The Economist on "notability"

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David Gerard

6 Mar 2008 6 Mar '08

9:16 p.m.

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Philip Sandifer

6 Mar 6 Mar

9:23 p.m.

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

...

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in. Which is all the more frustrating given that the problem with most of these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced elsewhere. Go us? -Phil

David Gerard

9:52 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

...

> http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789354 > Yes, (the Wikipedia jargon meaning of) notability is suitable material > for a business- and economics-oriented news magazine.[*]

...

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

No, it's second to BLPs. Not third, however. - d.

Philip Sandifer

10:33 p.m.

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:52 PM, David Gerard wrote:

...

On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

> http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789354 > Yes, (the Wikipedia jargon meaning of) notability is suitable > material > for a business- and economics-oriented news magazine.[*]

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

No, it's second to BLPs. Not third, however.

See, BLPs I think we have a nice and built-in defense on. By the time a BLP flap gains any play it's already fixed, so it ends up looking like we're ninjas who can fix problems instantly. Notability is a case where press attention actually makes our handling of it worse, not better. -Phil

Charlotte Webb

7 Mar 7 Mar

2:52 p.m.

On 3/6/08, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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By the time a BLP flap gains any play it's already fixed, so it ends up looking like we're ninjas who can fix problems instantly.

"Gestapo" would have been my word of choice, but I'm colorful like that.

...

Notability is a case where press attention actually makes our handling of it worse, not better.

While I agree that "notability" issues are poorly handled as a rule, regardless, I would have to know the nature of the press attention in question to decide whether it is a factor in the poor handling of "notability" issues. Could you clarify? —C.W.

James Farrar

5:20 p.m.

On 07/03/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 3/6/08, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

By the time a BLP flap gains any play it's already fixed, so it ends up looking like we're ninjas who can fix problems instantly.

"Gestapo" would have been my word of choice, but I'm colorful like that.

The General Counsel says "hi". :-)

Philip Sandifer

8 Mar 8 Mar

12:52 a.m.

On Mar 7, 2008, at 9:52 AM, Charlotte Webb wrote:

...

While I agree that "notability" issues are poorly handled as a rule,

regardless, I would have to know the nature of the press attention in question to decide whether it is a factor in the poor handling of "notability" issues. Could you clarify?

Generally when we get press attention on a notability issue we get a chunk of people who show up, usually outraged at the deletion/proposed deletion/merger/whatever. Our track record on being nice to such people and listening to their concerns is... dubious at best. Generally we triumphantly dismiss all of them as meatpuppets and act as though their existence is further argument for the marginality of the subject. It's very ugly. -Phil

Andrew Gray

2:38 p.m.

On 07/03/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Notability is a case where press attention actually makes our handling of it worse, not better.

Presumably, because one side now has a nice self-referential article to wave around and say "look! media attention to the matter!", and then we devolve into arguing about whether *that* counts, and It All Just Gets Sillier.

...

From my hazy memory of past cases - I have tried like anything to

avoid AFD this last year, since spitting blood isn't good for one's health - this is something that tends to get farcical. It's probably one of the few situations where press coverage of our editorial process leads to the editorial process coming to a different decision *with regard to the encyclopedia* than it would have if the press hadn't noticed the process. I suspect I explained that badly, but hopefully you sort of see the idea. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

George Herbert

6 Mar 6 Mar

10:35 p.m.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:52 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789354

> Yes, (the Wikipedia jargon meaning of) notability is suitable

material

> for a business- and economics-oriented news magazine.[*]

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

No, it's second to BLPs. Not third, however. - d.

I had unfortunately neglected actviely participating in a side conversation which started about trivia namespaces that [[User:Sam]] and Jason Spiro were discussing mid last month. Now that something pops back up into visibility, though, I think maybe it's worthwhile bringing up here again. Sam, are you on? You're probably the right person to explain your experiment here. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Bryan Derksen

11:03 p.m.

Philip Sandifer wrote:

...

On Mar 6, 2008, at 4:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

On a personal level I've found that my own editing activity has gone way down in the months since I found out about the swath of devastation that had been cut through our television-related articles on "notability" grounds. I don't do editing in that subject area myself, I generally prefer to gnome in more technical areas such as categories and templates, but nevertheless it cast a sense of gloom over my work. I just don't feel as proud about Wikipedia as I used to. Editors spend a lot of effort crafting and contributing quality material under a free license for the whole world to use, readers enthuse about how comprehensive Wikipedia is to include such things, and then we throw it all away and chide people for having contributed it in the first place. Depressing.

Matthew Brown

7 Mar 7 Mar

12:04 a.m.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

Perhaps, as David says, BLP are greater, but the problem there is not generated by Wikipedia's internal culture; it's created by people coming in from outside to add things. 'Notability', though, is a problem we grew all on our own.

...

Which is all the more frustrating given that the problem with most of these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced elsewhere.

Exactly. And it's got to the point now that deletionists are enforcing "one topic, one article" by making it impossible to break out further information to sub-articles, which is the natural and hypertext thing to be doing. -Matt

Charlotte Webb

2:58 p.m.

On 3/6/08, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Sometimes only a small section of another article is tolerated, not to exceed an arbitrarily selected word count. Maybe with a link to something on Wikia if you ask nicely. —C.W.

Ian Woollard

7:50 a.m.

On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add it would rapidly descend into farce. It's not about space, it's about reputation, quality and scope. And as soon as you have ANY criteria, people WILL complain. If notability did not exist we would be forced to create it. It's part of the DNA of the wikipedia, if you don't like the DNA of the wikipedia, nothing is stopping you from forking it and changing the DNA and going from there. Good luck with that. Which isn't to say that our notability criteria can't be improved though; but it's destined to remain imperfect. We should aim for perfectly imperfect. ;-)

...

-Phil

-- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

Michel Vuijlsteke

8:13 a.m.

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add it would rapidly descend into farce.

Yes it can, and no it wouldn't. You're thinking of Wikipedia as if it were a printed set of volumes. If it were, the mass of pop culture related content would stick out. As it is now, it doesn't. Nobody reads wikipedia from cover to cover. You're totally free to go about adding content to the Bismarck-Napoleon-Hans Delbrück side of Wikipedia, while someone else is adding biography stubs about every single character in Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. Or, you know, TV's Seventh Heaven. :) It does no harm to have loads of articles on things that do not matter to you and that would never ever be in the crosshairs of Brittanica. Neither you nor I have a crystal ball and can predict what will be relevant in twnty year's time; if we continue as we're doing right now, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice. So what if there are 500 Pokémon character biographies? They're not harming anyone. Notability is harming Wikipedia. There is no absolute notability, and we should stop trying to autistically cram everything into neat little boxes. Let history sort things out, not bots and singe purpose accounts. Michel

Brian Salter-Duke

noon

On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 09:13:50AM +0100, Michel Vuijlsteke wrote:

...

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the biggest PR blunder we engage in.

An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add it would rapidly descend into farce.

Yes it can, and no it wouldn't. You're thinking of Wikipedia as if it were a printed set of volumes. If it were, the mass of pop culture related content would stick out. As it is now, it doesn't. Nobody reads wikipedia from cover to cover. You're totally free to go about adding content to the Bismarck-Napoleon-Hans Delbr?ck side of Wikipedia, while someone else is adding biography stubs about every single character in Anderson's Saga of the Seven Suns. Or, you know, TV's Seventh Heaven. :) It does no harm to have loads of articles on things that do not matter to you and that would never ever be in the crosshairs of Brittanica. Neither you nor I have a crystal ball and can predict what will be relevant in twnty year's time; if we continue as we're doing right now, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice. So what if there are 500 Pok?mon character biographies? They're not harming anyone. Notability is harming Wikipedia. There is no absolute notability, and we should stop trying to autistically cram everything into neat little boxes. Let history sort things out, not bots and singe purpose accounts.

I sort of agree with this. However, we do want to stop some stuff getting in, like total crap that was dreamed up by some dud before breakfast and he added it to WP before lunch. We avoid the notion of adding what is "true" but have reached a compromise that we add stuff with sources. However, we are more and more deleting stuff that could have sources added. People work on deleting it, rather than working on finding sources or just leaving it for others to do that. Brian.

...

Michel _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

-- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

Philip Sandifer

1:34 p.m.

On Mar 7, 2008, at 7:00 AM, Brian Salter-Duke wrote:

...

I think the better concept than notability is interestingness. Material is encyclopedic if people would find it interesting. It is *clearly* the case that most of our pop culture ephemera is interesting to people. It is far less clearly the case that people's unsigned garage bands are interesting to anyone but themselves. Again, for the most part this is an interface problem. The problem with a massive summary of a television episode or a detailed account of everything a Pokemon has ever done is a problem for us because we still have articles formatted such that we could print them out and bind them if we wanted. That's a ridiculously old media solution - there will never be a paper volume of Wikipedia. Accordingly, it's OK to have articles structured in a more branching fashion so that chunks of the article that are mildly esoteric or primarily masses of data are hyperlinked expansions of the article. Whether this requires coming up with a new namespace for sub-articles and expansions that we can use or not, this seems to me like a very good idea. In literary studies we'd call all of these things the paratexts. That's probably not a good name for these things, but it's a concept we'd do well to have all the same. What should we call the chunks of an article that would best be treated as a break-out, hyperlinked extension of the article? Once we have a name it's a heck of a lot easier to begin thinking about the category meaningfully. -Phil

Ian Woollard

6:06 p.m.

On 07/03/2008, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

I think the better concept than notability is interestingness. Material is encyclopedic if people would find it interesting.

That's just a different definition of notability. Notability is just our criteria for what topics should be covered; and can potentially change over time. Just calling that criteria 'interestingness' doesn't make it not notability, and doesn't mean you won't get deletionism over it.

...

-Phil

-- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.

Charlotte Webb

3:10 p.m.

On 3/7/08, Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia(a)zog.org> wrote:

...

So what if there are 500 Pokémon character biographies? They're not harming anyone.

Actually it seems like most of the Pokémon not featured on t-shirts and lunch boxes have been merged to lists according to their Kanto Pokédex number or whatever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28… Somebody must have felt harmed. I know I do. —C.W.

Oldak Quill

8:01 p.m.

On 07/03/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 3/7/08, Michel Vuijlsteke <wikipedia(a)zog.org> wrote:

So what if there are 500 Pokémon character biographies? They're not harming anyone.

I'm no fan of Pokemon, but the deletion of well-written Pokemon articles demonstrate the motives of "deletionists". Pokemon characters have lots of media and sources associated with them, have a lot of fans who would be interested in reading these articles and editing them, and are "notable". They're also a great way to get people involved in Wikipedia: they come to the site, see how good our coverage of that subject is, and begin contributing/getting interested in the project. So, Pokemon characters are "notable", verifiable, have the potential to become FAs, have a lot of users to support them, and may get people interested in Wikipedia. The only reason to oppose articles on Pokemon characters is that a traditional encyclopedia wouldn't have these articles (more succinctly: elitism). This kind of deletion for no purpose but to appease some editors' notions of what is encyclopedic isn't helping anyone. It's driving away potential editors, it is driving away new editors, and it is driving away experienced editors. Those who support deleting articles to make Wikipedia more fitting to their notion "encyclopedia" are only furthering their own ends. They are not helping Wikipedia as a collaborative encyclopedia. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

Ray Saintonge

8 Mar 8 Mar

7:28 a.m.

Ian Woollard wrote:

...

An encyclopedia can't be about absolutely anything that anyone wants to add it would rapidly descend into farce. It's not about space, it's about reputation, quality and scope.

Reputation is a false God that I have no intention of worshipping. Most of it is an excuse for POV pushing. We probably never will include "absolutely anything". Most see it as unrealistic, but it seems that some would need to come down from their self-righteous pedestal to see that

...

And as soon as you have ANY criteria, people WILL complain. If notability did not exist we would be forced to create it.

Who would be forcing us? You?

...

It's part of the DNA of the wikipedia, if you don't like the DNA of the wikipedia, nothing is stopping you from forking it and changing the DNA and going from there. Good luck with that.

Cancer has DNA too. When the immune system can no longer distinguish the difference, the organism is in trouble. Ec

Thomas Dalton

6 Mar 6 Mar

9:30 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

So, who's going to write [[Notability]] then? We have an independent, non-trivial reliable source now, so I guess notability is notable...

michael west

10:47 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

The article reads very similar to this one from The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131 , albeit from a hands on knowledge of WP.

David Gerard

10:55 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, michael west <michawest(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

The article reads very similar to this one from The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131 , albeit from a hands on knowledge of WP.

Yeah, it's pretty clear it was directly inspired by it. - d.

Tony Sidaway

10:57 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

"Vice-presidents who have shot people" Oh I remember that. Didn't it appear just after a news item in which Dick Cheney accidentally discharged a firearm at a colleague?

Andrew Gray

11:33 p.m.

On 06/03/2008, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

"Vice-presidents who have shot people" Oh I remember that. Didn't it appear just after a news item in which Dick Cheney accidentally discharged a firearm at a colleague?

There was a category, too, I think. It was pretty patently intended as silliness... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

White Cat

10 Mar 10 Mar

12:03 p.m.

I recommend people to take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#.E2.80.9CT… I really feel wikipedia should not be censored against coverage on topics we (we here refers to your own self and is most likely not hared by everyone else) don't care about. I see people redirectifying (in reality purging) content from a variety of topics they feel should either not be covered or because it lacks "adequate" coverage (I don't understand the logic - if something doesn't have enough coverage, doesn't it have less coverage when it is turned into a redirect?). This is happening on a variety of topics, most notably on articles on pop-culture, no doubt. Such conduct at pop culture related articles is being reviewed by arbcom as of this post. Such conduct isn't restricted to pop culture related articles. Same thing is also happening on real world topics like that one page I noticed about a township in Canada. I also noticed a similar dispute on Highway related articles and the relevant arbitration case. This is unacceptable. Wikipedias goal is to cover all human knowledge, not human knowledge we (we here refers to your own self and is most likely not hared by everyone else) care about. If you ask me the new kind of vandalism on wikipedia is redirectification. You remove all content and no one will block you for it. Even such a suggestion seems to be a taboo. Notability guideline was intended against trash. Trash being defined by stuff no one but a very elite group of people (family and friends only) knows about such as bio articles on people that have not conducted anything significant. That was the intention behind it. Currently however self righteous people are enforcing guidelines based on their interpretations of them. These people typically have not written a single article. Guidelines are out there to guide us to write better articles. They are not binding but following them is generally the logical course of action. If you are using a guideline for any reason but writing an article you are violating the spirit behind guidelines even if you are following it to the word. - White Cat On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 11:16 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789354 Yes, (the Wikipedia jargon meaning of) notability is suitable material for a business- and economics-oriented news magazine.[*] - d. [*] it can call itself a "newspaper" all it likes _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

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17 participants

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participants (17)

Andrew Gray
Brian Salter-Duke
Bryan Derksen
Charlotte Webb
David Gerard
George Herbert
Ian Woollard
James Farrar
Matthew Brown
michael west
Michel Vuijlsteke
Oldak Quill
Philip Sandifer
Ray Saintonge
Thomas Dalton
Tony Sidaway
White Cat