Mark Gallagher wrote:
On 6/11/07, Jeff Raymond jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote: It's quite common, although not actually supported by the criteria, to speedy delete articles where the claim to importance/significance is not credible. I think that's a bit questionable at times, since we're introducing subjectiveness to the procedure. I'm pretty sure some people are speedying articles because they don't think references in the national press are enough.
I support discounting incredible claims. e.g. if an article says so-and-so won the Nobel prize for nude mountaineering, when there is no such prize (yet), then there is an assertion of notability, but we're well within the bounds of Common Sense, if not A7[0], to speedy it.
Indeed. I tend to call it the cottage-on-Mars test (was it Colbert who came up with that one?): if the claim is less credible than owning a cottage on Mars, it doesn't count. (This also applies to unsubstantiated claims that, while technically possible, would be a priori extremely improbable, such as being "the smartest guy on Earth".)
Evaluating the credibility of claims isn't, in my experience, the hard part in applying A7, though. What takes effort is judging whether a given absolute claim actually implies notability. Sure, we all know that being a high school student isn't an assertion of notability, while being an Olympic medalist is. But, for example, take a high school athlete whose personal long jump record was so-and-so many meters. Would that put him among the top 5 in his age group in the world, or 37th out of 40 in his school?
Frankly, I'd have no idea, having never been even remotely interested in the subject. So, even assuming there in fact was no other evidence or suggestion of notability, I'd still have to send it to AfD -- unless I wanted to start looking for sources for typical high school long jump scores to compare the claim against.
Of course, when going through CAT:CSD, I can just leave the high school athletes for others to deal with. It's trickier at the other end of the line (i.e. newpages), since articles that no-one wants to deal with will just slip through. Of course, one can slap a {{notability}} notice on the page, in the hope that it might invite someone to take a second look at it, but the "backlog", if it can even be called that, on those is so ridiculously long that I don't think anyone is even thinking about clearing it within the next few years.
(PROD would of course be an option, but in my admittedly limited experience, PRODding a recently created vanity page will, more often than not, just lead to the creator coming back a few minutes later and removing the tag. Which accomplishes absolutely nothing.)