On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:11 AM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Jon Q wrote:
You''l find David Goodman has similar views to your own.
Charles
And so I do.
But it doesn't take an ideal world to institutionalize BEFORE as a requirement. Just an approximately 2/3 majority at a discussion. We've come very close to it. There are many other desirable changes, such as the rewriting of NOT into a positive framework, such as WP DOES INCLUDE, but this is something that's simple and obvious.
The problem is that those supporting articles are normally only those who care about the particular article; those opposing it by and large do have a general agenda to make the encyclopedia more rigorously selective. The people who do not want that are much more dispersed and I have found it impossible to keep their interest long enough to do some good.
The worst thing we can do is to go case by case based on strength of arguments, for there is nobody qualified to judge the relative strength of competing arguments. Wikipedia is built on the general concept of the wisdom of the community, and even if the community is not always very wise, there is no equitable way to proceed except to assume that it is for the purpose of making decisions. . The only people here competent to judge conflicting content policies or how to interpret them are the interested members of the community as a whole, acting in good faith, and the only discretion of an admin is to remove those !votes that are not in good faith,as coming from single purpose accounts, or in complete disregard of policy. Any other view, and the decision is made by the whim of whichever admin gets there first--there is no general agreement among admins about the relative importance of different policies (except for some obvious generally agreed over-riding cases like BLP and copyright). Voting is not evil--it's the only way to work with large numbers of people, other than brute force or established authority.
I sometime wish i had kept quiet about my view on the broad inclusiveness desired in an encyclopedia until I had become an admin, because then I could counter the effect of those admins who have concealed or dissembled their tendency the other way--or who, in some cases, have managed to get appointed regardless through persistence. I know what I want, but I do not confuse it with what the community wants. To be perfectly frank, there are those who do, and every expression that individual admins can judge the quality of arguments supports them.
The insistence of sources is good and necessary, and I very strongly support the principle of WP:V. But the necessary source will depend upon the field, and not every field is reducible to what google indexes. We could get around this by redefining "Notability is not popularity" to read "Notability is not necessarily popularity," and accept that sufficient popular attention however expressed justifies inclusion, as long as we can document the basic facts somehow. Instead, we juggle with what we consider sources to maintain the fiction of the WP:GNG. For some types of articles we accept local or very specialized sources, for some we don't. If we really meant WP:GNG, every high school athlete would be notable, for even the high school paper is accurate enough & under sufficient editorial control to report the team statistics accurately. I wouldn't include them: they belong in local wikis only, but I'd justify this by a decision that they do not belong in Wikipedia, and not by quibbling about sources. In the other direction, we have accepted that every inhabited settlement is notable, and that comprehensive unselective primary geographic sources are sufficient for WP:V--when i came here, I recall making some tortured arguments about how such sources were actually selective and secondary. The arguments were accepted, because we wanted to include the places, not because the arguments really made sense.
It's not whether or not we want to go by rule. We want to go by those rules which actually do improve the encyclopedia, either by saying what we dod and do not want or by making a stable compromise when we cannot decide. Going purely case by case can destroy any compromise,whereas good reference works are stable and consistent.
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