On 2/25/07, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
No. His problem is that Wikipedia is documenting things inconsistently, arbitrarily, and in a manner that is not meaningfully predictable not only to an outsider but to one of the most respected figures in the field. If Scott McCloud cannot figure out the rhyme or reason to what is and isn't a notable comic (webcomic or print) on Wikipedia, odds are the rhyme or reason is shit.
Scott McCloud appears to be an expert on comics. Not data sorting.
You're misunderstanding. I'm not using sense in terms of "is a good idea." I mean it in terms of "is actually recognizable as an idea as opposed to a set of arbitrary rules." I'm not saying that McCloud's objection is that our notability guidelines are unreasonable. I'm saying that his objection is that they're nonsensical.
WP:RS is pretty solid
There are a few conditions where it breaks down but is otherwise pretty solid.
Wikipedia:Notability has a solid base in the: has been the subject of at least one substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other.
However working out if a certain article passes or fails this every time is hard. This in common cases people use shortcuts (just as chemists don't use MO theory to work out roughly what an organic chemical will look like) as long as people understand that these are approximations and what the underlying assumptions are that should be possible to deal with.
Of course none of this matters as long as people continue to use AFD for campaigning.
Strange. Because we were doing a fine job of writing a good encyclopedia before we had them, so I'm not exactly sure what we accomplished there.
Things change. Before we had them they tended to exist as de-facto standards in any case. And frankly once you take off the rose tinted specs the quality was not that high.
No amount of policy can ensure really good articles but they can reduce the amount of total dross.
No. I have to show that Wikipedia has a problem in the eyes of people who are disposed to be sympathetic to it.
Claim they are.
This isn't a double blind study to establish beyond a scientific doubt that Wikipedia has a problem. Such studies don't exist, and if they're a prerequisite for change then change is impossible. Which, admittedly, seems like the situation you want most of the time.
Pretty much. Nine times out of ten doing nothing is a surprisingly good solution.
It's easy to find tales of woe and then say that this requires total change right now. Much harder to do a proper examination of the situation which would allow you to have some idea what the correct changes are.
I must be remembering the two years I spent editing Wikipedia before [[WP:N]] and [[WP:RS]] were codified wrong, because I'm pretty sure we were capable of dealing with such groups before we had them.
We didn't have the 9/11 twoothers. We did rather badly with the aether people. In the early days of wikipedia we were rather tech heavy and other than certain audiophiles most tech people tend to be fairly sceptical. That isn't the case any more.