Wikipedia talk:We CAN'T cover them all

We can cover whatever reliable sources cover

This essay has some problems:

• "We" can't cover them all - in most cases, no one is asking "us" to cover "them". Instead, people who are new to Wikipedia "cover" some topics, by writing articles about them, only to discover belatedly that Wikipedia deletes up to thousands of articles per day.
  • Consider an analogy: suppose someone forbids people to walk over a particular plot of ground, and then "explains" the restriction by saying "We can't walk everywhere." That doesn't make sense, because lots of people are physically capable of walking into the restricted area. Instead, the person who puts up the fence should explain why he is preventing people from doing what they are perfectly capable of doing on their own. Those people are not asking someone else to walk there for them.
• It's not that "we" can't cover them, it's that "we" do not want other people to cover them here. Thus the proper slogan would be: "We don't want to allow them all." There is no problem with "covering" more topics - thousands of new users flock to Wikipedia every day with the urge to cover more topics. Unfortunately for them, they don't start off knowing enough of Wikipedia's complex rules and procedures to let them defend their work against deletionists.
• The essay does not link to a definition of what we allow. Thus the claim that "we can't cover them all" provides no useful guidance to a user who wants to know whether Wikipedia will allow him or her to cover some new topic.
• On Wikipedia, we don't actually "cover" anything, because we don't do original work. Instead, we anthologize and summarize what other people have covered. Therefore, the most important lesson for new contributors is to start with reliable sources, not with ideas. Many new users approach Wikipedia the opposite way: they have an idea to write about something, so they write a largely unsourced article from their personal knowledge. Which is like throwing red meat to the deletionists.
• The essay contradicts itself by pointing to the large and rapidly growing number of Wikipedia articles. Unless this enormous growth is going to magically stop at some point, Wikipedia will eventually (for all practical purposes) cover everything that anybody seriously wants to cover.
  • The body of reliable sources from which Wikipedia draws material continues to grow, as Moore's law continues to drive down publishing costs. Thus each year, Wikipedia can potentially have more articles. Each year, more people learn how to write encyclopedically on Wikipedia, and they learn how to better defend their work against deletionists. As Wikipedia grows, it attracts more visitors, and thus the incentive increases for more people to figure out how to get their information onto Wikipedia.
    • I have my doubts that there are that many more reliable sources. Sources, yes; but the decline in editing and fact-checking budgets at even newspapers and serious magazines, means that the requisite checking is perhaps less likely than ever to have taken place. --Orange Mike | Talk 00:29, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
  • There are still many topics under-represented on Wikipedia, which are unlikely to be challenged on notability grounds. They are relatively boring topics that don't interest many people. For example, we don't have every article we could have about bridges, wind farms, power plants, highways, and other items of infrastructure. More people would rather write about the garage band they just started. But when it comes to items of public infrastructure, we really can cover them all.

--Teratornis (talk) 21:50, 9 October 2008 (UTC)