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. :'(
Ec