Perhaps in future we could send these to the incubator (unless their BLP or the like) instead of deleting then see if the people want to work on them? -Peachey

Goodness. Someone in the reddit discussion referred to VfD. Someone's wiki-age is showing. Carcharoth

On 5 March 2010 13:25, Gwern Branwen <gwern0(a)gmail.com> wrote: A lot of these deletions are on the complete absence of evidence that anyone outside the project actually cares. - d.

On 5 March 2010 13:30, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote: Yes. The objections are "this is noteworthy for having x thousand downloaders and a busy forum." But no note outside of that. There's typically (I say *typically*) little evidence that anyone who doesn't already know about the project would ever, ever look it up. The YCombinator thread has a comment pointing out that they want to get into Wikipedia precisely *because* it isn't a random-crap bucket. No-one has as a checklist item "make sure there's a Knol about our project." - d.

Ken Arromdee wrote: Thought we went into all that ... Sorry, what if I say that I neither know nor care about anything Rush Limbaugh does or says (which is true), that I'm on the other side of the Atlantic from almost everyone who does care, and that puts me in the same position as about 90% of the world's population? Fundamentally, whether or not we had "notability" or not as a guiding principle, the following should be true: the topics on WP should be determined by "pull" not "push". I mean thaty editors should be deciding what to include by what there is to edit. They should not be generated by what is crassly and in bad Latin called a "media agenda". That is because this effort is an encyclopedia, not a Limbopedia. Half-baked topics should spend time in wiki purgatory, until their sins of unreferencedness are expurgated. Certainly if we didn't have the exclusion of most blogs, we would have a system that would be fantastically easy to game: how hard is to get some topic mentioned in a dozen blogs? It is true that the mainstream print media will run with stories that are basically a put-up job sometimes; but that doesn't prove we should be less critical, but more strict. Charles

Ken Arromdee wrote: You miss my point entirely. Which is "what if I say" something entirely subjective as a judgement of notability, in reply to your subjective argument for notability. _That_ is why Wikipedia tries to have _some_ objective criteria for inclusion of topics. I made this point to you in a previous thread on notability. OK, this is a more reasonable debate. If the astronomers say that a particular blog on recent astronomy has the sort of stature for announcements that would warrant its use as a reference, then its use shoudn't be ruled out entirely. But are there criteria that are workable? Charles

On Sun, 7 Mar 2010, David Goodman wrote: You are replying to the question "what rules make sense" by answering the question "what rules do we have", which misses the point.