Steve Bennett wrote:
Hi,
There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
thousands of active users.
I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at play here:
1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
Wikipedia. {The vanity principle}
# Support ~~~~
2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many
more subjects in
its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}
# Support ~~~~
3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to
appear in
Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}
# Support ~~~~
I believe that 1) is the crux of vanity concerns. No
one really cares
about the dataspace wasted on Jimmy Bob's Groovy Garage Band. But we
object to the idea that Wikipedia is being harnessed as an advertising
medium.
The second principle I think is one that should be spoken. We then
have a logical argument for rejecting an article about an
uninteresting street in an outer suburb of Wagga Wagga:
a) There are hardly any interesting streets in this suburb in WP
b) There are hardly any interesting streets in Wagga Wagga at all in WP
c) There are hardly any streets in any major cities in Australia listed.
Thus we can say, "come back when c, b and a have been fulfilled to some
extent".
The problem is when people make arguments to the effect of "Major cities
are not encyclopedic material", ie. they decide that /nothing/ is
allowed to be written about a particular topic. Now, I know that this is
a ridiculous example, but not much more rediculous than some arguments
that have been succesfully argued by *hundreds* of editors at AfD. Yes,
the vast majority of the world are morons, and WP is (to an extent)
representative of that in the everyday goings-on at AfD.
The third principle explains the repugnance with which
some editors
treat "fancruft". Notability and popularity are disregarded, and this
principle comes through: "We" simply don't want a lot of articles
about any fictitious subject. This obviously causes tension with the
large numbers of editors who want to create thirty articles about
their favourite Pokémon character.
I actually don't see /how/ you could create 30 articles on a single
Pokémon character without violating a) WP:NOR, b) WP:V, c) copyright, d)
the laws of physics.
So my first question is: Do these principles
adequately explain most
of the other notability guidelines?
Yes, with WP:NOR and WP:V doing a good job at covering just about
everything else - most of what /could/ be called "nn, d." can more
succinctly be summed up as "The subject of this article is non-notable
because what has been written amounts to original research and is not
verifiable". I've been arguing this for about a year now.
If so, then the community is faced with two
questions:
a) Do we accept these meta guidelines? Do we want to add others?
Well, a while ago someone said "there are /no/ notability guidlines",
and I almost believed it. Of course, this was before I realised what a
trollpit AfD was; we quite clearly *do* have notability guidelines, cf.
WP:BIO, WP:CORP, WP:MUSIC, etc.
b) How do we publish these meta guidelines, and how do
we make sure
they are taken into account into all other notability guidelines?
Put them up at [[Wikipedia:Notability guidelines]]?
--
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