[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts (was: Newbie and not-so-newbie biting)

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 6:18 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I don't ski. You are partly arguing that there should not be a
> notability guideline for skiing sites. And partly that a specialist
> skiing encyclopedia should be a directory of just about all skiing
> sites. I'm not really in a position to argue, since I'm not familiar
> with that sector of reference literature. The usual test is that there
> is such a book and it does include Kettlebowl.

I seem to recall that in the notability policy there is also scope for
comprehensiveness. That is, if a certain number of a given category of
entities is denoted "notable", then we include articles about *all* of
them, for comprehensiveness.

I really wish I'd fought harder years ago against framing the scope of
Wikipedia in terms of "notability". Notability is only part of the
picture: there are other reasons for including articles. There are
questions about how much should be written about a topic. There are
questions about whether all notable subjects should have entries. Etc.

> I would certainly argue that
>
> - Kettlebowl the hill as geographic feature is probably a topic to
> include, just that it should be treated as such without the promotional
> overlay this guy wants about it;
> - If the material on Kettlebowl had been placed in [[Bryant,
> Wisconsin]], we would have had one better article, not two scrappy ones.

IMHO, short is not synonymous with "scrappy". Look at a traditional
encyclopaedia. Is every article three pages long? No. Most are very
short, a paragraph or two. IMHO it's better to have two articles with
clearly defined defined scopes (in this case, a ski area, and a town),
than one article with a fudged scope (a town and, uh, any notable
nearby tourist attractions, of which in this case there is one major
one). I don't think information about the town would enhance the ski
area article. Information about the ski area would slightly enhance
the town article.

> I think skiing fans should not be allowed to chip away at minimum
> standards for inclusion just because they are, well, fans of skiing.

Of course. But all rules are subject to change, and we certainly
shouldn't be in a "you can't have that article about that ski area
because I didn't get this article baout my pokemon character"
position.

> WP:NOT says WP is not a directory, after all.

I think Wikipedia has progressed far enough and become unique enough
that WP:NOT is really not relevant anymore. Wikipedia is not
*anything* else. It's not an encyclopaedia, it's not a directory, it's
not a website, it's not a project...it's just totally sui generis. It
combines aspects of many of the above. There are directory-like
aspects, there are how-to-like aspects, there are cookbook-like
aspects etc etc etc.

The question is how to get all of these aspects in a balance that
maximises their utility to the greatest number of people at the lowest
cost. Describing a few thousand ski areas around the world is probably
ok. Describing hundreds of thousands of primary schools around the
area is not going to work.

The interesting thing is that we don't really need hard rules. If
there's one area where it works and makes sense to go into more detail
and have a lower bar for inclusion than another, that doesn't hinder
the mission. If it works.

Steve