Ryan Delaney wrote:
Alphax wrote:
As you can see from what you quoted, I never said it was a policy. You asked for guidlines, so I provided you with one, official or not.
As for your love of [[Elf Only Inn]], I see that (as of 11:00 UTC, 7th September 2005]] you have made a grand total of ZERO edits to that article. Stop bitching about the fact that an article was deleted, and expand the thing.
While we're talking about policies and guielines, would you say that [[WP:CIVIL]] applies to the mailing list, or is this a free for all...? ;-)
Maybe I should just violate [[WP:NPA]] and call Snowspinner a... nah.
Snowspinner, I'm sorry that I harassed you, and that you feel so hurt by articles being deleted, but if people feel that something is not notable enough to belong in Wikipedia - and AFAICT, this is still a valid reason for voting to delete something (actually, I don't think you even *need* to provide a reason when voting) - then they will vote, "nn. webcomic, delete".
It is neither your job, nor mine, nor the purpose of Wikipedia to increase the "notability" of something. Wikipedia is pretty big on the internet, and we have (or used to have) standards which meant that Wikipedia was being used as a measure of notability of a topic elsewhere on the Internet, and in the wider media in general.
As it has been pointed out in another thread:
Fastfission wrote:
Well, recognizing that Wikipedia itself is becoming a cultural object, wouldn't it make sense at the very least to say "When it is more notable than its inclusion in Wikipedia would be"? ;-)
Put more simply, if I were in EB, it would be pretty amazing and the most notable thing about me ("Otherwise unnotable man included in Encyclopedia Brittanica," the headlines would proclaim). However if I was more notable than my inclusion into EB would be, then it wouldn't be any big deal if they had an article on me -- it might even be expected, if they specialized in breadth.
Of course, the problem with this is that it is self-reinforcing policy! That is, if the standard for inclusion to Wikipedia went down, then the likelihood of having a Wikipedia article about something would go up, which would in turn affect a standard for inclusion based on the likelihood of an article being in Wikipedia... and so on.
It's a slippery slope once we say abolish such meta-guidlines as notability and encyclopedic potential. Wikipedia is NOT a web directory, and for many articles (not all, but many nonetheless) on webcomics, that is all the article is being used for. As I said before:
Alphax wrote:
We are here to document the state of things, nothing more. That is the essence of NPOV, the policy which (along with Freedom of content) Wikipedia is founded upon.
To me, staying neutral means "we don't write about something until it is notable outside of the community it originated in", because otherwise we are pushing that communitie's POV that the subject of the article is notable outside of that community.