At 04:34 AM 3/7/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: What I'm seeing from
Mr. Matthews is an argument, that, no, the guidelines should prevail, and we should not change the guidelines to reflect actual practice.
I'm certainly not saying that, and it doesn't represent my view. I didn't understand what you were saying so well, at first.
Thanks for noticing and acknowledging that. It helps.
Proposals to create nearly 200 stubs in an area on the assurance that they are probably verifiable somehow falls under a different general heading, the creation of a "walled garden" of material where ordinary editors are basically told to keep out.
Well, not exactly. But because the standard set up by the decision about the assurance is simple and applicable to all 200 articles, it would become difficult to AfD them. And it should be difficult, except in one way. If one disagrees with the standard, discuss the standard. Consensus can change. But individually AfDing the articles, making a claim that has been repeatedly rejected, no, that's not okay.
Making that global decision on notability, which would apply only specifically to the specific international organization and its members, and only by extension and individual decision to many more international organizations of similar nature, simply allows results to become predictable without writing them in stone.
Nothing about this would prevent "ordinary editors" from working on the articles.
Walled gardens are no good when "editors assumed to know" are in charge of the content.
That's correct. But this was not the issue here.
Some better approach needs to be negotiated, allowing at least some informal guidelines to emerge.
Yes, exactly. Documenting actual practice, without presuming that this is binding. It's actually the Wikipedia way, but it's being lost (because it's presumed that guidelines are binding, that became obvious in this affair, and then, if they are binding, they must be written authoritatively and prescriptively, which then can make them impossible to manage, editing them becomes highly contentious, with decisions being made by the few who care to deal with those pages.... On the other hand, that some kind of result happened and was sustained isn't deniable. Until and unless it changes and that is sustained.
(Example: which scholastic philosophers to include? We tend to go by the contents of academic works of reference as at least a sensible approach.)
That's right. It's posible to decide, for example, that all philosophers listed in some authoritative reference are notable, ipso facto. That doesn't mean that no others are notable, but it does mean that far less time might be spent demanding sources or the article will be deleted. Someone, instead, who sees unsourced material might tag it, or, later, remove it, but the article doesn't then get deleted. The listing in the authoritative source would remain, as a minimum.
Another example I'd propose, without insisting on it, particularly (i.e., maybe it's a bad idea, it's just being proposed as something that could be considered), it's a case I ran across when I started looking at abusive blacklistings. Lyrikline.org is a German poetry site with the support of the German government; it's quite notable. It has a review process by which it decides what poets to host, and it hosts a biography, some poetry, and audio of the poet reading. It would be possible to determine, as an example, that all poets with lyrikline.org pages were, ipso facto, notable. As I recall, we might gain several hundred poet stubs, fairly easily. (The poets are from all over the world.)
Why would this indicate notability? Well, the decision that is being made there is whether or not the poet is notable! And that decision is being made by those knowledgeable in the field. It's probably a sounder decision than one made by the general Wikipedia editorship. By adopting it, we could avoid a lot of unnecessary dispute.