David Gerard wrote:

But our present notability guidelines suffer from (a) their original purpose (as an excuse) (b) arbitrary numerical cutoffs. There's something important being missed: what precisely are we talking about?

The reason why anyone would bother wanting to read the article in question. Well, that's what I'm trying to convey whenever I use the words "notable" or "notability".

Even then, my concerns can often be satisfied simply by rewriting the article's opening paragraph. For example, if an article begins with "Linus Torvalds is a Finnish computer programmer", that sentence would greatly tempt me to nominate the article for deletion on the basis that Torvalds was not notable. However, I know something about computers, so I know that hypothetical opening sentence should be rewritten as "Linus Torvalds created and manages the development of the Linux operating system."

I'll admit that biographies are the low-hanging fruit in this exercise; when one begins to consider articles about ideas, literature, groups and businesses & so on that it gets more difficult or separate the notable from the cruft. Still, if an article has a strong lead paragraph that explains the significance of its subject in a few sentences, notability should not be an issue. It's when the writing is bad (or the requirements of NPOV or attribution force the opening to be undeniably uninformative) -- or someone is attempting to slip in yet another example of vanity, PR or other garbage -- that the issue of "notability" is raised.

But I'm probably unique in this usage.

Geoff