Ilmari Karonen wrote:
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Why is this not a good thing? Our articles are NPOV and verifiable, and easily corrected should errors in them be found. What would be a better site to have as the #1 hit?
That's a good point. Given that we don't, currently, provide any information on Brian Peppers, I'm glad, for the sake of human dignity, that Snopes does (and actually outranks us on Google). Because if they didn't, the next sites down the list are Wikitruth and YTMND.
Reference: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22brian+peppers%22
[this is not so much a direct reply to this post as a general feeling about this thread] Others have pointed this out I am sure but it seems to me that many of these less notables, especially the meme ones, quickly become less so. To the point that the most notable thing about them is that they have a wikipedia article, because otherwise they would have been forgotten. The "Human dignity" is a value judgment and is therefore POV argument is, to me at least somewhat specious, since notability is also a value judgment (that is why not include any thing that can be verified even if its not notable).
As a community we have established standards for what is encyclopedic. Some have historical precedent others less so, but they all are ultmatly derived from value judgments. That said I think the most compelling argument against this sort of article is not human dignity (though its a good one), its just that we really do seem to have let the bar of notability fall to a level that I think harms the project.
Dalf