On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:09, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
Other options would be for a site that ended the inclusionism/deletionism conflict by abandoning notability and concentrating on verifiability or aiming for comprehensiveness. That seems to work for IMDB but possibly you need to restrict this to specialist pedias - aiming for coverage of all films and their cast is one thing, but on a general pedia you need to set a threshold somewhere unless you are prepared to have articles for pet guinea pigs.
One of the things Citizendium gets right in policy terms is to recast notability in the terms of 'maintainability'. An article on Citizendium is only deleted if (a) it's obvious junk (though not explicitly listed, that's basically CSD-type criteria - vandalism, propaganda pieces etc.) or (b) it's not maintainable by the current community of editors.
It seems a pretty good candidate to be a bounding threshold for inclusionism. And it's something that is sort of required for BLPs. A rough test might be something like this: if you've got a BLP article and that person were to die or their status changes radically, would the article be updated? If Tony Blair or George H.W. Bush were to keep over dead tomorrow, the WP article would be updated, and the CZ one would be too, even with only a very small community of editors. But what happens if the man who runs the grocery in a small village in England dies? Who updates his article? That is what a maintainability policy gets you.
The benefit of such a maintainability policy is that a lot of articles don't need much maintenance like BLPs do. It's not like Isaac Newton is going to rise up from the grave and become an Oscar-winning actor and make his encyclopedia articles invalid. And it seems a reasonable presupposition to think that once an encyclopedia like Wikipedia has an article on the Cabbage Patch Dolls or Plato's Republic or the evolution of horses or whatever, the amount of updating isn't going to be too drastic.