:I tend to agree that the list should be limited (and trimmed), both because of the significant labor involved in doing a good job, and simply because it gets giagantic at some point.  My only alternate suggestion would be perhaps to limit it, not to a particular absolute magnitude threshold, but to the 100 most luminous stars known in the Milky Way galaxy, or something like that.  In any case small errors in photometry and distance estimates will make the threshold somewhat ambiguous and arbitrary.  I favor limiting it to our galaxy mostly because of the difficulty in excluding close double stars, which has already been a problem for Eta Carina.  Another question is what to do about variability.  I would tend to favor excluding transient outbursts (novas & supernovas, surely) and maybe try to get the average bolometric luminosity for others.  The need to get data at different wavelengths all at the same time complicates to problem for variables (possibly fatally for non-periodic variables?), but the bolometric luminosity may be more stable for periodic variables, I'm not sure. I suppose we would not want to exclude the 19th century outburst of Eta Carina, but I have no clue about a fair estimate of its bolometric luminosity, except to extrapolate from V, assuming a black body.