Geoffrey Burling wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
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?
The reason why anyone would bother wanting to read the article in question. Well, that's what I'm trying to convey whenever I use the words "notable" or "notability".
Even then, my concerns can often be satisfied simply by rewriting the article's opening paragraph. For example, if an article begins with "Linus Torvalds is a Finnish computer programmer", that sentence would greatly tempt me to nominate the article for deletion on the basis that Torvalds was not notable. However, I know something about computers, so I know that hypothetical opening sentence should be rewritten as "Linus Torvalds created and manages the development of the Linux operating system."
That sentence could be changed to "Linus Torvalds is a notable Finnish computer programmer". That would give us an assertion of notability. Another possibility would be to shrink wrap the notability assertion. Before saving the article you would need to check a box affirming that you are asserting the notability of the article. If it works with software packages it should work for us. :'(
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