On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber kmw@armory.com wrote:
On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard wrote:
Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us.
Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
Google search rank is mostly a function of the page for a specific search term, so having an article about [[Bulbasaur]] (a pokemon) doesn't really affect our search results for [[Cholesterol]]
http://www.google.com/search?&q=bulbasaur http://www.google.com/search?&q=cholesterol
People, when talking about Bulbasaur online, will link to Wikipedia, upping its pagerank, and when people talk about cholesterol they will do the same. Probably not the same people. ;)
If we created an article that no one links to, or people link to some other source for that subject a lot more it won't be in the top results. I don't see that that would affect our highly ranked search terms though. I do think google rank matters, in a way. It is how most of our readers find us, and if there is a group of people uninterested in others reading the articles I think we would be at an argumentative impasse.
Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur? yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.