer—say, Wikipedia:Vital articles/Countries. That way, again, you can provide a link to a more in-depth list of countries, but without overburdening the current WP:VA list with an excess of relatively trivial articles. (Do you really think Turkmenistan is more important than Zoroaster, or than Palestine, Mongolia, and New Zealand for that matter?)

"We now only have 34 countries, more than 200 less than this page originally started with, and 16 less than even the lowest proposal!" - ... So? It's easier to add countries than to remove them, and having too short of a list is an infinitely better situation than having too long of a list. Since lists will naturally tend to accumulate new entries over time, regardless of their size, we are in a much better state when we're below the desired number than when we're above it. But, I think you're obsessing a wee bit much about the numbers; in fact, all of you are. You aren't considering the countries on a case-by-case basis, and consequently you're valuing trivial countries over highly important ones because you you're relying on largely only a single, not-very-helpful criterion for importance (population); and you aren't considering the actual purpose and function of this list, and consequently you're proposing impractical, unworkable criteria for inclusion that would overbloat the listings. We should evaluate each country (and each city) to determine whether to add it or not, weighing dozens of factors to determine whether it merits inclusion or not, as was done when these shortened lists were first created from the original unworkable "list of all countries". We should not simply automatically add ones according to some singular, arbitrary criterion, no matter what that criterion is.

"The consensus (I thought) was that we would start by removing around 60-80 articles from areas like biography, and replace these with areas that need expanding, like countries and history." - The countries list doesn't need expanding, or it needs very little. The history section does need expanding, and the biography section does need trimming. (Indeed, if you look at my above list, you will see that I suggested that around 70 articles be cut from "Biography", just as you said.)

"Just under a year ago, Silence renamed the list, and removed nearly all of the countries. After the list was tagged as too pro-Western" - Um, let's be careful not to equivocate. The countries list, which you are talking about in your first sentence here, was not tagged as being too "pro-Western". Rather, the overall WP:VA list, which is the list you're talking about in your second sentence here, was tagged as such (by User:Richard001). -Silence 11:48, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the suggestion of making inclusion of the countries list optional would be a suitable compromise at this point. And yes, I consider Turkmenistan is far more important than Zoroaster! If we're not including countries as part of a way to resolve the Western bias, how should we fix the problem? Walkerma 05:33, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Titanium

Is titanium important enough to list here? It is an especially vital metal to aerospace applications and for that reason I was surprised it was not already listed. --mav 13:28, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I recommend adding it to Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Expanded#Chemistry. We should reserve the WP:VA list for only the most absolutely essential elements, like Oxygen and Gold and Carbon. If anything, the current list is already too long on the concise list, and too short on the expanded list. -Silence 14:10, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Being a chemist myself, I was going to suggest a couple of changes to the chemistry list. I would propose removing graphite and helium - both of which I'd rank below titanium - and replace them with sodium and chlorine, both of which are of enormous importance in history, industry and chemistry. I don't think titanium quite qualifies, though it is important, it's not in the top list. Walkerma 15:26, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I would also replace magnesium and neon with something more "vital". Although we could add other interesting elements such as potassium and calcium, the chemical compounds section is too small. Instead of adding more elements we could add substances such as methane, alcohol, sugar, carbohydrate, protein, fat, polymer, ammonia, sulfuric acid, etc. (not necessarily all of them, but they deserve consideration). In particular, I wouldn't consider hydrochloric acid to be as "vital" as implied by the current list (it's the only specific compound other than water and carbon dioxide). Itub 09:15, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Computer Science

Shouldn't this article be listed?-BiancaOfHell 16:11, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, it probably should. -Silence 16:14, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

but where?-BiancaOfHell 16:29, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Probably either "Mathematics" or "Information technology". It's listed under "Computers and the Internet" on the expanded list. -Silence 16:35, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Out of date info

There appear to be a number of entries that are out of date: no longer stubs, new good articles, no-longer good articles, etc. What would people think about me writing a bot to update this page once a day? --Selket ^Talk 21:15, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

That would be a great idea. Anything to make the list more accurate, and give more focus to it.-BiancaOfHell 21:37, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I've been thinking today about entirely revamping this current page in an effort to make it more useful to editors: turning it into a table format, with fewer articles listed (say, 600-800, with the removed entries moved to the more simple "Expanded" list) and more up-to-date and specific info on each (e.g., one bar for "Title", a second for "Status" with FA and B-class and so on noted, and a third for "Notes" with specific info on ways the article needs to be improved, like "NPOV", "REFS", etc.). I'm not sure how much such a reformat would lend itself to bot maintenance, however, unlike the current list. -Silence 21:47, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking it would be a good idea to have a way of including a link to an 'extended' list for each heading that is accessible by clicking on [show/hide].-BiancaOfHell 21:59, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

I must say that I like the format now (neither would be easier or harder from a bot's perspective). Tables tend to get hard to read when they get large. That said, I agree with BiancaOfHell on having the linked extended sections. --Selket ^Talk 23:34, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, BiancaOfHell's description is exactly what I was planning on, and have been working on. My current idea is to have (1) a list of around 600-1,000 vital articles in table format, with columns for title, status, notes, and "date when last checked", under sections in the same [show/hide] fashion as pages like WP:GA use; (2) the exact same list, but in more or less the current format, for people who don't want all the details but mostly just want to browse through the names; and (3) the "expanded" list (1,500-2,000 articles), which will be even more basic and will be the one where most of the discussion about adding or removing entries will go on (whereas the first two lists will be more concerned with improving and maintaining the entries on the list, thus ensuring that more of the time we spend is on productive editing, rather than trivial squabbling over whether or not to include borderline entries). I imagine that the second list (and perhaps parts of the first) could indeed be well-served by a bot of some sort. A bot could also be valuable for helping determine what entries to add and remove, if we could set one up to gather information like "how many pages link to this one?" and "how many interwiki links does this page have?" en masse. -Silence 23:41, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Excellent idea. I had never seen WP:GA before, but it's a good template to start from. I agree that having an extended list will prevent needless squabbles. As long as people can see which articles are Vital, and which could do with some improving then the list will be a good service.-BiancaOfHell 00:11, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Just to update everyone, I'm almost done writing the bot. It's taking a long time because I decided to make it a little more sophisticated. It will not be restricted to just this page but can update any list based on a set of rules in the page comments. --Selket ^Talk 05:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Update Solar System status as FA by bot?

Okay, the Solar system article is now an FA. Should we wait till the bot is written to make the update? A first test.-BiancaOfHell 20:36, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Update now. I can't write a bot until a decision is made on whether we are changing the format of the page. Then, I will need to wait for task approval, which can take a few days. If the page is going to maintain it's format for the time being, I can go ahead and start coding. Is that what the consensus is? --Selket ^Talk 18:31, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Britain?

I'd edit the list directly, but I'm not sure what the score is around here and what criteria you are using. This list of British people I feel need inclusion is not exhaustive, but just a stab. I doin't know how you are weighting it, but this is the English language Wikipedia, so I'll throw the big British names out. Under artists I can't see Turner, Hogarth or John Constable. Under authors George Orwell, HG Wells, Charles Dickens, Chaucer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Composers, at the least Arthur Sullivan and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Entrepreneurs needs Richard Branson, Henry Tate and John Cadbury. Explorers needs Ranulph Fiennes, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. Inventors and scientists needs, blimey, James Watt, John Logie Baird, Alexander Graham Bell, Stephen Hawkings. Mathematicians, at the least George Boole. Politicians and leaders, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Oliver Cromwell, Henry VIII of England, Elizabeth I of England, Lloyd George, maybe Robert Walpole and Charles I of England, possibly Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, although I am unsure of the criteria. Revolutionaries is missing Irish Republican Army. And where's the sport? Roger Bannister, Steve Redgrave, Liverpool FC, Manchester United FC, David Beckham, Alf Ramsey, Celtic FC, The Ashes, Torvill and Dean and Nick Faldo etc. I'll let other countrys bang the drum for their sporting stars. And actors? Alec Guiness, Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren. Would David Lean be an artist? The BBC would fit where? Food for thought, at any rate. I'm not hot on great Irish people, Australians or Canadians, I will say, not to speak of the other countries where English is the first language. Hiding Talk webcomic warrior 14:14, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Note that we're trying to reduce, not increase, the number of English-language-centric articles on the list, including British ones. However, your suggestions are very appreciated, and a few would probably make good additions here (Stephen Hawkings looks promising, for example), and many more would probably be useful additions to the Expanded list. You are also welcome to propose any suggestions for entries to remove from the current list, as we're mostly trying to shorten, not lengthen, the current list. -Silence 21:02, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Why are you trying to shrink it? Hiding Talk webcomic warrior 21:34, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Our plan is to make two lists: one short (say, 600-1000 articles), regularly updated one for the practical purpose of monitoring Wikipedia's most critical articles and both improving and maintaining them; the other second (say 1500-2000 articles) and more comprehensive, but not used as much for the specific purpose of article maintenance because of the difficulty of regularly checking on so many articles. Wikipedia:Vital articles will be the short list, and thus needs trimming; Wikipedia:Vital articles/Expanded will be the long list, and thus needs expansino. -Silence 21:41, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Ah, okay. Well, if you are shrinking English-language-centric articles then you could lose Andy Warhol, William Blake, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Madonna, Tim Berners-Lee, the Wright Brothers, Thatcher, FDR, Bush, Blair, Truman, Victoria of the United Kingdom and you need to cull half of the philosophers and social scientists, not just English Language ones. Leave Aristotle, René Descartes, Sigmund Freud, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Socrates, and Sun Tzu. Just my thoughts. Sorry, I hadn't seen the extended lists. Hiding Talk webcomic warrior 21:47, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion: Kalevala

I copy this from talk page of meta-wiki, since no talk happens there. I suggest Kalevala would be added to list. As the Finnish national epos it is the flagship of one of the richest oral traditions in the world - the Finnic mythology. About hundred thousand folk poems have been collected from Finnic peoples to the folk poem archive of Finland. Kalevala, even while it haves only a small portion of those poems, represents all that. It is written in a unique European language and unique metre. In Kalevala there are layers of mythology from all time perioids since stone age. It is translated in many languages. There is nothing else about Finland in this list of articles even though Finland is one of the leading countries in welfare, health care, fight against corruption, education, womens rights, democracy, technological achievements, journalist freedom, economic competitiveness and so on (look statistics at the Finland article). There is nothing about any Fenno-Ugric people in this list even though most scientist agree that Fenno-Ugric languages were spoken at Northern Europe before Indo-European languages and so Fenno-Ugrics are native European languages and an important part of what Europeans are composed of just like Christianity or Hellenic culture. If we don't have anything else about Fenno-Ugric world here lets have Kalevala to represent all that. Tuohirulla puhu 16:05, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion: tree simplification

Hi, I'd love to see this knowledge tree be simplified as in "Science"/"Science" goes to "Science", and the hyperlink is simply placed in that single "Science". bsod 23:25, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

What is 'Writing' doing in 'Information technology'? It's double, also in 'Everyday life'/'Language'. bsod 01:21, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

In 'Mathematics': The 'col-break' code between 'Integral' and 'Chaos Theory' bugs there with the renumbering, it starts at 1 again somehow. It immediately is clear that this is a bug, because both columns in the 'Mathematics' sections start at 1., which is impossible. The same bug occurs in 'Measurement' by the way. bsod 01:41, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I respectfully propose to get rid of that entire 'Measurement' main category. As every physicist will tell you, measurement is a subtopic in physics. And as such, is should be found in that category. And even as a main category, it is a very redundant structure, at least in the beginning: its just a list of physical quantities each with their respective units as children. And later on in the measurement category, even that schema does not hold. Take 'Speed' for example: it has two subcategories there, 'Acceleration' and 'Velocity'. These terms are not even speed units. It's more like /things you can measure and have something to do with speed/. Anyway, I could go on about it, but the mainline is: Let's ditch that Measurement, it helps us to loose a lot of words (of lesser importance). bsod 02:19, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Eurocentreism

Unfortunately this list is completely Eurocenteric. It represents western POV and ignore other cultures. I write some of notable persons and events. Of course this is not all of them.

• People
  • Artists:Calligraphists:Mir Emad Hassani(most celebrated Persian calligrapher. It is believed that Nasta'liq reached its highest elegance in Mir Emad's works.), Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād and Reza Abbasi(the greatest miniaturists)
  • Authors:Rumi, Ferdowsi, Hafez and Saadi (poet)(4 greatest Persian poets)
  • Composers and musicians:
  • Explorers:Ibn Battutah(Why do you write Marco Polo and neglect Ibn Battutah?)
  • Inventors and scientists:Al-Razi(Who discovered alcohol)
  • Mathematicians:Al-Khwarizmi(Algorithm is derivated from his name.) Omar Khayyám(well known for inventing the method of solving cubic equations. algebra is introduced by him)
  • Philosophers and social scientists:Avicenna, Averroes(both of them have great effect on Tomas Aquinas), Ibn Khaldun(He wrote Muqaddimah which is one of the first work in philosophy and sociology of history, transformations of civilizations) Bhaskara and Nasir al-Din Tusi (for their works in Astronomy and Trigonometry)
  • Politicians and leaders:Cyrus the Great(Founder of Achaemenid Empire)
  • Revolutionaries and activists:You wrote the name of Osama bin Laden and neglect Ruhollah Khomeini (He is the leader of one the Great revolution in the world)
• History
  • Prehistory to Middle Ages:
    • Iron Age:Achaemenid Empire(7.5 million km² (under Darius the Great)) and Han Empire (6 million km²) both of them are greater than Roman Empire.
  • Middle Ages:Tang Empire(14 million km²) and Arab Empire(13.2 million km² (under the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I))
  • Renaissance to present:Iranian revolution(I can't understand why there is written French and Russian Revolutions and neglected Iranian revolution.)
• Geography:
  • Bodies of water:Caspian Sea(the largest lake on Earth by area), Suez Canal
  • Cities:New Delhi and Istanbul
• Arts
  • Literature: Poetry:Shahnameh, Masnavi
  • Music:Qawwali
  • Visual arts: Miniature (illuminated manuscript)
• Philosophy and religion:
  • Philisophical schools and traditions:
    • Theistic philosophies:Sufism and Islamic philosophy
• Everyday life:Worship
• Society and social sciences:
  • Education:Madrasah(Islamic seminary)
  • Business and economics:Bazaar

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 03:33, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Artists: Mir Emad Hassani and Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād don't seem notable or influential enough for this list IMO.

Do you agree with Reza Abbasi?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Authors: Rumi, Ferdowsi, Hafez and Saadi (poet), maybe add Hafez only.

Rumi was a great theologian, jurist, Sufi and poet. His poems has great eeffect not only in Iran but also in Turkey, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Pakistan. Throughout the centuries he has had a significant influence on Persian as well as Urdu and Turkish literatures. Upon a proposal by Culture and Tourism Ministry of Turkey, the year 2007 was declared as the "International Rumi Year" by UNESCO in March 2006:Rumi#International Rumi Year. I can't understand why do you think he's not notable enough?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Explorers:Ibn Battutah, maybe remove Marco Polo? Marco Polo is better known I think.

This is what I call Eurocentrism. The journey of Ibn Battutah is longer than the journey of Marco Polo. He's not notable because western Media don't pay attention to him. --Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Inventors and scientists:Al-Razi yes

Mathematicians:Yes to Al-Khwarizmi. No to Omar Khayyám.

If you want to choose one person among them, I propose Nasir al-Din Tusi. He has great work in Astronomy(Zij-i Ilkhani) and Trigonometry(Treatise on the Quadrilatera). He's one of the greatest Persian politicians(Vazir of Hulagu) and the greatest Shia theologian(His book is [[Tajrid Al-Eteqad)). He was notable in ethics(Akhlaq Naseri). He was also a jurist and philosopher.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:20, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Philosophers and social scientists:Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun, no this section tends to mushroom out of control.

I see there's written Aristotle. The position of Avicenna in Muslim civilization similar with the position of Aristotle in Hellenistic civilization. He was one of the greatest physicians of the middle age(The Canon of Medicine). His works in physics and metaphysics are notable (like The Book of Healing). George Sarton called Avicenna "the most famous scientist of Islam and one of the most famous of all races, places, and times.

Politicians and leaders:Cyrus the Great, yes though this section also tends to grow too much.

Revolutionaries and activists:Ruhollah Khomeini, yes.

Achaemenid Empire, a bit redundant with Persian Empire but maybe.

Han Empire and Tang Empire Chinese Dynasties can be difficult. There are so many how does one pick which are notable and which are not? Maybe we should include History of China instead.

Arab Empire is currently a disambiguation page.

I chose some empires on the basis of List of largest empires#Ancient empires and List of largest empires#Medieval empires. Also Qing Empire is notable on the basis of List of largest empires#Percentage of world population and List of largest empires#Percentage of world GDP--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Iranian revolution, yes.

Caspian Sea is already included, Suez Canal maybe but maybe we should delete Panama Canal instead.

New Delhi and Istanbul yes to Instanbul, no to New Delhi.

Literature: Poetry:Shahnameh, Masnavi No, I'd prefer to trim existing entries.

Shahnameh is notable and effective as Iliad, Mahabharata and Odyssey. It has had great effect in Persian language as well as Turkish, Persian and Mongol governments of Central Asia, Turkey, Iran and India in the later era.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Music:Qawwali, maybe. Probably yes.

Visual arts: Miniature (illuminated manuscript) no.

Theistic philosophies: Sufism and Islamic philosophy no I'd prefer to trim this section rather than expand it.

I insist on Sufism in this part or other part. --Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Worship redundant with Spiritual practice perhaps it should replace it though.

Madrasah, no. Redundant with school

Bazaar, no. Redundant with market

Just my two cents on the matter. :-) —dv82matt 05:16, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I chose my suggestions on the basis of their worth for culture and civilization and their effect on people life. I try to choose some people or works which belong to more than one nation or region. I proposed people who have worked in more than one field. It's difficult for me to put Rumi, Avicenna or Nasir al-Din Tusi in one category. Rumi was a notable religious scholar, Sufi and poet. Avicenna as well as Nasir al-Din Tusi were great philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, theologian, physician and politician. Avicenna is famous as a philosopher and physician while Nasir al-Din Tusi is famous as a theologian and politician. There are numerous notable persons in China, India and some other former civilizations which Europeans don't pay enough attention to them. --Sa.vakilian(t-c) 10:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I understand and appreciate where you are coming from and your suggestions are good. This page does have a problem with being Eurocentric. My suggestions above are only suggestions. If you feel strongly that an article should be included then go ahead and include it. However the 'People' section tends to grow too much because people only seem to add entries and never delete them. This is what the page looked like not to long ago. Notice that there were over 200 people articles which I think is far to many. Feel free to add entries as you see fit but try to keep the number of "People articles" under 100. Cheers. —dv82matt 13:42, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

No I don't want to push my POV. I've asked some of my friends who are knowledgeable in yhis case to help with choosing the most notable ones. I removed Bin Ladan. He's more notable among western media than among the Muslims. I can mention about 10 other Revolutionaries and activists who are more notable than Bin Ladan.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 15:15, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I added these articles:

• People:Authors:Rumi
• People:Philosophers and social scientists:Avicenna
• Peaple:Politicians and leaders:Cyrus the Great
• People:Revolutionaries and activists:Ruhollah Khomeini (Instead of Bin Ladan)
• Arts:Literature:Shahname
• History:Renaissance to present:Iranian revolution

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 16:45, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I added ibn Battuta the geographer and Maimonides the philosopher/physician to try to represent the Arab world slightly. Abu Nuwas the poet should be added, though the "authors" section would need to be rescoped slightly. For scientist/mathematician, one or two of the following should be added: Averroes, Ibn al-Haitham, Geber or Al-Kindi. The "politicians" and "revolutionaries" sections should be pared, perhaps the the latter being eliminated; the former suffers the most from recentism here. Cheers, Tewfik^Talk 04:53, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree on ibn Battuta and Maimonides.

In the case of scientists we should choose one or two of these:

Geber:For usage of measurement in chemistry.

Al-Razi:For his works in chemistry especially finding Alcohol

Ibn al-Haitham:For his works in physics

In the case of Philosophers and social scientists:

Averroes: As a great philosopher

Ibn Khaldun:He wrote Muqaddimah which is one of the first work in philosophy and of history and sociology of transformations of civilizations)

Al-Kindi:He's not notable enough.

Literature: I don't have any idea. --Sa.vakilian(t-c) 05:11, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I added these articles:

• People:Scientists and enventors:Geber
• People:Mathematicians:Nasir al-Din Tusi
• People:Philosophers and social scientists:Ibn Khaldun

I want to add

• History:History of China
• History:History of India
• Aryabhata or Bhaskara

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 13:21, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Religious scholars and leaders

I suggest to add this section under notable people section. At present the name of Gautama Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad are written under Specific religions while the name of some others like Moses and Zoroaster aren't mentioned.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 04:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree, I've thought of doing this myself. —dv82matt 05:18, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I propose to add these people:Abraham, Moses and Zoroaster.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 04:24, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I added Prophets and founders of religions and moved the name of religious leaders to there. I removed 2 persons:Bab and Guru Gobind Singh because I want to write one person for each religion. However we can write more than one person for each religion. If so, I propose Ali and Fatima for Islam, Peter and Mary for Christianity.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 04:51, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

How about "Religious figures"? I think two for each religion would be good - but surely Christianity needs Saint Paul. StAnselm 01:49, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

I think that is the fear expressed above, that too many entries will be vital. One person per religion seems like a good guideline, though you probably shouldn't list them as "prophets", since the secular world doesn't acknowledge that they all existed. More than that and we won't be 'vital' any longer. Tewfik^Talk 05:21, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I think most of the people known some of them like Abraham as the prophet, however I don't insist on using prophet'.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 05:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Why is Confucius consider to be a religious leader? Isn't he a philosopher? David D. (Talk) 05:03, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Vital articles' department

I suggest to establish a team of wikipedians with different cultures. They can judge which article is notable enough to be mentioned in this list. They can set criteria and answer to the requests.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 05:35, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

about eurocentralism

Im seriously in agree with sa_vakilian..I think here in this sellection V can whatch a clear eurocentralism...& he offered good topics 2 B add on this list...& his critique is acceptable. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bluesky lost (talk • contribs) 08:55, 31 March 2007 (UTC).

Athletes

I'm going to add an athletes section for people. Any complaints? I'll use the core list from WP:BIO for now. I'll wait a day or to see if there are. Quadzilla99 23:45, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd object. Atheletes aren't really notable enough for inclusion. Also it sets a bad precedent, if atheletes are included why not actors, entertainers, and entrepreneurs the people section should be kept to under 100 entries if at all possible. —dv82matt 09:11, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Lack of Notability

Are these persons notable enough:

• Alan Turing: He hasn't achieved Top grade in Mathematics wikiproject:Talk:Alan Turing
• Francis Drake:Other explorers like Vasco da Gama more notable than him.

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 19:02, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Francis Drake sould be removed but I think Alan Turing should stay. —dv82matt 11:36, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Quick count

Did a quick count, seems to be 1033 articles at the present, with 73 FAs and 115 GAs. That's about 7% FAs and 11% GAs, all together 188 articles ≈ 18%. Lampman 16:49, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

What we can remove

How many article should we have? I prefer 1000 articles.

If so I propose to remove these articles:

Sport

I think we can remove these articles:

• American football
• Cricket
• Baseball

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 02:36, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I think "American football" and "baseball" should stay but "Cricket" should go. —dv82matt 07:13, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

That's crazy. Millions more people play and billions more watch Cricket than American football or baseball. --Dweller 09:02, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Keep Cricket then. —dv82matt 09:52, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Well even though I love football and play it, it's not a internationally vital sport but it's disputably more popular and important than baseball, here in USA, even if we say baseball's our national past time it's really football that's our national sport now. Cricket on the other hand though, is a internationally established sport for hundred of years. So I think cricket's more vital. It's disputable that it's the second most popular sport in the world after the only undisputed most popular sport soccer.--THUGCHILDz 09:26, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

This smacks of systemic bias =Nichalp «Talk»= 09:56, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Apart from the inclusion of soccer, the current list seems very US-centric. There is a world out there beyond the 50 states, and in most of that world American football, baseball, basketball and ice hockey are minor sports. I'm not saying that they should necessarily be removed, but sports with genuine worldwide popularity such as tennis ought to be included. JH (talk page) 13:03, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't see why American Football's on there - it's a sport played almost entirely in one country. Basketball and ice hockey less so, but if they're there tennis and athletics most definetely should be. Cricket, as a sport played by billions, should stay. HornetMike 14:58, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Heh, people are jumping all over this. Let's just remove all the specific sports, they're not that vital as encyclopedia topics go anyway. We could reduce or remove many of the other "specific whatever" lists as well IMO. —dv82matt 16:46, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Agree with this. David D. (Talk) 04:57, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Measurement

We can remove some of units like:

• Hertz
• Ton
• Gallon
• Kilometre

What's your idea?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 02:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Agree. While they are very important they are not crucial as encyclopedia articles. —dv82matt 07:13, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Chemical elements

I suggest to remove these articles:

• Diamond and Graphite:These are not element.
• Silicon

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 03:02, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

All are forms of elements - diamond & graphite are forms of carbon, but I think I could agree that graphite and diamond are of limited importance (though diamond is clearly important in jewellery). Silicon is very important - it is the second commonest element in the Earth's crust, making about 26% of the mass, and (along with oxygen) it's the basic building block of nearly all soil and rock. Silicon is also the main material for integrated circuits and semiconductors. If you want a chemist's view, get rid of neon and if you want to remove a second, take helium. I really don't know why neon is on there, I would rank it about 60th in importance out the 117 elements - it doesn't do any chemistry at all, it's only claim to fame is a minor use in a few lights, it's "full octet" structure, and the fact that it's a minor component of air. Helium is more important to physicists - the alpha particle is a helium nucleus, and helium is fairly common in the universe and in fusion reactions. It is also known through its use in balloons. It has very little interest for chemists, though, except as a fluid in gas chromatography and HPLC. Walkerma 04:27, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

I think "helium", "diamond", and "silicon" should stay. "Graphite" and "neon" can be deleted. Incidentally Walkerma, I added "neon" when expanding the section some time ago. But in my defence those flashy neon lights are pretty darn cool. ;-) —dv82matt 07:13, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Diamond and Graphite are some morphologies like ozone(O3) and C60. Neon and helium are Noble gas. I think we can remove Neon and leave Helium.--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 07:38, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Middle Ages

Can we put Pre-Columbian instead of Aztec, Inca Empire and Maya civilization?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 07:56, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Renaissance to present

Do we need to all of these:

• American Civil War, American Revolutionary War and Vietnam War. I think History of the U.S. covers all of them.
• Great Leap Forward
• History of South Africa in the apartheid era
• Indian Emergency (1975–1977)
• Russian Civil War
• Spanish Civil War
• English Civil War

--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 08:24, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

In general I don't think the history section should be made shorter as it is already quite sparse. That said we could probably lose "English Civil War". I'd like to add:

1. History of Africa
2. History of the Americas
3. History of Europe
4. History of the European Union
5. History of Japan
6. History of the Middle East
7. History of the United States
8. Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
9. Civil rights movement
10. Indian independence movement
11. Korean War
12. Russian Empire
13. Soviet Union
14. Spanish flu
15. Taiping Rebellion
16. Women's suffrage

We could then remove some such as American Civil War, American Revolutionary War and Russian Civil War which you mentioned as they would have become redundant. —dv82matt 10:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Why don't we add Uttoman Empire, Arab-Israel conflict and some other notable articles if we put American and Russian civil war there?--Sa.vakilian(t-c) 02:16, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Ottoman empire is listed. I'm not actually against removing the American and Russian civil war as well as other articles provided we add broad overveiw articles that continue to give coverage of the topics that are removed. —dv82matt 02:42, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Bible

Why list Bible under "Christianity"? --Dweller 19:48, 15 April 2007 (UTC)