[WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary

[Surreptitiousness]

wjhonson at aol.com wrote:
> I believe tantamount not to "rules can be broken" but rather to "rules can 
> change".  I never advise people to be bold *against* policy, but rather 
> to go to the policy discussion pages and see whether or not their 
> situation might be an exception that we'd like to include *in* the 
> policy.
>   
I agree, although I think it depends upon the case.  It all depends upon 
which policy you are talking about.
> By the way, I dispute that notability guidelines were laid down to 
> prevent "advertising, spam and original research".  For example I think 
> in the Porn Actors notability it states something like that they must 
> have appeared in at least five films or something of that sort.
>   
Yes, but the driving impetus was to stop vanity pages and advertising, 
if you look back at the discussions regarding drafting the porn 
guidance, you'll see advertising was a concern for those 
participating.The trouble with gaining consensus on anything for fiction 
is that there are people who won't even allow a bar like "has to have 
appeared in five works of fiction".  I've just had to point out to 
someone that their whole argument, which was based upon the fact that 
subject specific notability guidance couldn't extend or provide an 
alternative route to notability beyond that in the main notability 
guidance, actually contradicted the notability guidance itself, which 
emphatically states the opposite.  I'm also concerned with a potential 
rewrite of the intro to our notability guidance being discussed on the 
talk page, because it looks like it might remove these subject specific 
routes.  We're kind of losing sight of the argument that we don't have 
to think of Wikipedia as paper, and that each article is a different 
page and a different entry.  We've kind of lost sight of the argument 
that because we aren't paper, our articles can be seen as sections of 
one large article. So like you say, or at least I'm assuming you're 
saying, our porn star coverage is allowed to go to as deep as possible 
to ensure our coverage is as broad, wide and encompassing. That means 
saying five films is enough, to sate the desire of those who become 
immersed in the field. (It's kind of hard to avoid double entendres with 
this subject)
> You can certainly create a list of porn actors who have only appeared 
> in a single film *without* doing any original research.  Remembering 
> that source-based research is not "original" just because it's "new to 
> a major publication".  Original research involves the *creation* of a 
> new fact, not just the re-reporting of it no matter the source, 
> provided it's been published in some format previously.  A video box 
> cover is a publication format.  So reading names off it, is not 
> original research.
>   
I'm aware of the arguments.  The big flaw in the argument you are 
pushing is that our policies, especially no original research, call for 
articles to rely mainly on published reliable secondary sources.  That's 
been in policy in some form or another for ages, I think it is one of 
Larry Sanger's additions to the rule book.  It's currently coming into 
play in a number of places. So yes, fine, you can read stuff of a dvd 
box, but the argument is, if that's all you have, then you don't have an 
article.  You also don't have an article if you have a lot of primary 
and tertiary sources, but very few secondary sources.  I think the 
trouble is that very early on you'd have people interested in science 
subjects writing policies over here, and people interested in fiction 
subjects writing policies over there, and conflict has ensued when 
people discovered the other "set of policies" and started applying them 
to the "wrong" subject, if you see what I mean.  And original research 
is really hard to apply to fiction, because a lot of it surprisingly 
does amount to interpretation. Now yes, we should let consensus 
determine content, but is that a consensus as defined in policy or by 
editors?  And then we fall into arguments over what a local consensus 
is. Surprisingly few people appreciate the argument that a consensus 
enshrined in a policy can be just as localised as any other.  I can 
never tell if that's small mindedness or political ignorance. I also 
find people are too busy arguing at article "a" in order to protect or 
advance positions at articles "b", "c" and "d". It would be so much 
easier if there was some way of just debating the merits of article "a". 
Alternatively, I find the people I think of as my peers are increasingly 
avoiding debates and just editing the encyclopedia.  I kind of 
appreciate and understand that.