On 5/12/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Eugene van der Pijll wrote:
Bryan Derksen schreef:
John Lee wrote:
When you have an article about every [[John Smith]] who has ever lived, finding the John Smiths who actually matter can be a tad difficult.
Those would be the ones at the top of the list at [[John Smith (disambiguation)]]. We already have a mechanism for this.
No, [[John Smith]] is categorized by occupation, not by notability. When there are perhaps 100 people on a disambiguation page, it is almost impossible to sort them by notability.
Yet it's possible to rate the articles for notability by some standard and delete the ones that fall short? Simply reorganize the page along the same lines, putting the ones you'd otherwise delete down at the bottom. Other disambiguation pages already list the most prominent examples first, eg [[Mars (disambiguation)]].
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Yes, of course it's possible to do that. "Is there a significant amount of independent, reliable source material available on this subject, or is there not?" If there isn't, we run into several problems, and fails several core policies:
-Primary source only articles tend to irreparably fail NPOV. A band or company's own site will and should promote that band or company (why else would they have a site?) But if that's all that's out there, and we mirror that source (and we have to mirror sources, using our own interpretations would just shift the problem to NOR instead), we have nothing to print but marketing fluff. In that case, better to let their website or Myspace promote them, and say nothing at all until -someone else-, who's reliable and has no vested interest in promoting them, decides to say something about them.
-Primary source only articles fail V. "If an article topic has no reliable, third-party sources, Wikipedia should not have an article on it."
-Just accepting whatever gets thrown at us fails NOT. We're not a directory or an indiscriminate collection of information. Using a bar, that -someone else- must have written about it in a decent amount of detail before we will, ensures that we stay true to those, and don't become an indiscriminate collection of trivia, factoids, or articles based on biased, promotional stuff if that's all that's out there on the subject.