David Gerard wrote:
Hm, true. But our present notability guidelines suffer from (a) their original purpose (as an excuse) (b) arbitrary numerical cutoffs. There's something important being missed: what precisely are we talking about?
I think everybody does have a intuitive notion of notability, but the intuition isn't very precise, and it's different for different people.
The print encyclopedias make it easier for themselves in two ways: physical size, so if you only have so many pages, you just pick the N most important topics, and the editor-in-chief, whose personal preju^Wintuition will be the tie-breaker for any hard choices. We've taken away both of those convenient but capricious criteria, and are now faced with deriving "notability" from first principles.
I don't have any answers, but I think people are slowly and painfully converging on something like meaningful criteria. Verifiability is a factor, amount of verifiable information is a factor, size and open-endedness of subject space is a factor. Per-project seems less troublesome than WP-wide, not least because the notability discussion is built on shared knowledge.
Stan