If we're not noding facts, why are we here?

Certainly not to duplicate the laudable efforts of the likes of the Gutenberg Project or Mark Harden's Artchive.

I node whole novels onto E2, but I don't do it so that they're on the net - they're already on many different places on the net. I node them here because I want to use the power of the community as a lever to get people to read books I like.

Pretty much any collection of people, on or off line, is a community - some are more tight-knit, some are less so. I'd say that E2 is somewhere in the middle that way (compared to another online community I know, which boasts the dubious distinction of having given rise to 4 weddings and a funeral in 1999 alone...).

I don't think any of us here node for the pure disinterested pleasure of spouting information to the masses. We node things we care about, and because we are part of a community, people who care about us might be moved to care about them in turn. We exert peer influence on each other, culturally speaking.

To say that one should node more facts in order to attract more users who will then node more facts to attract more users is recursive and vague - what is the ultimate purpouse of this hoarding of information? Well researched factual nodes which reflect the noder's own beliefs and opinions are priceless, but not for that part of them which can be looked up in any half decent library - for that part of them which encapsulates an age's point of view, a generation's concerns, a society's values.

Even the purest science doesn't concern itself with facts for the sake of facts alone - it is the broader spectrum of conclusion, the possibilities opened by an analysis of the facts, that is the ultimate goal of science. And as with science, so with E2.