The way I would phrase it, there are those who believe the policy pages are "given down from on high" and there are those who understand that those same pages were "created from below". That is, 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. It's happened dozens of times, just within my own memory, that situations of this sort, get resolved by clarification and modification of the policy language.
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. That seems more about setting a bar so we don't get people who have a trivial set of appearances i.e. they are "notable" in their field.
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.
-----Original Message----- From: Surreptitiousness surreptitious.wikipedian@googlemail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tue, Aug 18, 2009 2:01 pm Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
It's a question of the amount of coverage we want to give to fiction details. Let's say we have an article on Superman, and also on each of the
various
Superman comic runs that have appeared in the past 50 years. Now make an article on *each* comic issue, and then in that article describe the plot, characters, moral, date, number of issues, etc. *Now* for each character make an article for them, describing each
issue
they were in, with the plot details, and link them all together. You'd have something like three to twenty thousand articles on
Superman.
Many people would see that as overwhelming in scope and most relevant
for a
specialist work.
I've always found it to be a question of how hard people are prepared to look the other way, or perhaps look hard enough to find a problem. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that notability guidance was pretty much drawn up and widely accepted to prevent advertising, spam and original research. It's now being pushed places it doesn't need to go, by people who don't really understand what we're about. Some devoted souls seem to treat these policy pages as "The Word", almost sacrosanct, which is starting to create real tension with the notion that they are descriptive and that consensus can change. I think the current battle is not between "inclusionists" and "deletionists", but between those who believe rules should be followed and those who believe rules can be broken. That we have a rule which says we can break rules makes for the most perplexing conversations. I can't help but wonder, in amusement, if it isn't possible to fork the encyclopedia from the rules in some way.
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