Haukur Þorgeirsson wrote:
I write my share of articles here on things I happen
to be interested in.
A number of times the topics I've chosen to write about have zero English
language Google hits and no coverage on the Web in any language.
That is enough for some people to slap an AfD tag on it. Yes, we
apparantly have editors who have never heard of books or libraries - the
/only/ measure of whether something really exists or not is whether or
not you can get Google hits for it.
Yet an article of mine has never ever been submitted
to AfD. No-one has
even made the mere suggestion that an article I've written should be
deleted. I think there might be three reasons for this:
1. People trust that an experienced editor is submitting articles on
reasonably worthy topics.
2. I cite my sources.
3. I write about old stuff.
I think the third reason may actually be the most important one. People
are worried about non-notable companies using Wikipedia to advertise their
stuff. No-one is worried about abuse of Wikipedia to promote obscure 11th
century runic inscriptions.
So, I think the idea runs like this: "If it happened 1000 years ago and
someone still cares enough about it to write an article then it's probably
notable enough to keep."
Interestingly, people /will/ try and delete something if the subject is
only 100-200 years old, but it's perfectly acceptable to have articles
on every X in Y where Y is 1000 times larger that all other Z, where Y
is a member of Z, and yet not allowed to have articles on other X's in
W, where W is also a member of Z, and W is 10000 times smaller than Y...
--
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