On Wed, June 6, 2007 9:33 am, William Pietri wrote:
It's especially hard for me in that I used to understand it. I used to feel that it mattered a lot. Sometimes, I can almost get it again--and then it's gone. It's very frustrating. Although I'm glad to enforce community standards when I put on my admin hat, it bothers me that I don't have a deep understanding of it.
Is there a good exposition of it somewhere beyond WP:N? Or perhaps better, an examination of it?
Somewhat ironically, the setup w/Wikipedia:Notability is what's probably made "notability" untenable, especially with the adoption of Uncle G's "On Notability" essay, which, while well written, completely missed the point.
Notability started out as a good way of saying "We want articles on X, but not all articles on X, so we talked about it and decided that we can have an article on this aspect of X if it does A, B, and/or C."
The new focus on sources (not entirely a bad thing) put the concept of notability into a Wikipedia-only facet for a short time, where people decided that notability wasn't what a subject did, but whether a subject was discussed in the mainstream. All well and good in theory, but it a) misunderstood notability, and b) expanded the concepts of our verifiability policy beyond what it even required.
So, at that point, even if an article's subject was verifiable, if it wasn't verifiable *enough*, it stopped being notable. And this was somehow preferable.
We've reached a tenuous stalemate of sorts at WP:N - the guideline no longer requires source counting and instead discusses the quality of coverage, while pointing people to the long-standing guidelines that actually understand notability for topics, but it's still not perfect.
As The Cunctator said, notability being abandoned for deletion purposes would probably be a great idea in theory, except that a) what do we do with non-notable material, and b) how can we keep that from being abused in terms of notable material?
-Jeff