Philip Sandifer wrote:
We need to think seriously about our standards of
quality, and be sure
to line them up with, you know, what people seem to want. When our top
100 pages are largely porn and Pokemon, well, it becomes hard for me
to really justify slashing our porn stars and television episode
coverage on anything other than the firmest and most damning of grounds.
Just last night I spent an evening going through several hundred
articles about various remote galaxies tidying up the usage of a
template I'd changed. Most were identified only by NGC number and many
of the ones that did have a photograph had only a blurry smudge that
didn't mean much to anyone except a professional astronomer.
I find it hard to believe that the subjects of most of those articles
were even remotely in the same ballpark of notability as a random
episode from the TV show Scrubs, which is watched by millions and has a
dedicated fan base. But articles about galaxies are Scholarly, so I
don't expect anyone's going to purge that particular pile of minutiae
any time soon. Better to go after the stuff that actually
_distinguishes_ us from the Traditional and Scholarly encyclopedias.