On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.
Perhaps, as David says, BLP are greater, but the problem there is not generated by Wikipedia's internal culture; it's created by people coming in from outside to add things. 'Notability', though, is a problem we grew all on our own.
Which is all the more frustrating given that the problem with most of these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced elsewhere.
Exactly. And it's got to the point now that deletionists are enforcing "one topic, one article" by making it impossible to break out further information to sub-articles, which is the natural and hypertext thing to be doing.
-Matt