On 5/29/07, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I wonder also how this meshes with notability being "permanent".
The statement that notability is permanent gets it wrong because it assumes that we all agree what notability is, that we don't change our evaluation over time, and that relative importance doesn't change over time. They all change over time. Pepys used to be just this guy from the seventeenth century, until some scholars worked out how to read the forgotten shorthand code of his diaries. Now he's a great source of information about the restoration period.
The notability guidelines can be useful, but the overarching concept of notability is too tenuous to be more than a rule of thumb, a tool used by AfD to help to plod through the 100-or-so deletion nominations every day.