On 6 February 2013 13:06, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
On 2/6/13, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
Notability is *supposed* to be timeless, not
perishable, let's recall.
Yeah. But that is a bit of a canard in some cases. It is a question of
whether coverage endures and continues or peters out. i.e. Whether
people/sources (the right sort) write about something over time, and
in what manner. Coverage of something when it starts is very different
to coverage after it is gone. The former is news, the latter starts to
become history (whether a footnote or not).
Yes, the point about reducing notability to "reliable sources" is that
making GNG depend on RS assumes we know what we are talking about in
RS. Which is questionable. So I cordially hate GNG. Precisely because
it takes more to write history of lasting value,, than journalism that
informs and sells, reducing things to RS is basically a bust. But,
absent a catchy replacement, it is what we are stuck with. Which is
exactly the status of notability, anyway.
Pownce is clearly a footnote by now. One of
WP's purposes is to host
such footnotes. So the writing issue boils down to reducing froth to
footnote coverage.
Ultimately everything becomes a footnote if you take the long view.
With some things being more a footnote than others. Getting the
balance right as something goes from having lots of coverage at
inception, to either increasing or decreasing coverage thereafter is
tricky, but an important consideration.
It is something that I don't think those engaged in debates about
notability consider enough, especially when considering that living
people get coverage because they are living. Whether they get coverage
when or after they are dead (which we won't know until that happens)
*should* be a consideration, but often isn't.
Sometimes when something comes to en end, new coverage will prompt
updates here, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. It all results
in a large mass of articles that are poorly maintained and look
increasingly out of date as time goes by.
Nothing at all wrong with footnotes, though. I once had a project to
go through the footnotes of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall". I had an
interesting hour with the first, on Jordanes, but got no further,
though it produced an article.
Articles from 6 or 7 years ago are often essentially unimproved from
their early days. Now with much better online resources I often find
I'm improving a very stubby one from 2007. There isn't an actual
problem, though. in that I feel motivated now to do that improvement.
I think the right attitude is that it has taken longer than we thought
to start "eating our tail" and upgrade old stubs. To get back on
topic, if a stub really is on a notable topic, then there isn't much
of a problem. I'll agree that a certain kind of "transience" isn't
well expressed in basic policy.
Charles