On 09/11/2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
Another problem: Phil Sandifer does not scale. You
know a lot about
webcomics, and I trust your judgment on them, which makes for a
great first cut as far as I'm concerned: if Phil says it's unworthy,
then it almost certainly is genuinely junk. Get more of your
well-informed friends in on it.
The webcomic artists do have a point: there was indeed a long-running
attempt to get rid of webcomics in Wikipedia, to the point where those
against them tried to put through a notability guideline that would
preclude expert opinion as biased toward the subject - i.e., a direct
anti-expert guideline, specifically to stop Phil objecting to them.
That said, the present campaign appears (I must say) somewhat petulant
and ill-conceived as to what is article-worthy in Wikipedia. The
notion of third-party verifiability is not widely appreciated.
The public relations problem is that "notable" is Wikipedia jargon,
*not* how the word is understood by outsiders. This means it's going
to continue to be a problem as long as it's used on AFD and other
points of public interaction in the jargon sense rather than the
conventional English language sense.
- d.