On 07/03/2008, Ben Yates <ben.louis.yates(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, everything2 mostly or partly uses a voting system for its notability, and to say that it is not without its problems is a bit of an understatement. I'm not sure what the precise deletion rate is, but I found maybe 1/3 of my articles were deleted out of hand. Often I would resubmit them with relatively minor changes and they would get good scores. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

Ian Woollard wrote: Not remotely comparable. The Internet as a whole isn't under a free license, it isn't NPOV, it isn't verifiable, it isn't editable, it doesn't have standardized style guides or access methods, etc. I'd rather stick around and continue improving Wikipedia by incorporating more knowledge into it.

On 08/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote: Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that will get reflected in how people treat us. Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value covering 'everything' higher. Encyclopedias are not an exact science, and never will be. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On Sat, 8 Mar 2008, Ian Woollard wrote: Only if "quality" is defined as "notability".

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm afraid this is an example of rather muddy-headed thinking on your part. Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google rankings are high or low. We're not in the business of producing Google rankings, and we don't get ad revenues from the hits. Secondly, our Google rankings and our rankings on peoples' personal indicators of reliability are to do with the fact that we are likely to have pretty good content on a topic searched for, compared to what else is available online in one place. If a person searches for something, the existence or non-existence of articles unrelated to their interests doesn't alter the quality of the information they find on what they ARE searching for. It's simply invisible. However, if someone searches for something and we DON'T cover it - because some ad hoc 'consensus' of half-a-dozen AFD regulars decided it was 'non-notable' - then Wikipedia has failed to provide information. That tends to leave people with a bad taste in their mouths; double that if when they searched last week, Wikipedia DID have the information they wanted and now doesn't. 'Non-notable' content only 'hurts' our quality if you are measuring quality by some pretty odd measures. Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state. The solution to that isn't to delete the Pokemon. I think this is one way in which we are - as we often are - WAY too over-sensitive to outside criticism. We handle it poorly and panicked, and often make matters worse. It might be better if you didn't assume that because people disagree with you they don't value the encyclopedia. I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of quality that creates 'losers'. We don't have to do everything by algorithm. -Matt

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:36 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote: If Wikipedia has good content people will read it. We have had little trouble finding readers without doing anything in particular to play to the search engines, and I suspect this will continue. There's a reasonable case to be made that our popularity has exceeded our readiness for it. I'm not, by the way, against having standards. I just believe that our standards are often set wrongly. There's an argument to be made (as is done by Phil Sandifer among others) that 'Notability' isn't even required to prune out the crap. Insisting on verifiability and NPOV seems to do pretty well, for one thing, and enforcing rules on conflicts of interest helps as well. Strangely enough, people find having an NPOV article about their things to be a lot less satisfying than they think it is. I have no opposition to deletion reasons that include 'blatant advertising', either, so long as they're correctly applied. I'm pretty sure that that's not the reason, since Wikipedia's ranking doesn't seem to me to have improved since nofollow went into effect. I'm frankly unsure what you mean here. What are they trusting us to have? Good information. I'm also confused by your use of 'non notable articles' here - generally the deletionist argument is about topics, not articles, here, but perhaps you used them interchangeably here. If Wikipedia can have a good, encyclopedically written article on a subject, I rarely see a problem with us having one. I agree that a very sucky article on something is little better than nothing at all and may even be worse, but I'd tend to prefer improvement to deletion, or if deletion, a deletion that does not preclude someone else recreating a good article in its place in future. "Consensus" on WIkipedia is often very minimal. Have you seen how many votes in total the average AFD discussion has? Perhaps half a dozen all told. I'm personally fond of useful encyclopedia articles, even if they're on specialist subjects that would not be covered in Britannica. Wikipedia is a specialist work as well as a generalist. Policy is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's my personal reading that a lot of the pressure to delete certain subject areas comes from editors who find it embarassing that Wikipedia covers 'unserious' topics. We can get rid of the flaws in the current 'Notability' idea without throwing the baby out in the bathwater, I agree. However, the problem is that the people who work on deletion are a small subset of Wikipedia contributors, even regulars, yet they have an outsize effect on our deletion policies - especially since policies and guidelines are constantly changed. That's because only deletionists spend so much effort on deletion discussion. People like me are out writing stuff. I remember Wikipedia before 'Notability'. It didn't work so bad. In general, though, I see in 'Notability' a very CS-major computer nerd way of trying to go about things. An attitude that says consistency beats getting things absolutely right. A belief that we can create policy as a computer program that ensures the right outcome - and even if that outcome isn't perfect, it's better that it be automatable than involve human judgment. A desire to make policy with a primary emphasis on it being hard-edged and definitive, because it makes the job of the deleters easier. I have problems with that. -Matt

A good current example of (IMO problematic) deletionist arguments can be found at [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mockingbird Don't Sing]] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Mockingbird_Do… - in which several people argue that the article on a movie be deleted DESPITE IT MEETING THE "NOTABILITY GUIDELINE" ALREADY ESTABLISHED, with comments like: * "I don't especially like the trend of article creation for seemingly every banal film coming down the pipeline these days, and here we can actually do something about it" * "We're trying to build a better encyclopedia, and the presence of this article isn't helping, which is why it should go, even if it happens not to transgress WP:FICT" * "If anyone voting "keep" has something other than WP:ILIKEIT, let's hear it" -Matt

On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 03:38:39AM -0800, Matthew Brown wrote: Yes, and it was a snowjob keep, with these approaches strongly criticised. Good work in fact. -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

Certainly we can get the same result using Reliable sources and verifiability as we can using Notability--but that is only because we define the non-trivial mention discussion of a subject in two RSs as demonstrating notability. This shifts the burden to "non-trivial", and to "reliable". Decide what you want in WP, and we can adjust those definitions to get the result. We can also do it in a more direct fashion be defining notability. The result however can be anything we might want. Refuse to accept local newspapers, and we can get quite restrictive about people and companies. Accept a birth certificate or a certificate of incorporation as a RS, and every one of them is included. The question is what we want in WP. There are any number of ways to write rules to get there. It's clear enough from the above discussion--and thousands of others--that there is no agreement on the basic issue of what the encyclopedia is to contain. It's not the abstract definition of rules that defines the content. The rules have been adopted and interpreted in order to limit the content. I think there's good reason to do that. We want to do more than a paper encyclopedia can. We also want to filter the internet, and produce something that people will recognize as an encyclopedia. That still leaves a great rang of possibilities. Given that most of the people working on the encyclopedia want to include whatever they are interested in working on in whatever detail they wish to do it, and exclude whatever they are not interested in writing or reading, and limit the detail on other topics to the amount that interests them, how can we possibly achieve a real consensus? There are some consistent approaches: to limit the content to whatever the great majority of people all agree should be included, which is practice produces a very limited result, or accept whatever content any significant number want to include, which does the opposite. There's another approach that seems rational, to limit the content to what people are prepared to write a good article on, but this produces inconsistent results, giving an encyclopedia like the present citizendium, where there are articles on scattered subjects depending on the interests of the limited number of people working there. We have more people, but not all that many who can produce a high quality article. We resolve the situation at present by accepting inconsistency: any ad-hoc group of people prepared to give sufficient case at AfD can overcome opposition one way or another, and the consensus is the consensus of the strong and the organized. Sure, this changes from day to day, so we enshrine that as a principle. This is managed by a self-selected editorial hierarchy, of the people who care enough and have time enough to make consistent contributions at afds and policy pages in general. But that produced consistent results only when the encyclopedia was smaller and that group of people approximately agreed with each other. What I see happening now is that the people in that earlier group want to maintain the positions they had earlier adopted; they accomplish this by adopting a rule making process that only the most dedicated of the newcomers can understand and learn to participate in, in the hope that the newcomers will adopt the old ways during their acculturation. There enough of us active newcomers now to start changing things, but no consistency in what we want, and so the old formulations tend to hold and the encyclopedia gradually becomes fossilized. -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote: Kurt, You line by line short responses "So what?" are not contributing anything helpful to good debate or discussion. ./scream

Ray Saintonge wrote: Notice, that I sometimes don't respond to "inconsequential" statements. They sometimes don't need responses at all. All I'm saying, is when I read the thread, "So what?" is not helpful to me. It does not serve to persuade me either way, or add anything useful. It does not give me opinion or information. It does //nothing//. I stand. ./scream

Of course we have a responsibility to the web. we are writing an encyclopedia for use. Though I know this may come as a foreign idea to some wikipedians, we're not a computer game, but a practical project. Our users are broadly defined as anyone commercial or non commercial who wants a ready reference source of general information in the web context. The web context we work in is aware of other browsers and other web services. We arent making a new system from scratch, we work in that environment, and we need to pay attention to how we are used and we need to have respect for those who depend upon us. No large information system on the web can operate in isolation from google. why this is so, and whether this should be so are separate questions, but as it is we operate as part of the present system. Wherever WP is situated conceptually or practically, it's not on an ivory tower. -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

David Goodman wrote: No, not quite. The Wikipedia that you see on the web is not our product, that's our working area. It's there first and foremost for editors. The fact that general readers also find it useful is a happy coincidence since that's how we draw most of our new editors in. The product of Wikipedia is our database. If all we cared about was publishing an online encyclopedia we wouldn't need the GFDL or other open licence, we wouldn't need to worry about keeping the licensing consistent and compatible, we could just say "by posting your work here you're granting us the right to display it on Wikimedia" or somesuch. There are already tons of other user-generated sites out there with similar ad-hoc licensing that don't care about ease of reuse. No, our most important target audience for re-use are people and organizations like those found on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks>, or anyone else who wishes to build something out of the resource we make available, big or small. Some day Wikipedia-the-project will be defunct (or evolve into something completely different) and the database will be what we leave behind for our successors to pick up and use or work with. Label and categorize things, sure. Many mirrors and forks will likely be interested only in a subset of our content and this sort of labeling will allow them to cull that out more easily. But it makes no sense to cull out cull out topics for them ahead of time because we don't know what they'll be interested in. Maybe someone down the road will want to make the Encyclopedia Pokemonia, or set up a competitor for IMDB that focuses on TV shows, or whatever, and they could have used Wikipedia's articles for that. Sure it can. If Google were to decide tomorrow to exclude Wikipedia from their search results entirely we wouldn't close shop and shut down. I personally don't use Google very much any more for searching for general information, I have a Wikipedia search installed in my browser's search bar to go there directly. IIRC Firefox 3 is going to be distributed with Wikipedia as one of the default searches pre-installed. Not to mention the traffic we get from direct links people post on their own external web sites, and from the other various search engines still out there. Google's handy but we don't really need it.

On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard wrote: Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant. -- Kurt Weber &lt;kmw(a)armory.com&gt;

The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx, (assumed population, 20,000) ? Will they use one about the main street in that town? In either case, should we have it as a separate article? On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Judson Dunn &lt;cohesion(a)sleepyhead.org&gt; wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

David Goodman wrote: The reality, though, tends to be rather more political and content-based than that. Articles don't get deleted on their own, and relatively few are nominated for deletion by people applying some sort of theoretical objective standard (of notability or utility or anything else). The cases that are controversial are mainly in areas where there are significant groups of people actively campaigning for a reduction in coverage---mainly anything to do with pop culture or recent news. If you write about an underground rapper with a large YouTube following, you're going to run into objectors. If you write about the most obscure 19th-century government official you can dig up, on the other hand, nobody is going to object. -Mark

If so, then even in what we think we do best, we are incomplete. It's time to stop worrying about having too much; we have too little. I'm sure there are hundreds of shows from the early years of television that need treatment. I know there are hundreds of classic novels that are merely mentioned in a list. I have a suggestion: nobody be permitted to propose deleting more articles than they create, or removing more content than they write afresh. On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Monday 10 March 2008 03:06, Todd Allen wrote: Nothing factual is unimportant. What's wrong with those? Such as? What's wrong with those? But not as much as we otherwise could--therefore, we're worse off with your approach. There's no such thing. How does removing information make an encyclopedia better? They're the same thing. -- Kurt Weber &lt;kmw(a)armory.com&gt;

There are over trillions of stars in the are of space we can see via naked eye or instruments. The analogy generally used to describe is that there are more stars in the universe than sand in the beaches of this entire planet. Clearly a star is a notable object in space worthy of an article. And it is feasible to write entire articles on each and every one of them if something as dull as Proxima Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri) is any indication. We should not dump them for being "Astronomy cruft". We should expand them instead. On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Wily D &lt;wilydoppelganger(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Only people with weak ideas dismiss and insult opinions of others. People who wish to mass remove articles have this tendency. - White Cat On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 7:02 PM, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:51 AM, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You two have just pretty much defined by example reductio ad absurdum, on both ends of the spectrum. Isn't there anyone who isn't readily willing to descend into such inanity who will defend deletionism? -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On Monday 10 March 2008 14:54, Ian Woollard wrote: What rules? There are no rules on Wikipedia...we are only bound by our obligation to further the aims of the encyclopedia. Removing factual, verifiable information works AGAINST the aims of the encyclopedia. What makes an article "inane"? Being about something you're not interested in? It should be allowed to stay, "notability guideline" or no, since "notability" is meaningless and unnecessary in the first place. We're not bound by it PERIOD. Information about people scratching themselves behind their ears, obviously. -- Kurt Weber &lt;kmw(a)armory.com&gt;

On 10/03/2008, George Herbert &lt;george.herbert(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I deliberately picked it to be inane as I could think of, but it actually looks like it. There's sources on scratching, and there's one or two psychological things about scratching behind the ear while talking, you could probably say verifiable things about it. The only thing is whether it's notable? Probably not... I would expect that it's below the notability line. I wouldn't like to bet, there's a lot of stuff that may be mentioned in passing that is verifiable without it being something that most people would expect to find in an encyclopedia in its own article. To give another more edgy and more amusing example that I discovered by accident, I created an article on encyclopedia articles, I figured that there were articles in the wikipedia on every other sort of article (newspaper articles, magazine articles....), so I might as well. Turns out there's not a lot written on it ;-). There's quite a lot written on entire encyclopedias, but even then not much on the articles, it looks like most of the stuff specifically on articles in them is probably either in a book I don't have immediate access to, or a trade secret ;-), so ironically encyclopedia articles might not be notable ;-) I'm not entirely sure which way that argues though ;-) -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On 10/03/2008, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Without in any way wishing to disrupt anything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_scratching_themselves_behind_their_ears Deletion is currently tagged due to alleged lack of encyclopedic quality, lack of notability and it being 'likely socially irrelevant'. You'll note that scratching behind the ears is a verifiable feature of the world, and it's probably adequately referenced, so this article doesn't necessarily violate WP:VER, Any extreme inclusionists here presumably want this article to stay, so please improve it to make that happen. People that believe in notability can let it die, even help it die. Clearly if by encyclopedia you mean simply something with an enormous quantity of information on essentially everything then this article deserves to live. Personally I feel ambivalent towards it, so I'm not going to participate much further, but it seems to me that it serves as an acid test as to whether people are simply trolling here. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

Human non-verbal communication is a field of active study. There have been works on this subject for centuries. I wondered what we could find in Darwin''s The expression of the emotions in man and animals," took a look, and added a closely related reference. On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 5:34 AM, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

I've just completed an essay that is related to this topic: [[User:GlassCobra/What Wikipedia is]]; many ideas were inspired by or lifted from (hope the mailing list's GFDL, haha) this discussion. I encourage everyone to leave comments or criticism on the talk page. Thanks in advance. - GC

On 10/03/2008, White Cat &lt;wikipedia.kawaii.neko(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Proxima Centauri is near to earth so we can actually study it in some detail. Thus while objectively it might be considered a bog standard red dwarf from the POV of humanity it is very interesting. -- geni

True. But say in 50 years from now we probably will have the technology to observe even the most distant stars, we will have data and great deal of material. When that happens we will have more articles on stars than on any other topic combined. I am not suggesting we create five trillion articles in two days, what I am saying is we should be ready for five trillion articles that will be eventually (say in the next 50 years) created and expanded. Whenever a topic gets an impressive amount of coverage, weather its highways or townships or TV episodes, people panic and try to mass remove them to keep them more "manageable". This notion is wrong. In 5 years wikipedia grew so much, in the next 5 years it will shrink if this redrectifying madness continues as it is. I picked astronomy for my example as it is an endless source of articles. Any other topic is finite. - White Cat On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 8:24 PM, geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

Todd Allen wrote: In most of those cases it's possible to put in a lot of material that you would dismiss as "unreferenced speculation/original research/trivia" but which is IMO (and I the O of a lot of other editors) perfectly reasonable and valuable information to have in an article. For example, a plot summary and cast listing of a TV episode is neither unreferenced nor original research nor trivia. By smushing everything together into one giant list page a lot of that information is going to be thrown away. I think you're going to have to come up with a reason for throwing that information away beyond simply asserting that it's "non-notable". The validity of judging things based on their "notability" is what's under discussion here, you can't just assume it.

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:22 PM, David Goodman &lt;dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: And if such sourcing does exist, -and is reliable- (e.g., not fansites, blogs, forums, etc.), that's well and good. But let's make sure we don't lose sight of the reliability requirements here. What we should avoid is "I watched the series and saw that..." being used to support a full article. We can do some very basic, indisputable things from primary sources only, but the meat of an article should come from secondary, independent, reliable sources. If we can't do that, because such sources aren't in existence, we shouldn't have a full article, just a list entry. I applaud people who find sources, usual or unusual, so long as they're reliable. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 2:58 AM, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Great. Then (s)he can find such a summary on a fansite. Or, if we have reliable sources, and only if, on Wikipedia. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

Reliable sources? For an episode? Let me think how can we get that... Hmm... Hmm... Oh RIGHT! How about the episode itself? Its quite reliable and verifiable. Each time you watch it it is the same story, same plot. - White Cat On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 1:11 PM, Todd Allen &lt;toddmallen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 13/03/2008, Todd Allen &lt;toddmallen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: And sourcing is not a bureaucratic checklist. The source text being discussed is obviously relevant to an article and, if objectively checkable, certainly citable. - d.

Secondary sources are not a valid metric to determine notability unless you are a paper encyclopedia or seeking universal notability. Universal notability is a mistake according to Jimmy Wales: http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/wikipedia_is_ju.html In addition secondary sources do not necessarily establish notability. Every US marine that served in Iraq or every victim of 9/11 attacks have plenty of secondary coverage. Not every one of them are notable. [[WP:SPINOUT]]'s and [[WP:STUB]]'s are not banned - White Cat On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 4:08 PM, Todd Allen &lt;toddmallen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Thursday 13 March 2008 10:34, Ian Woollard wrote: And is also totally irrelevant. Oh, COME ON. You're kidding me, right? Seriously, call me "unhelpful" all you want, but all you're doing here is grasping at straws trying to salvage a lost cause. Not at all. -- Kurt Weber &lt;kmw(a)armory.com&gt;

On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote: I feel obliged to point out that, as a scholar working in popular culture, the phrase "totally unarguable from the source" is almost, but not entirely, meaningless. I point this out because it's an arbitrarily high standard that almost any claim can be argued to fall short of. The reasonable standard is "arguable straightforwardly from the source." That is, anybody reasonable, upon looking at the source and the claim, would go "OK, yes, I see why that claim is being made." One advantage of this standard over others is that we have a large number of reasonable people who can perform this check with no equipment other than their own presumably good judgment. No. That is not what notability is. There are many problems with having an article on my quite wonderful but largely non-notable little sister. None of the ten largest problems are that the article would violate NPOV. This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri, the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally important to and for what? Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two million concepts. -Phil

We are dealing with an extreme case of deletionism (mass redirectification), yes. On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 8:50 PM, Ian Woollard &lt;ian.woollard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On 13/03/2008, Sage Ross &lt;sage.ross(a)yale.edu&gt; wrote: You're strictly correct. OTOH isn't this somewhat equivalent to arguing that it's perfectly OK to remove something from an article (or even lots of articles if they all mention it) on NPOV grounds, and then turn around and make an article especially for it? -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On 14/03/2008, Matthew Brown &lt;morven(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes, but are all of them? I'd say very definitely not. And if not, then we have a defacto notability standard. FWIW 'People scratching themselves behind their ears' has been deleted for not being 'encyclopedic, notable or of social significance'. There you go then, notability. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

On Mar 13, 2008, at 9:46 AM, David Gerard wrote: Indeed. Comments like Todd's are deeply baffling to me. As an active scholar working on areas of popular culture, I cannot imagine any justification for going to a secondary source, independent or otherwise, for something as straightforward as a plot summary. Were I peer reviewing any paper that did that, I would reject it out of hand for egregiously sloppy research. While I recognize that Wikipedia's goals in research are different from active professional scholarship, I would suggest that a policy that amounts to "use laughably bad sources instead of good ones" is not one that we actually mean. -Phil

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 4:20 PM, Todd Allen &lt;toddmallen(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No, but that decision is best made by editors familiar with the subject matter in the regular editorial fashion, rather than being imposed from outside by an AFD nomination. Note that the entire content of an article does not have to be from secondary sources; it just needs to be verifiable. For uncontroversial detail that can definitely come from a primary source. -Matt

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Wily D &lt;wilydoppelganger(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You "snipped" a critical part of what I said. If significant amounts of independent reliable material really -are- available about the list element, it can and should be split out once the information and sources are -actually- added. If that eventually applies to every element in such a list, good! If it only applies to a few, good, and if to none, good! Keep it in the list, split it out once genuine, -reliable- (peer reviewed or fact checked by professional) sources are available. -- Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

Oh and disk space has gotten cheaper. I once calculated the cost of disk space and it was like below http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_arbitration/Episod… - White Cat On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Wily D &lt;wilydoppelganger(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: