[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[White Cat]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:34 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is
> not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then
> the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
>
> But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what
> it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
>
> And it's critical that these not be confused.
>
> In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by
> even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by
> making an article about it?
>
> If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody
> makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better
> be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5
> million other articles.
>
> >  - d.
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
> imperfect world things would be a lot better.


All stars are important. All stars have secondary sources. Only uncharted
stars lack that information and that is a temporary situation. No one will
create articles on such stars. This is because we do not even know the name
of such stars let alone know their location, size or brightness. We are
unaware of their existence (hubble was not yet pointed at them) but they are
clearly there. However, there are hundreds of millions of charted stars. No
one should stay in the way of anyone creating stub articles for such stars.

In the case of highways, townships and other such articles we do not need to
wait for a telescope to point at them. Based on primary sources (such as
official data) alone we can tell a lot about them.

Notability was drafted to get rid of trash. Trash no one but you, your
fellow band members and etc know about. If your band is known by the *entire
planet*, I'd consider your band notable even if Harvard has not yet studied
your band.