On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:27 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx, (assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate article?
I lean towards if people can find reliable sources for the fire dept, and can actually stir up an article that's more than 2 sentences, why not. The lower balance on that I would use is utility and maintainability. Would a fire dept article be useful? Possibly, especially if there is something interesting about the fire dept there, but I'm not sure an article on every street would be maintainable, in the sense that one might expect enough traffic for it not to devolve into nonsense/spam.
It's certainly a very complex subject, and there are arguments on both sides. I would like to see the pendulum swing a little more in the more open direction, but the actual policy changes that would come to make that happen are complex. I would suggest that utility and maintainability be key, but I'm certainly interested in seeing what the community decides. :)
I do think, more than most of our other policies, notability is hurting our image. I also think many of the people that feel that way aren't wikipedians, and are just angry that something they care about got deleted, without putting much thought into what that inclusion would mean for the encyclopedia as a whole. There are a lot of solutions, as some people said above, maybe transwiki these to some other site would be even better.