On 6/29/07, Rob <gamaliel8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/28/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:
>
In short,
a reliable source establishing why *this
particular* person should have an article, as opposed to all the other
essentially anonymous people on the sex offender list or in Ohio court
records.
The most reliable source for that is Google Trends. This particular
person should have an article because lots of people are searching for
information about him. If you want to call that "an internet meme",
that's your terminology, not mine.
Okay, so you are saying (hopefully I have it right this time) not that
he should have an article because of specific kind of notability (like
a significant internet meme) but simply because people are looking for
info on him. It doesn't matter if this demand is generated by general
internet interest, or just the population of Toledo, Ohio wondering
who that guy down the block is.
Pretty much. I don't see notability as a judgment on why people want
to know about something. I also don't think locality considerations
play a role, so long as the verifiability of the sources is universal
(if you can't check a source without going to a courthouse in Toledo,
Ohio, that would be a problem).
I actually think the "hyperlocal" aspects of Wikipedia are one of the
areas of greatest potential.
But, to me, the key question is : what are they
finding? If there are
no encyclopedic (in the sense that I discussed above) sources to
support an article, then we should not have an article regardless of
the demand.
The way you have described encyclopedic sources, I'm not even sure
they should be in the article in the first place. Except in corner
cases (a topic which is notable for being notable), notability is a
topic for discussion pages, not for the article itself.
It is the mission of journalists and historians to
satisfy that demand by creating secondary sources through synthesising
primary ones like court documents, not ours. It is our mission to
write encyclopedia articles once those secondary sources exist.
There are at least two secondary sources for BP, the Toledo newspaper
article and the Snopes article.
Anthony