---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com Date: May 18, 2005 1:39 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Schools on en: (was Do I misunderstand Wikipedia? On notability and encyclopedic merit.) To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org

On 5/18/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:

So what you mean is, you don't want to create the articles? Then don't create them.

I don't create them because it would disruptive to wikipedia. If you are going to reply to lists that my message wasn't directed to, you at least could have at least quoted my entire message.

The last time it was advanced as policy, it got a simple majority but failed to make consensus. Jimbo also explained why verifiability is good enough for *articles people actually want to write*:

I'm quite well aware of what Jimbo has stated and the previous decisions on the schools matter.

What I am asking about is a closely related but separate matter, which is does the moniker 'encyclopedia' indicate that we are generally using a criteria of notability to decide to include things.

There are wikipedians at the extreme end of the spectrum that think we should include an article with stats for every darn roadway intersection that we can prove exists, and I believe that either they are misunderstanding our intentions or I am.

I'd be quite happy with an answer like, 'We prefer things to be notable and discourage the creation of non-notable subjects... but if someone wants to create and maintain a page on something not meeting that we will permit it as long as it's verifiable and NPOV', which is how I suspected things actually were... But this doesn't fit with the small group of people determined to prevent any school (or quite a few other things, as long as they are verifiable and NPOV) from being deleted.