[WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article

[Guy Chapman aka JzG]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:34:50 +0000, "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
wrote:

>Hm, true. But our present notability guidelines suffer from (a) their
>original purpose (as an excuse) (b) arbitrary numerical cutoffs.
>There's something important being missed: what precisely are we
>talking about?

Not, as far as I can tell, the primary notability criterion, which is
what some of us believe should supplant all the tortuous
subject-specific guidelines.

  "A topic is notable if it has been the subject of at least one
   substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources
   that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other.

All we need to do now is define what constitutes a reliable source for
different content areas.  That genuinely will be context-specific,
whereas the existence of sources from which to write a verifiable -
and verifiably neutral - article which is not simply a directory entry
is pretty much a universal requirement if we aim to stick to the
policies of neutrality, verifiability, not publishing original
thought,  and being an encyclopaedia rather than a directory.

The subject-specific guidelines often boil down to "this is an area
where impassioned fans of the subject think Wikipedia should be a
directory, and where it is therefore acceptable to draw the entire
content of the article from primary sources".

Guy (JzG)
-- 
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG