On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote: If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms, there must be *some* binding common principle.
Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at least yet.
Maybe...when talking about ancient history topics, most people would agree that "the more the better", even if each only gets two edits per year.
Indeed. Not a hard and fast rule, perhaps - just my thinking out loud.
- Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
encyclopaedia as a whole
Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.
Ah, any examples?
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a specific example to point you to - but I know this has been discussed multiple times on this list with nothing that one could describe as consensus.
I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics; people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.
On ancient Babylonian vase patterns, sure. On pro-pedophilia blogs no. On different nomenclature systems for describing 3 or 4 toed tree frogs, sure. On the initiation rituals of a fraternity in an unremarkable university in Wisconsin, no.
I generally find that Verifiability and No original research tend to weed these out fairly well. I'm leery of having Notability as a policy because it will be used as a weapon by people, and because any policy that does not match the articles we in fact have / agree upon / keep is empty words.
I'm just trying to make a starting point. What's the nearest statement you could make to mine that you would agree with?
It should have been written about in a publication not associated with the creators that has some level of credibility, the latter being hard to determine of course. Newspapers, trade journals, credible academic journals, etc.
A 'credible source' is a topic that people have tried to define on wp:cite and wp:v, I believe, with some degree of success. For the purposes of notability, we are not concerned with primary sources - primary sources do not, by their very nature, define notability.
This is, granted, simply moving the point of hard definition to 'credible third-party source', but is at least a step.
Note that we're not talking about what sources can be used in the article - primary sources have their uses - but those that can establish a claim for notability.
Some online sources are credible in specific fields - I would strongly disagree with counting all online sources as non-credible.
Agree. I don't like the culture of "that's not worthy of an article, nuke from space". A better "vote" would be "how much space do we dedicate to this topic? two words? ok!"
Exactly - if something is just 'yet another <x>', then it is simply a list entry.
Oh it's not "mine". People will "nn" a pop culture article more easily than a science, geograhy or literature topic, no?
Definitely, but I'd disagree that it's anything approaching a consensus - perhaps a consensus of those who frequently nominate for deletion.
Tell me, you want to write about a topic, but fear it may not be notable. Short of asking someone, how do you find out?
If I want to write about it, I write an article about it - nobody's deleted one yet, so I must have it right ... ;)
Of course, I have it easy - very few of my interests are 'popular culture'.
I think the actual thought processes are to do with working out if there's enough to at least write a decent stub about it that can be sourced. If not, I'll generally simply add it to a list or a more general article.
-Matt