The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your
examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx,
(assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main
street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate
article?
On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Judson Dunn <cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber
<kmw(a)armory.com> wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard
wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to
be the top of google
searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in
the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things
in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that
will get reflected in how people treat us.
Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding
factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've
ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
Google search rank is mostly a function of the page for a specific
search term, so having an article about [[Bulbasaur]] (a pokemon)
doesn't really affect our search results for [[Cholesterol]]
http://www.google.com/search?&q=bulbasaur
http://www.google.com/search?&q=cholesterol
People, when talking about Bulbasaur online, will link to Wikipedia,
upping its pagerank, and when people talk about cholesterol they will
do the same. Probably not the same people. ;)
If we created an article that no one links to, or people link to some
other source for that subject a lot more it won't be in the top
results. I don't see that that would affect our highly ranked search
terms though. I do think google rank matters, in a way. It is how most
of our readers find us, and if there is a group of people uninterested
in others reading the articles I think we would be at an argumentative
impasse.
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an
article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur?
yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one
about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it
would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much
harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need
any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
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