On Jan 8, 2009, at 1:36 AM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
In a message dated 1/7/2009 7:57:35 AM Pacific Standard Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:
"Encyclopedia" and "record of only what has been published in reliable secondary sources" are not synonymous terms.>>
And yet the community needs a method of determining "Is this encyclopedic?" We already loosely use an expression like "this is not encyclopedic" in AfD. Apparently there is some sort of processing going on, on the editor level, to allow them to determine that.
If the determination is simply the answer to the question "Has this ever been published by anyone anywhere?" then we come back again to Notability, since this answer destroys notability entirely.
However the community seems to want Notability. And so my conclusion is that this contradiction means that "This has been published" is not a full answer to "Is this encyclopedic?"
Well, you've also switched scales. Notability, defined as some level of coverage from sources, works on a topic level. If you applied it to the article content level - every claim must be double-sourced - it would be disastrous.
I mean, I'm not saying secondary sources are useless. I'm just saying, "knowledge published in reliable secondary sources" and "encyclopedia" are not equivalent. That's a statement on a line-by-line, fact-by-fact scale.
-Phil