On 5/12/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I'm thinking of usefulness to the reader here. Third-party verifiability rather than "notability" is good because if there's no third party material the reader wouldn't have a reason to look it up, and it doesn't cut off the Long Tail the way arbitrary notability bars do.
What do you mean by "third-party"? Say a skier visits a travel agent who recommends the skifield that is the subject of this discussion. He goes to Wikipedia to find out more about it. Even if our article on the topic is just a condensed reformulation of the information on the subject's website, I feel that we have done him a small service. We've presented the information in a standard, encyclopaedic format. We've provided all the links we could find. And we've presented it more neutrally than the website itself would. We might include statements like "the smallest ski area" or "was closed in 2006" that the website itself might not. There's a lot to be said for having an *encyclopaedic* view of a subject - regardless of whether it's more informative than the primary source.
I've yet to have it understandably explained to me why arbitrary notability bars are good for the reader typing a term into the search box, and why nothing is better than something (verifiable).
Arbitrary notability bars are good for *us*, because they let us define a cut-off point at which the cost of maintenance is higher than the benefit to the reader. There's no benefit to the reader.
Steve