On 09/11/2007, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
Another problem: Phil Sandifer does not scale. You know a lot about webcomics, and I trust your judgment on them, which makes for a great first cut as far as I'm concerned: if Phil says it's unworthy, then it almost certainly is genuinely junk. Get more of your well-informed friends in on it.
The webcomic artists do have a point: there was indeed a long-running attempt to get rid of webcomics in Wikipedia, to the point where those against them tried to put through a notability guideline that would preclude expert opinion as biased toward the subject - i.e., a direct anti-expert guideline, specifically to stop Phil objecting to them.
That said, the present campaign appears (I must say) somewhat petulant and ill-conceived as to what is article-worthy in Wikipedia. The notion of third-party verifiability is not widely appreciated.
The public relations problem is that "notable" is Wikipedia jargon, *not* how the word is understood by outsiders. This means it's going to continue to be a problem as long as it's used on AFD and other points of public interaction in the jargon sense rather than the conventional English language sense.
- d.