On 6/29/07, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/28/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote: >
In short, a reliable source establishing why *this particular* person should have an article, as opposed to all the other essentially anonymous people on the sex offender list or in Ohio court records.
The most reliable source for that is Google Trends. This particular person should have an article because lots of people are searching for information about him. If you want to call that "an internet meme", that's your terminology, not mine.
Okay, so you are saying (hopefully I have it right this time) not that he should have an article because of specific kind of notability (like a significant internet meme) but simply because people are looking for info on him. It doesn't matter if this demand is generated by general internet interest, or just the population of Toledo, Ohio wondering who that guy down the block is.
Pretty much. I don't see notability as a judgment on why people want to know about something. I also don't think locality considerations play a role, so long as the verifiability of the sources is universal (if you can't check a source without going to a courthouse in Toledo, Ohio, that would be a problem).
I actually think the "hyperlocal" aspects of Wikipedia are one of the areas of greatest potential.
But, to me, the key question is : what are they finding? If there are no encyclopedic (in the sense that I discussed above) sources to support an article, then we should not have an article regardless of the demand.
The way you have described encyclopedic sources, I'm not even sure they should be in the article in the first place. Except in corner cases (a topic which is notable for being notable), notability is a topic for discussion pages, not for the article itself.
It is the mission of journalists and historians to satisfy that demand by creating secondary sources through synthesising primary ones like court documents, not ours. It is our mission to write encyclopedia articles once those secondary sources exist.
There are at least two secondary sources for BP, the Toledo newspaper article and the Snopes article.
Anthony