Tony Sidaway wrote:
No what I was saying (and I thought it was pretty obvious) is that this whole "notability fixed" thing is trivially false. Pepys is the counter-example: a fellow more known now for something that most eigheenth century scholars were unaware of, or which they thought (believing the diaries to be in a private code) would be forever inaccessible.
I always understood the guideline to mean that notability was "permanent" in the sense that once someone or something has become notable they can't become non-notable again. So Pepys was non-notable during his lifetime, later _became_ notable once his diaries became a significant source of historical information, and now he will never become non-notable again. It's a one-way street to notability.
I find this quite reasonable since the fact that someone or something was notable at one time is itself a notable thing.