On Jan 8, 2009, at 1:36 AM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 1/7/2009 7:57:35 AM Pacific Standard Time,
snowspinner(a)gmail.com writes:
"Encyclopedia" and "record of only what has been published in
reliable
secondary sources" are not synonymous terms.>>
----------------------------
And yet the community needs a method of determining "Is this
encyclopedic?"
We already loosely use an expression like "this is not encyclopedic"
in AfD.
Apparently there is some sort of processing going on, on the editor
level,
to allow them to determine that.
If the determination is simply the answer to the question "Has this
ever
been published by anyone anywhere?" then we come back again to
Notability, since
this answer destroys notability entirely.
However the community seems to want Notability. And so my
conclusion is
that this contradiction means that "This has been published" is not
a full
answer to "Is this encyclopedic?"
Well, you've also switched scales. Notability, defined as some level
of coverage from sources, works on a topic level. If you applied it to
the article content level - every claim must be double-sourced - it
would be disastrous.
I mean, I'm not saying secondary sources are useless. I'm just saying,
"knowledge published in reliable secondary sources" and "encyclopedia"
are not equivalent. That's a statement on a line-by-line, fact-by-fact
scale.
-Phil