At 05:53 PM 2/24/2010, Ken Arromdee wrote:
You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.
Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.
Before being blocked, a minor inconvenience this week, I came across a situation with 13 AfD's filed on national member societies of the International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these societies had existed since the 1920s, and it is a certainty that reliable source exists for them, but those sources can be a devil to find, unless someone has access to and is willing to comb through old issues of QST, or can search in local print archives of newspapers from the time of recognition or other notable events.
WP:CLUB notes that national-level nonprofit organizations are *generally* notable. In this case, the IARU, at some point, when they were not members and did not participate in the decision except by applying, decided to admit them as the sole representative of the entire nation in the IARU. We have the IARU as a source for the fact that they are the national members, and the IARU points to the national societies' web sites, and we often have those sites as a source for additional information about the societies, information that is highly likely to be true. In ordinary language, that means that they are "reliable" for that purpose. This is not controversial information.
But the problem is obvious. I proposed a change to the guideline, a special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member society of a notable international society would be notable. If you know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections. "Notability is not inherited." A bit more puzzling was the claim that the IARU was not independent from the admitted member. As to the act of admission, it certainly was! It will only admit one society, and it appears that when there are conflicting claimants, they want them to get it together and form a uniting society. Tehy want one representative in the nation to represent the international union to the government of that country, and, as well, to represent the country's interests before the IARU and international bodies.
I got practically no support at the relevant talk page (it is the talk page for the guideline that WP:CLUB) points to. And there was no support at WP:RSN for the proposition that the IARU was reliable for the purpose of determining membership and official web site URL.
Yet what happened at AfD? Out of 13, 11 closed as Keep, 1 as Delete, and 1 as No Consensus. Some of the Keep results had exactly the same lack of "independent sources" as the Delete result.
Guidelines are supposed to represent actual practice, not prescribed practice. The point is to avoid disruption from AfDs that will fail, or from insistence on keeping something that will be deleted. But the editors who sit on the guidelines seem to think otherwise, and one of them complained that editors, voting in the AfD, were not following the guideline, and he helpfully pointed to it. As he had just changed in an effort to make crystal clear his interpretation, which was obviously not theirs!
By not allowing guidelines to move to represent actual practice, when there is an opportunity, disruption and senseless debate continues. Someone else will read the existing guideline, interpret it with a literalist understanding ("there *must* be at least *two* independent reliable sources, period, no exceptions) and then file an AfD, wasting a lot of time. In this case the editor filed 13, and there were obviously many more on the way, there are something like 200 such national societies.
There is an alternate interpretation. The stubs should be deleted. And they were only kept because people interested in amateur radio voted for them. Suppose this is the case. (It's not. DGG was asked about one of these AfDs and he basically came up with the same arguments as I did.) If it's the case, then the guideline should be clarified so that the rest of us won't make that mistake again, of trying to keep stuff that will only be deleted, and, instead, we will pull the stubs back into a list article. A similar list article had existed previously, and it had been decided that stubs were cleaner and better, because there is, in fact, a lot of reliable information about these societies, that could indeed be put in a list article (where some kinds of self-published information can be used), and having looked at the articles and reflected on the list possibility, I agree with the standing consensus. But nobody voted to remove the information, just to delete the articles. It's an absolutist understanding of what an "article" must be, based on a technical failure, the failure to find what surely must exist, independent sources for these societies, some of which are pushing ninety years in existence.
Sorry, something that might look like "instruction creep" is actually necessary, or the same battles get fought over and over. And over. As long as it is understood that the guidelines are not rigid regulations, there isn't a problem with that. And consensus can change, so when actual outcomes are seen, and stand, that contradict a guideline, the guideline should be changed no matter what the rule-bound think "should be" the rule.