Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:09:24 -0700 From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org
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David Goodman wrote:
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?
The reality, though, tends to be rather more political and content-based than that. Articles don't get deleted on their own, and relatively few are nominated for deletion by people applying some sort of theoretical objective standard (of notability or utility or anything else).
The cases that are controversial are mainly in areas where there are significant groups of people actively campaigning for a reduction in coverage---mainly anything to do with pop culture or recent news. If you write about an underground rapper with a large YouTube following, you're going to run into objectors. If you write about the most obscure 19th-century government official you can dig up, on the other hand, nobody is going to object.
We have very few policies that govern content. The main ones are verifiability, what wikipedia is not, neutral point of view, biographies of living people and no original research.
If you write about some dead C19th official, you'll likely be using a book as a source for the article so verifiability is no problem, you'll be unlikely to run into blp as everyone concerned is dead, you probably won't manage to add too much original research unless you try really hard, you're unlikely to have an axe to grind, which only really leaves not to worry about. As for nobody objecting, they might if the subject is a baronet, or if the book you used wasn't in English, or worse yet not in the Latin alphabet, and there are no ghits.
Write about some rapper you're a fan of, or a TV programme you watch, and there's likely no book, you may or may not be neutral, like as not we'll get novel - and probably wrong, unless you're a real-life expert - conclusions drawn from listening and/or watching, living people are in there, and the chances are good that some sort of stuff which wikipedia is not gets involved.
An article on a contemporary topic is less likely to meet content policies, or to be able to be fixed up, than a geostub or a biography of a very dead person.
Angus