The existing situation is of great assistance to another species: the wiki-barrister, expert is using whatever legal processes are available to achieve equity. . If such a person intuitively think an article should be kept, they will find arguments to keep it, and vice-versa. For essentially every article at AfD contested in good faith, they could find plausible arguments based on policy for either keeping or deleting. For the unscrupulous subspecies, they could find arguments of some sort for a good deal that is not really reasonably contestable.
In truth, the only general concept of notability is what articles are suitably important for the encyclopedia that we want to have. Collectively, we can decide on whatever sort of encyclopedia we want, and can consequently have whatever concept of notability we want. There is no actual pre-existing meaning of the term, and WP:N goes to some lengths to distinguish it from any word used in an ordinary way. People argue as if Wikipedia should conform to some standard of notability, but we can have whatever rules we please. We can use a concept like the GNG to whatever extent and in whatever way we decide to use it. For example, some people have argued we should in some fields only count scholarly articles, and no general news sources at all; some people have argued the exact reverse. If we prefer abstract standards, we can have them at whatever level we want. To take an area I work on, we have decided to include all college presidents; we could limit it to major universities, or we could decide to include all high school principals. To take an area where I don't work, we have flipped back and forth on whether to include minor-league baseball players.
Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the encyclopedia should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise. We can have whatever compromise can get enough agreement. It's not a matter of logic, just a matter of of what we can find that works for enough of us to resolve the individual problems. (At present, we use inconsistency as a sort of compromise: of articles on computer programs of very similar marginal importance, and very similar marginal sourcing, about half will be included and half not, so people of all positions on this can say they win half the time, or (more likely) complain that they lose half the time. Personally, I think that's the worst way to find a solution.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net
wrote:
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything.
In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies:
anyone
who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to
satisfy
them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation
and
misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than
full
formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the
provisions
of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles. Although
WP:NOT
is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part
of
it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little
better
than random. Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what
should
count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
Many of the inconsistencies exist only in the eye of the species known as the Lesser Horned Wikilawyer - they illustrate the proved that "the Devil can cite Scripture". The phenomenon under discussion belongs really to the Illogical Positivist: the "notability guidelines" are a vast case analysis, and the General Notability Guideline is the default case, meant to catch the situations where no other guideline applies. As we have been saying, it is phrased as a sufficient condition: if it is not also a necessary condition, what happens? Well, the case analysis might not be complete: we might (gasp) have to use our own brains.
Must it be complete? Only if you believe there is a hypostatised concept "notability" that really must be applicable in all cases. I think what is being said above is that there are many of those Illogical Positivists around, and they argue somewhat in the way I'm saying. Now that wouldn't surprise me at all, as a statement. People often enough do use any argument from quasi-policy in what is a rhetorical rather than a logical way.
Charles
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