At 05:53 PM 2/24/2010, Ken Arromdee wrote:
You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of
debate just to keep a page
around when the notability rules could be fixed instead. Otherwise we're
no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that
anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.
Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.
Before being blocked, a minor inconvenience this week, I came across
a situation with 13 AfD's filed on national member societies of the
International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these societies had
existed since the 1920s, and it is a certainty that reliable source
exists for them, but those sources can be a devil to find, unless
someone has access to and is willing to comb through old issues of
QST, or can search in local print archives of newspapers from the
time of recognition or other notable events.
WP:CLUB notes that national-level nonprofit organizations are
*generally* notable. In this case, the IARU, at some point, when they
were not members and did not participate in the decision except by
applying, decided to admit them as the sole representative of the
entire nation in the IARU. We have the IARU as a source for the fact
that they are the national members, and the IARU points to the
national societies' web sites, and we often have those sites as a
source for additional information about the societies, information
that is highly likely to be true. In ordinary language, that means
that they are "reliable" for that purpose. This is not controversial
information.
But the problem is obvious. I proposed a change to the guideline, a
special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member
society of a notable international society would be notable. If you
know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections.
"Notability is not inherited." A bit more puzzling was the claim that
the IARU was not independent from the admitted member. As to the act
of admission, it certainly was! It will only admit one society, and
it appears that when there are conflicting claimants, they want them
to get it together and form a uniting society. Tehy want one
representative in the nation to represent the international union to
the government of that country, and, as well, to represent the
country's interests before the IARU and international bodies.
I got practically no support at the relevant talk page (it is the
talk page for the guideline that WP:CLUB) points to. And there was no
support at WP:RSN for the proposition that the IARU was reliable for
the purpose of determining membership and official web site URL.
Yet what happened at AfD? Out of 13, 11 closed as Keep, 1 as Delete,
and 1 as No Consensus. Some of the Keep results had exactly the same
lack of "independent sources" as the Delete result.
Guidelines are supposed to represent actual practice, not prescribed
practice. The point is to avoid disruption from AfDs that will fail,
or from insistence on keeping something that will be deleted. But the
editors who sit on the guidelines seem to think otherwise, and one of
them complained that editors, voting in the AfD, were not following
the guideline, and he helpfully pointed to it. As he had just changed
in an effort to make crystal clear his interpretation, which was
obviously not theirs!
By not allowing guidelines to move to represent actual practice, when
there is an opportunity, disruption and senseless debate continues.
Someone else will read the existing guideline, interpret it with a
literalist understanding ("there *must* be at least *two* independent
reliable sources, period, no exceptions) and then file an AfD,
wasting a lot of time. In this case the editor filed 13, and there
were obviously many more on the way, there are something like 200
such national societies.
There is an alternate interpretation. The stubs should be deleted.
And they were only kept because people interested in amateur radio
voted for them. Suppose this is the case. (It's not. DGG was asked
about one of these AfDs and he basically came up with the same
arguments as I did.) If it's the case, then the guideline should be
clarified so that the rest of us won't make that mistake again, of
trying to keep stuff that will only be deleted, and, instead, we will
pull the stubs back into a list article. A similar list article had
existed previously, and it had been decided that stubs were cleaner
and better, because there is, in fact, a lot of reliable information
about these societies, that could indeed be put in a list article
(where some kinds of self-published information can be used), and
having looked at the articles and reflected on the list possibility,
I agree with the standing consensus. But nobody voted to remove the
information, just to delete the articles. It's an absolutist
understanding of what an "article" must be, based on a technical
failure, the failure to find what surely must exist, independent
sources for these societies, some of which are pushing ninety years
in existence.
Sorry, something that might look like "instruction creep" is actually
necessary, or the same battles get fought over and over. And over. As
long as it is understood that the guidelines are not rigid
regulations, there isn't a problem with that. And consensus can
change, so when actual outcomes are seen, and stand, that contradict
a guideline, the guideline should be changed no matter what the
rule-bound think "should be" the rule.