Pete Bartlett wrote:
I personally
think this is yet another example of WP:V being swept aside under an
avalanche of Google hits, a problem in several areas at present where
all the POV pushers have to do is spam as many blogs and web boards as
they can find and suddenly an article must be verifiable (it's just
that the reliable source is a long way down the list, honest). A
supposed meme which inspires such fierce passions and which has had
its fans searching the world at the urging of a website, but which can
only come up with a single mention in a foreign-language newspaper,
does not sound to me like the kind of thing for an encyclopaedia. More
something for a Wikicities project. but then, I am older than your
average Wikipedian, and I've seen my kids obsessed by, and lose
interest in, many things along the way. Whether Warhammer is "better"
than Pokemon I wouldn't like to say...
Guy (JzG)
As I too become long in the tooth I come more and more to the opinion
that it is waste of time trying to find "one size fits all" standards of
notability and verifiability
to apply to all articles. Seems to just generate year after year of policy-fiddling and
pointless arguing.
You make me feel like a walrus.
So I wonder if it would be more pragmatic to drop these
arbitary thresholds and just say "sources are required".
Each article has the best sources we can find for that topic. If the best sources are
blogs then fine -
the reader is left to him/herself to determine notability based on their own frame of
references.
Well-established material gets book citations.
New material gets journal citations.
Internet memes gets blog citations.
Horses for courses.
This idea is analogous to the idea of NPOV - we just provide the data and the reader does
the hard work.
I still don't like blogs, and I attach far more importance to
verifiability than notability.
Unfortunately, your suggestion requires a more than liberal application
of common sense. That alone dooms it.
Too many people live in the kind of ordered universe that can be
completely defined by a set of rules that is always insufficient to the
task.
Ec