On 4/10/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/9/07, Seraphim Blade seraphimbladewikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
"From the independent sources available, could a comprehensive, high-quality (GA/FA) article be written on this subject someday?"
I think this would be a terrible criterion to use for this purpose. Not every worthwhile subject has sufficient to say about it to make a FA or even a GA as currently defined.
-Matt
Haha, it's a little known fact that GA was originally created as a form of recognition for articles which would never be able to attain FA status or close to it, because of various deficiencies (e.g. insufficient sources due to systemic bias in secondary source material). (Or, at least, this is what Worldtraveller, the fellow who came up with GA, told me a year or two ago.) I still recall how just a month or two after GA's inception, several short articles which I could never bring up to what is currently B-class status because of insufficient source material (just to name two, take the two [[Karamjit Singh]]s) were rejected by GA. Standards creep works that fast, apparently.
Sorry to digress - I'll try to redeem myself by suggesting that even tying inclusion criteria to some relatively low standard at the present, e.g. C-class, may not work too well thanks to how our standards for articles continue to rise. In a number of cases, these standards become arbitrary and mindlessly enforced, such as an obsession for demanding footnoting where it isn't necessary (e.g. articles which rely on a few core high-quality web sources) - so I would think it's a bad idea to get *this* objective about inclusion criteria.
I think we will always have to have some element of subjectivity about our inclusion criteria. We used to require very subjective criteria because our rules were poorly-developed (which is why I used to support a not-too-well-defined idea of notability), but nowadays thanks to rules creep, we don't need as much subjectivity as we used to. But we shouldn't go overboard in the objective criteria either - I think we already have a surfeit of clue being substituted by mindless rules. If anything, perhaps the reason AfD is working less well these days is that it has adopted the worst of both worlds - it uses subjective criteria to delete the wrong articles, and mindlessly wields objective criteria with the same result in other areas.
Anyhow, I'm rambling now. Just my two cents.
Johnleemk