On 07/04/06, Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com wrote:
At 07:17 -0400 7/4/06, Sydney Poore wrote:
Serious encyclopedia means leaving out material that is not encyclopedic. Too many editors are stretching the meaning of encyclopedic to include anything that can be sourced. During Afd, it is very common for editors to cite tabloids, forums or publicly written dictionaries such as Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/. Since it takes a super majority to delete, often the outcome is no consensus and the material stays.
But surely a word, a work or art, a meme, or artifact, can be created today and archived contemporaneously?
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
If something is referenced by a third-party reliable source today, chances are it's important.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
If something is referenced by a third-party reliable source today, chances are it's important.
That's a point I'm trying to address in [[Wikipedia:Notability/Proposal]]. My definition is that:
"Notability as a concept on Wikipedia is conferred through mentions in verifiable sources. These sources should be independent of both the topic and of wikipedia, and should be of the standard described in Wikipedia:Reliable sources. Articles should not be built using only the subject itself as sole source. This requirement for independent sources is so as to determine that the topic can be written without bias, and also that any claim to notability is likewise independent; otherwise the article is likely to fall foul of our vanity guidelines."
Now to some people this probably doesn't go far enough, but to me I think this is the base level that's been indicated time and time again and is established implicitly in our verification policy. I really want to get it defined explicitly. If we can get a consensus on this base definition/level of notability, that's going to impact heavily on debates across wikipedia. Having to explain the linking and intricacies of five policy pages over and over again is wearing me out and it's too open to being gamed. It would be nice to have this issue done and dusted and described at the level at which consensus exists.
Steve block
On 4/7/06, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Now to some people this probably doesn't go far enough, but to me I think this is the base level that's been indicated time and time again and is established implicitly in our verification policy. I really want to get it defined explicitly. If we can get a consensus on this base definition/level of notability, that's going to impact heavily on debates across wikipedia. Having to explain the linking and intricacies of five policy pages over and over again is wearing me out and it's too open to being gamed. It would be nice to have this issue done and dusted and described at the level at which consensus exists.
I totally support that. I would also like the basic reasons for notability guidelines to be stated more explicitly. We don't, from memory, have any rationale stronger than "Wikipedia is not paper, but still!"
So we first need to explain why we don't want infinite numbers of articles: - We can't maintain them all to an acceptable standard - We do have physical standards - Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the encyclopaedia as a whole
Then we need to explain how we determine notability, and how we decide what's in and what's out: - For recent creations of mankind, newspaper articles are virtually a requirement - For societies, clubs etc, longevity and true notability compared to peers are required - Our natural bias against popular culture - Links to existing guidelines.
It seems like it might not be a bad idea to establish some precedents or borderline cases. "If your website is not at least as notable as foofoo.com, which has been repeatedly rejected, don't even bother".
Steve
On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
I totally support that. I would also like the basic reasons for notability guidelines to be stated more explicitly. We don't, from memory, have any rationale stronger than "Wikipedia is not paper, but still!"
Good luck on getting consensus on that. Attempts to define notability have been rather unsuccessful. Projects to define notability in particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success, but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like that will have false positives / negatives.
So we first need to explain why we don't want infinite numbers of articles:
- We can't maintain them all to an acceptable standard
This one is a valid point. If the interest level in a particular topic is just not there, no encyclopedia-worthy article can be created or maintained.
Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at least yet. Of course, certain groups of 'interested' are not well represented yet online in general or on wikipedia in specific.
- We do have physical standards
Clarify?
- Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
encyclopaedia as a whole
Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.
I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics; people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.
Then we need to explain how we determine notability, and how we decide what's in and what's out:
- For recent creations of mankind, newspaper articles are virtually a
requirement
Strongly disagreed. Many topics are outside the scope of newspapers.
If you extend that to the technical and specialist press, you have a stronger case, but still, I am very uneasy about that as an absolute requirement.
- For societies, clubs etc, longevity and true notability compared to
peers are required
Agreed here - and some might be worthy of mention as a list item only.
- Our natural bias against popular culture
Please say 'my' rather than 'our' here. A casual study of Wikipedia would probably show a bias /towards/ popular culture.
SOME Wikipedia editors have a bias against popular culture. These people may even be quite influential. However saying that there is a CONSENSUS bias against popular culture is incorrect.
It seems like it might not be a bad idea to establish some precedents or borderline cases. "If your website is not at least as notable as foofoo.com, which has been repeatedly rejected, don't even bother".
Useful, but I feel it just moves the goalposts; there's no way to objectively reduce notability to a number for numeric comparisons against other subjects.
-Matt
On 4/7/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Good luck on getting consensus on that. Attempts to define notability have been rather unsuccessful. Projects to define notability in particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success, but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like that will have false positives / negatives.
If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms, there must be *some* binding common principle.
Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at least yet.
Maybe...when talking about ancient history topics, most people would agree that "the more the better", even if each only gets two edits per year.
- We do have physical standards
Clarify?
I meant physical limits. :)
- Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
encyclopaedia as a whole
Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.
Ah, any examples?
I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics; people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.
On ancient Babylonian vase patterns, sure. On pro-pedophilia blogs no. On different nomenclature systems for describing 3 or 4 toed tree frogs, sure. On the initiation rituals of a fraternity in an unremarkable university in Wisconsin, no.
Then we need to explain how we determine notability, and how we decide what's in and what's out:
- For recent creations of mankind, newspaper articles are virtually a
requirement
Strongly disagreed. Many topics are outside the scope of newspapers.
If you extend that to the technical and specialist press, you have a stronger case, but still, I am very uneasy about that as an absolute requirement.
I'm just trying to make a starting point. What's the nearest statement you could make to mine that you would agree with?
- For societies, clubs etc, longevity and true notability compared to
peers are required
Agreed here - and some might be worthy of mention as a list item only.
Agree. I don't like the culture of "that's not worthy of an article, nuke from space". A better "vote" would be "how much space do we dedicate to this topic? two words? ok!"
- Our natural bias against popular culture
Please say 'my' rather than 'our' here. A casual study of Wikipedia would probably show a bias /towards/ popular culture.
Oh it's not "mine". People will "nn" a pop culture article more easily than a science, geograhy or literature topic, no?
SOME Wikipedia editors have a bias against popular culture. These people may even be quite influential. However saying that there is a CONSENSUS bias against popular culture is incorrect.
I need more convincing.
It seems like it might not be a bad idea to establish some precedents or borderline cases. "If your website is not at least as notable as foofoo.com, which has been repeatedly rejected, don't even bother".
Useful, but I feel it just moves the goalposts; there's no way to objectively reduce notability to a number for numeric comparisons against other subjects.
Tell me, you want to write about a topic, but fear it may not be notable. Short of asking someone, how do you find out?
Steve
On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote: If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms, there must be *some* binding common principle.
Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at least yet.
Maybe...when talking about ancient history topics, most people would agree that "the more the better", even if each only gets two edits per year.
Indeed. Not a hard and fast rule, perhaps - just my thinking out loud.
- Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
encyclopaedia as a whole
Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.
Ah, any examples?
I can't think, off the top of my head, of a specific example to point you to - but I know this has been discussed multiple times on this list with nothing that one could describe as consensus.
I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics; people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.
On ancient Babylonian vase patterns, sure. On pro-pedophilia blogs no. On different nomenclature systems for describing 3 or 4 toed tree frogs, sure. On the initiation rituals of a fraternity in an unremarkable university in Wisconsin, no.
I generally find that Verifiability and No original research tend to weed these out fairly well. I'm leery of having Notability as a policy because it will be used as a weapon by people, and because any policy that does not match the articles we in fact have / agree upon / keep is empty words.
I'm just trying to make a starting point. What's the nearest statement you could make to mine that you would agree with?
It should have been written about in a publication not associated with the creators that has some level of credibility, the latter being hard to determine of course. Newspapers, trade journals, credible academic journals, etc.
A 'credible source' is a topic that people have tried to define on wp:cite and wp:v, I believe, with some degree of success. For the purposes of notability, we are not concerned with primary sources - primary sources do not, by their very nature, define notability.
This is, granted, simply moving the point of hard definition to 'credible third-party source', but is at least a step.
Note that we're not talking about what sources can be used in the article - primary sources have their uses - but those that can establish a claim for notability.
Some online sources are credible in specific fields - I would strongly disagree with counting all online sources as non-credible.
Agree. I don't like the culture of "that's not worthy of an article, nuke from space". A better "vote" would be "how much space do we dedicate to this topic? two words? ok!"
Exactly - if something is just 'yet another <x>', then it is simply a list entry.
Oh it's not "mine". People will "nn" a pop culture article more easily than a science, geograhy or literature topic, no?
Definitely, but I'd disagree that it's anything approaching a consensus - perhaps a consensus of those who frequently nominate for deletion.
Tell me, you want to write about a topic, but fear it may not be notable. Short of asking someone, how do you find out?
If I want to write about it, I write an article about it - nobody's deleted one yet, so I must have it right ... ;)
Of course, I have it easy - very few of my interests are 'popular culture'.
I think the actual thought processes are to do with working out if there's enough to at least write a decent stub about it that can be sourced. If not, I'll generally simply add it to a list or a more general article.
-Matt
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The problem is that most 'notability standards' are completely arbitrary. For example, why is a band that has released two albums on a major label notable, while a band that has released one album on a major label is not? (WP:MUSIC) To be honest, I don't see why we need any other standard than 'can we write a sufficient amount of verifiable, NPOV information about this topic?'
Cynical
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/7/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Good luck on getting consensus on that. Attempts to define notability have been rather unsuccessful. Projects to define notability in particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success, but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like that will have false positives / negatives.
If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms, there must be *some* binding common principle.
Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at least yet.
Maybe...when talking about ancient history topics, most people would agree that "the more the better", even if each only gets two edits per year.
- We do have physical standards
Clarify?
I meant physical limits. :)
- Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
encyclopaedia as a whole
Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.
Ah, any examples?
I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics; people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.
On ancient Babylonian vase patterns, sure. On pro-pedophilia blogs no. On different nomenclature systems for describing 3 or 4 toed tree frogs, sure. On the initiation rituals of a fraternity in an unremarkable university in Wisconsin, no.
Then we need to explain how we determine notability, and how we decide what's in and what's out:
- For recent creations of mankind, newspaper articles are virtually a
requirement
Strongly disagreed. Many topics are outside the scope of newspapers.
If you extend that to the technical and specialist press, you have a stronger case, but still, I am very uneasy about that as an absolute requirement.
I'm just trying to make a starting point. What's the nearest statement you could make to mine that you would agree with?
- For societies, clubs etc, longevity and true notability compared to
peers are required
Agreed here - and some might be worthy of mention as a list item only.
Agree. I don't like the culture of "that's not worthy of an article, nuke from space". A better "vote" would be "how much space do we dedicate to this topic? two words? ok!"
- Our natural bias against popular culture
Please say 'my' rather than 'our' here. A casual study of Wikipedia would probably show a bias /towards/ popular culture.
Oh it's not "mine". People will "nn" a pop culture article more easily than a science, geograhy or literature topic, no?
SOME Wikipedia editors have a bias against popular culture. These people may even be quite influential. However saying that there is a CONSENSUS bias against popular culture is incorrect.
I need more convincing.
It seems like it might not be a bad idea to establish some precedents or borderline cases. "If your website is not at least as notable as foofoo.com, which has been repeatedly rejected, don't even bother".
Useful, but I feel it just moves the goalposts; there's no way to objectively reduce notability to a number for numeric comparisons against other subjects.
Tell me, you want to write about a topic, but fear it may not be notable. Short of asking someone, how do you find out?
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/7/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Good luck on getting consensus on that. Attempts to define notability have been rather unsuccessful. Projects to define notability in particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success, but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like that will have false positives / negatives.
If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms, there must be *some* binding common principle.
Welcome to one of the big unsolved problems of Wikipedia.
If it's any consolation, the problem is not unique to us. For example, the vaunted 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, where notability was decided by the top experts in the various fields, has almost no articles on corporations, even though many were already bestriding the world by 1900, and were rather more important than the subjects of many of the articles that EB did include. The brief references to corporations that you'll find are either connected with the biographies of the founders, or are in some articles on locations and products relevant to the business. So even what seems like a very solid approach, the consensus of experts, can have blind spots.
Per-project criteria seems to be our best bet for now. It would be useful to encourage projects to write down more of the criteria they use informally now, and then to have some generalist-type person collect the successful criteria and assemble into a sort of meta-guideline that could be consulted when thinking about what to do for new areas.
Stan
On Fri, 7 Apr 2006 15:30:33 +0200, you wrote:
I totally support that. I would also like the basic reasons for notability guidelines to be stated more explicitly. We don't, from memory, have any rationale stronger than "Wikipedia is not paper, but still!"
Some time back I tried to include an underpinning policy section in notability guidelines - the point being that if something is not notable, it is unlikely to be verifiable from reliable sources. Notability is a shorthand for WP:V, WP:RS and WP:NOT (an indiscriminate collection of information).
Case in point: Cleveland Steamer, where at least one voter at AfD said it should remain because Wikipedia was the only reference he could find to it. Cited sources are unquestionably not reliable. Guy (JzG)
On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
If something is referenced by a third-party reliable source today, chances are it's important.
I'd strongly dispute that. Because of the ease and speed of record-keeping and publishing, it's very easy to get third-party information on something.
For example, I could create thousands of stub articles on small private schools in Michigan. But I'd describe them as extremely non-notable: every last one of them has students from only a single family, often only a single student, and exists as a "private school" with significant government records only because of a quirk in the Michigan homeschooling law.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]]
On 4/7/06, Mark Wagner carnildo@gmail.com wrote:
I'd strongly dispute that. Because of the ease and speed of record-keeping and publishing, it's very easy to get third-party information on something.
For example, I could create thousands of stub articles on small private schools in Michigan. But I'd describe them as extremely non-notable: every last one of them has students from only a single family, often only a single student, and exists as a "private school" with significant government records only because of a quirk in the Michigan homeschooling law.
Noted, my statement was vaguer than I meant. I meant, if a newspaper article is published today about an event or entity that happen/was created today, then the chances are, that thing is notable. Otherwise it would take longer than 24 hours for it to become newsworthy.
Steve
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Yes, but the difference is that verifiability is a policy requirement, whereas notability is not (although notability is often used as a reason for delete votes in Afd)
Cynical
Mark Wagner wrote:
On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
If something is referenced by a third-party reliable source today, chances are it's important.
I'd strongly dispute that. Because of the ease and speed of record-keeping and publishing, it's very easy to get third-party information on something.
For example, I could create thousands of stub articles on small private schools in Michigan. But I'd describe them as extremely non-notable: every last one of them has students from only a single family, often only a single student, and exists as a "private school" with significant government records only because of a quirk in the Michigan homeschooling law.
-- Mark [[User:Carnildo]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
If something is referenced by a third-party reliable source today, chances are it's important.
Whenever I use a quotation in Wiktionary I create a link to the author on Wikipedia. This doesn't mean that I know there is an article there about him, but at least having a published book is evidence of notability.
Ec
On 4/7/06, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
We require not only verifiability, but notability. I can create something today and document it today, but - save in rare circumstances - I cannot prove its importance today.
I might note that notability is not official policy, even though it is /de facto/, and furthermore there is serious disagreement over where any line should be drawn, even among those who back a notability bar.
-Matt