On 09/04/07, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson(a)att.net> wrote: Neither of these elucidate the problem much at all. According to your first link a public figure could be defined as someone who is "pervasively involved in public affairs". Couldn't this definition include headmasters or even teachers in state-funded schools? -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

Conrad Dunkerson wrote: If the matter has already been in the newspaper, and we are using that as the source one could hardly call it an invasion of privacy. Ec

Rob Smith wrote: A human sacrifice? At what point do we start discussion people being accountable for their actions. If someone was a porn star in a previous life, that's what they were - we're not "sacrificing" them by pointing it out, especially when we're not the first. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On 4/8/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: Jeff, can you expand on how it would do that? As I see it, it might do the opposite. Biographies of borderline notable people often either languish unattended or are used as a platform by people with an axe to grind.

On 4/8/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: There are people for whom there's what Fred called "spot coverage," because they did something interesting, but they're not overall notable. Along the lines of "John Smith is a British schoolteacher who came to public attention after being discovered on the floor naked during a geography class, having asked his pupils to draw a map of Europe on his genitals." I think we could fairly easily come up with a working definition of "notable borderline," where George Bush is at one end of the scale and our geography teacher at the other. The point is that no news organization or encyclopedia would publish a biography of the geography teacher just because of that one incident. We're currently asking the question "Why shouldn't Wikipedia publish biographies on everyone for whom reliable sources can be found?" but I think we should turn that on its head and ask "Why *should* we, given that no else does?" If we were to adopt an opt-out clause for borderline notables, I think it would generate significant goodwill among the public, because this is seen as one of our major problems. Sarah

Jeff Raymond wrote: Nonsense. Notability ain't pregnancy.

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 21:28:37 -0400, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: Yes it should. It's about the depth and breadth of coverage. If all the coverage is in respect of the genitals incident, that's a merge to an article on school sex scandals or some such. We absolutely must not confuse transient notoriety for notability. Any politician who stands for a major office will generate a lot of coverage, their campaign team will make sure of it. After the election, losing candidates are often never heard of again. We commonly merge these losing candidates to a single article. (in my view only reason we have articles on them in the first place is because some people think we are Wikinews, but that's an aside). Those politicians, last seen selling insurance in Mudhole Flats, Idaho, may be offended that the sum total of human knowledge about them, as judged by Wikipedia, is that they polled six votes in the 2006 run-offs for Mayor. Or they may not care. People whose supposed notability rests on a single highly negative story (whether or not they dunnit) which was a nine days' wonder in the press, they are going to have a much bigger problem. What do we do with people against whom a single source has a vendetta, but has failed to get more than passing coverage of that vendetta? Like Zeleny's campaign against Min Zhu? Any case that does not make the books of notable cases is probably not a notable case. Having an article on that case, masquerading as a biography, based on the fact that i enjoyed passing notoriety, is a bad idea. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Mgm wrote: In the real world, at least, notability is relative. I am notable in my family and in my circle of friends, but I'm not notable enough in the real world to have a Wikipedia article. A scientist can be extremely notable in his field but unheard of in the rest of the world. Etc. (Now, I know, someone mentioned we weren't talking about real-world notability here, but rather Wikipedia notability. I suppose that makes a difference to the argument, though I'm still not sure exactly what.)

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Because Wikipedia notability, in many people's minds, needs more than simply "backing it up." Society's idea of notable is fluid and depends on what you're talking about - Wikipedia's got a small but vocal number of people who feel notability is constant and defined only by who says as such. It's why there needs to be a distinction - "not so notable" or "borderline notability" is a false concept that only exists in that small but vocal group. It has little in the way of a basis in reality, and is not defined by anything that is logical. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On 4/9/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote: It may be, but it shouldn't. It should be based on facts, not someone's deletion opinions. The result based on those facts may differ, though. Mgm

On 09/04/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: "Notability" isn't something that could ever be directly measurable. There are several indirect measures that are used (some of which are more likely to determine an article to be not notable). It really isn't hard to delete an article based on notability: you just have to choose the right yardstick. Even the concept itself is very vague: different things are notable to different members of different demographic groups at different times. Things are often deleted on Wikipedia because they are not notable to a particular demographics (eg. the affluent demographics to which many Wikipedians belong). For these reasons, "notability" is a terrible way to determine whether an article should be kept or deleted on Wikipedia. The sooner we abandon it (and start relying on harder measures such as verifiability), the better. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On 09/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: I've never come across the page before (let alone had anything to do with its creation/development) so I'm not sure how shameless I could have been. I'm glad to see others have reached the same conclusions as I have though. If I had read the page before or had anything to do with its development I would have provided a link in my original post. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On 09/04/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: NPOV is a matter of article content, surely? By not having an article we simply don't cover that topic, not implicitly cover that topic non-neutrally... If reference to the person is necessary for a neutral coverage in another article, we make that reference; it doesn't mean we need to link out to a seperate biographical article. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

On 09/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: I've read the page more thoroughly and I fail to see how you could have interpreted what I said as a plug for it. I said we should entirely abandon notability for verification while that page states that an article should be included if it is verifiable and notable. I recognise the page seeks to change emphasis from notability to verifiability and some of the reasoning is related to mine. Still, I don't think the page goes far enough. Why am I flogging this horse? I don't like being accused of doing (or assumed to have done) things I did not do. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On 09/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: Ah, it's so clear now :). I misinterpreted and you got the thick end of my pride. Apologies (sincerely). -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 12:04:46 -0400 (EDT), "Jeff Raymond" <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: ... which is a POV fork of WP:N by another "small but vocal" group, this time the inclusionists. Mainly Jeff. And even Jeff's best friend would not pretend that his inclusion criteria are anywhere near the community centre of gravity. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

Well, it was pretty overwhelmingly rejected. (Yes, yes, voting bad, etc., etc., but it still -can- be a useful metric.) Hell, I love changing the -name- (I think notability is a pretty poor and confusing thing to call our inclusion criteria), and I still couldn't bring myself to support it. Basically, the question we must ask ourselves is this: "From the independent sources available, could a comprehensive, high-quality (GA/FA) article be written on this subject someday?" If yes, we keep. If no, we merge or delete, depending whether there's any verifiable information at all and whether an appropriate place to merge exists. Far easier than 4000 convoluted "notability" guidelines (there's a separate one for porn stars for godsakes!), and much more in line with writing an encyclopedia. (As an aside, this also -would- eliminate those borderline bios-"15 minutes of fame (or shame)" sourcing wouldn't allow a comprehensive article, so it'd fail that anyway. Seraphimblade On 4/9/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:

On 4/9/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ah, there's the rub, as Shakespeare would say. Perhaps B-class would work as a compromise, but there's got to be some kind of uniform standard. Otherwise, it's pretty much "Whatever anyone wants to write about gets written about," and then we're introducing editorial bias. We should handle inclusion/exclusion the same way as we handle anything else-look at what the sources say (or don't say, for that matter). Seraphimblade

On 4/9/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: I'm not sure you'd necessarily find it so. B class isn't -too- far from GA, and requires a pretty decent article. Really, if we can write a B article on something sourced mainly from independent sources, I don't see much of a problem having the article. (Most of the time, all a B needs to get to GA is some copyediting and flow, and maybe a picture or two, there's not a significant difference in amount of content, just in presentation.) Seraphimblade

On 4/10/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: Haha, it's a little known fact that GA was originally created as a form of recognition for articles which would never be able to attain FA status or close to it, because of various deficiencies (e.g. insufficient sources due to systemic bias in secondary source material). (Or, at least, this is what Worldtraveller, the fellow who came up with GA, told me a year or two ago.) I still recall how just a month or two after GA's inception, several short articles which I could never bring up to what is currently B-class status because of insufficient source material (just to name two, take the two [[Karamjit Singh]]s) were rejected by GA. Standards creep works that fast, apparently. Sorry to digress - I'll try to redeem myself by suggesting that even tying inclusion criteria to some relatively low standard at the present, e.g. C-class, may not work too well thanks to how our standards for articles continue to rise. In a number of cases, these standards become arbitrary and mindlessly enforced, such as an obsession for demanding footnoting where it isn't necessary (e.g. articles which rely on a few core high-quality web sources) - so I would think it's a bad idea to get *this* objective about inclusion criteria. I think we will always have to have some element of subjectivity about our inclusion criteria. We used to require very subjective criteria because our rules were poorly-developed (which is why I used to support a not-too-well-defined idea of notability), but nowadays thanks to rules creep, we don't need as much subjectivity as we used to. But we shouldn't go overboard in the objective criteria either - I think we already have a surfeit of clue being substituted by mindless rules. If anything, perhaps the reason AfD is working less well these days is that it has adopted the worst of both worlds - it uses subjective criteria to delete the wrong articles, and mindlessly wields objective criteria with the same result in other areas. Anyhow, I'm rambling now. Just my two cents. Johnleemk

On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 04:23:36PM -0700, Seraphim Blade wrote: This view is just one view among Wikipedians. There are other views. My own view is that we need to ask first - Do we want an article on topic X? If we answer "Yes", then we then use your criteria to determine whether we can write it. If your criteria fails, we do not write it. But we still do not write it if your criteria would pass after we answered "No" to my question. My question is what notability is all about. I would also argue that not all articles that would fail GA/FA (particularly under the present guidelines and practices) should be deleted or merged. For example, there are lots of things that should remain a stub, but then we have debated this on WP and we do not agree. You appear to me to keep asserting things as self-evidently true, when they are just your opinion. Bduke -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 06:45:14PM -0700, Seraphim Blade wrote: "NOR clearly states that we work from sources, not our own thoughts or knowledge." Agree - we work from sources. I.e. we write articles from sources. "It's a logical extension of this that we write or don't write about something based upon the amount of sourcing available." No, it is not a logical extension. We are concerned about whether we write or not. We could use your criteria, or we could use another criteria. I say we write about something that is notable. We need to define that properly. If something is not notable, such as a very junior soccer team, we do not write an article on it, even if there are lots of sources for some reason. I'm not striving for completeness. I'm striving to be encyclopedic. -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 10:59:22AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: It is not just me. I think it is consensus. I mentioned a soccer team because I had mentioned elsewhere (on WP:NOTE talk if I recall) a debate on [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Hoyland Common Falcons]], a team in the village where my father was born and later returned to in his old age. There was at one time a precise guideline about rejecting teams below 11th(?) level, what ever that means, but this team is well below. In this case there were few or no sources, but if there had been, I think they would have been rejected. An encyclopedia does not need an article on every soccer team, every Scout Troop, etc., etc. Of course there are exceptions, such [[Hallam F.C.]], also in my old stomping grounds just up the road from where I was brought up. That however is the second oldest F. C. in the world playing on the oldest ground. -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

On 4/12/07, Seraphim Blade <seraphimbladewikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: If gridiron football is anything like association football then digging through the back issues of the local paper would fix that one. Most have a sport section for when they have to produces say 2-3 pages of football based content every day. With perhaps 3 local teams at (minor league stuff doesn't normally count to that total) every player will get a lot of coverage over the course of a season. -- geni

Seraphim Blade wrote: Also generally, however, thirdstring football players were still starters in college, and would have plenty of material there. -Jeff -- Name: Jeff Raymond E-mail: jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com IM: badlydrawnjeff Quote: "I was always a fan of Lisa Loeb, particularly because you kind of get the impression she sang every song either about or to her cats. They seem to be the driving force in most of her creative process." - Chuck Klosterman

On 4/13/07, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Trivial mentions usually don't give much information to base an article on, but in the right circumstances, it can be an excellent aid in determining notability. Example: Even if John Doe has no article written specifically about him. If some article mentions he was the first to climb Mount Everest, his notability is established, despite the fact he may have had a one line-mention in a 2000 word article. Mgm

G'day Seraphim, That is a good point, and I would agree ... to an extent. We're amateurs, usually in the sense of "rank amateur". Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and we're relying on the words of experts to help us write a quality reference. We don't do original research, in part because it's not our place to do so, and in part because that's not what an encyclopaedia is for, anyway. And, arguably, Wikipedians making up their own minds about notability in deletion/creation debates is little different from Wikipedians drawing their own conclusions when writing articles. So, you have a good point. We have to be careful about systemic bias, however. It is much easier to find well-sourced information about a contestant voted off (or whatever it is they do) on the first week of /American Idol/, than it is to research the life of a Sikh religious hero. There are a number of reasons for this: * We write for the English Wikipedia. Most of us are native English-speakers, and like most native English-speakers, we don't know any other languages. So, sources written in Punjabi or whatever are closed to us. * I do 98% of my research on the Internet; when I refer to books at all, it's because happy chance has led to me having a book on the subject (this is rare). I assume most of us are the same. Subjects of concern to Westerners, in particular English-speaking Westerners, in particular Americans, are much easier to access online than other subjects. It may not be possible to learn as much as we'd like about Sikh history online. * We know about /American Idol/. Even I would be able to research and write about any /Idol/-related person we need an article about. If I wanted to discuss, say, the linguistic history of Benin, I wouldn't even know where to start looking ... and neither would most Wikipedians. We need to remember that not all subjects can be as easily-sourced as the subjects we usually write about (that's why they're not one of the subjects we usually write about, eh?). If for all questions of worthiness we turn to the American press (say), we will find out only what the American press a) know about, and b) think their audience will care about. And that's narrowing the world down a great deal further than I think an international, comprehensive encyclopaedia ought. Cheers, -- Mark Gallagher "'Yes, sir,' said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend." - P G Wodehouse, /Carry On, Jeeves/

On 4/10/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: Why? Better for whom? I personally can't stand searching for a term and being redirected to a general article on the topic of which two sentences vaguely half addresses what I'm looking for. I'd much rather have a two-sentence stub that precisely addresses what I'm looking for, even if it's only to point me back to the main article afterwards. Steve

On 4/10/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, it was quite an epiphany for me when I realised that "real" encyclopaedias actually have lots of very short articles. They don't call them "stubs" either. And they leave out pointless gossip about people's personal lives. Maybe I should dredge up my proposal for notability to be defined in kilobytes: this child actor gets 1kb of Wikipedia space. This cold war president gets up to 100kb of Wikipedia space. Steve

Steve Bennett wrote: That's essentially my position. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On 09/04/07, Jeff Raymond <jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote: Precisely. We have enough trouble with people taking WP:BLP to mandate sympathetic point of view, rather than neutral point of view. - d.

Slim Virgin wrote: I wouldn't argue against it, no. It's unreasonable to expect someone to remove a legitimate biography on a notable figure. No we wouldn't. Internally, we'd be cowardly and stupid. Externally, no one would give a shit - it does nothing to solve the problems ("Okay, so some people can have their biographies removed. Too bad the articles are still inaccurate.") Yup. And that doesn't seem to be changing, and it doesn't look like we need a misguided policy to increase it further. -Jeff -- Name: Jeff Raymond E-mail: jeff.raymond(a)internationalhouseofbacon.com WWW: http://www.internationalhouseofbacon.com IM: badlydrawnjeff Quote: "I was always a fan of Lisa Loeb, particularly because you kind of get the impression she sang every song either about or to her cats. They seem to be the driving force in most of her creative process." - Chuck Klosterman

On 09/04/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: That sounds awfully like "so much for NPOV." - d.

On Sun, 8 Apr 2007 19:20:20 -0500, "Slim Virgin" <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Absolutely. In many cases the only non-trivial sources are documenting a single event in their life. Fine if it's rowing across the Atlantic, not so fine if it's an allegation of rape that never made it to court. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 14:08:57 +0200, "MacGyverMagic/Mgm" <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: I would merge it to solo Atlantic crossings, or find evidence tat there is widespread coverage independent of that one achievement. Of course, it is not terribly /likely/ that this person will request removal, whereas such requests form those whose "achievements" are rather less laudable is not quite so rare. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: IF we aren't the first publication of it, THEN we're not causing harm. We're simply sharing information, nothing more and nothing less. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: I don't agree with that. It may be a little worse with nofollow turned off (since it increases where we sit in the rankings), but, again, you're unlikely to find a bio like that on-site without looking for it, and if you're going through Google, the newspaper article is unlikely to be forgotten. Unless you think the newspaper is causing harm, too. Which, in that case, well... -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

Steve Summit wrote: If people don't understand us, then it's up to us to make sure they *do* understand us, not try to fit into a mould of what they think we should be. We have *some* impact in the real world, but not the type we're afraid of here. It's because we're so big that we may, in fact, have a responsibility to offer good biographies of people with what some may call "borderline notability" - the mainstream press isn't bothered with the other details. It's because we're different that we shouldn't be patching one alleged hole by creating many little ones. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Yes, we're more accessable, but the information is not unaccessable. I've been in the same boat as you on the research regard, trust me - it doesn't mean the information isn't readily available and, again, if we're not the first publisher, we're not doing the harm. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On 4/9/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com> wrote: I often use 'The Times Digital Archive' to research articles, this being a searchable database of scans of every page of The Times since 1785. It is a private database which certain libraries subscribe to. Recently I had the unhappy experience of having another editor complain that because I had cited a source which was a Times article from the 1930s, it wasn't accessible on the internet and therefore not verifiable. The fact is that old newspapers are available, even if you don't have LexisNexis. You can go to a newspaper library; most reference libraries in Britain have major newspapers on microfilm. It is no part of sourcing to find sources that a couch potato can find in 30 seconds on Google. -- Sam Blacketer London E15

Jeff Raymond wrote: Some of them surely do. Earlier today someone said that having Daniel Brand tell us what to do was a bad idea. Here I would say that having the National Enquirer tell us what to do (or what we can do) is also a bad idea.

Steve Summit wrote: The difference, of course, being that I don't believe anyone considers the Enquirer reliable. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.