I stumbled into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kinuyo_Yamashit...
My personal summary: Notability requirements shown to be utterly broken for popular culture topics.
On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
I stumbled into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kinuyo_Yamashit...
My personal summary: Notability requirements shown to be utterly broken for popular culture topics.
Yeah. It's difficult. The discussion looks like a 'no consensus', but throw in the socking accusations and the BLP background, and you can understand the result, even if you disagree with it. I would look up some sources, but I really hate those "pseudonym in another language in an obscure and emerging genre (video music)" cases. You really can't make much progress with those unless someone actually goes and writes a book about it, or you know the other language (and I know no Japanese at all).
Carcharoth
On Sat, 20 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
I would look up some sources, but I really hate those "pseudonym in another language in an obscure and emerging genre (video music)" cases. You really can't make much progress with those unless someone actually goes and writes a book about it, or you know the other language (and I know no Japanese at all).
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway? The source isn't being used as a source of facts about the subject. We should require a *prominent* source, not a reliable one--something mentioned on Rush Limbaugh and Conan O'Brien really ought to be considered notable. Prominent blogs and fansites would then count towards establishing notability, which would have eliminated this problem.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
Charles
Actually our notability guidelines foster bad music articles.
"Songs that have been ranked on national or significant music charts, that have won significant awards or honors or that have been performed independently by several notable artists, bands or groups are probably notable." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_%28music%29#Albums.2C_sing...
As a result we get thousands of articles which are basically nothing more than laundry lists of chart placements and recordings, usually unreferenced but occasionally with minimal referencing. A few from 1955 (randomly chosen year).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Boom_Boomerang_%28song%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croce_di_Oro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domani http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamboat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fool_for_You http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Get_%28song%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Important_Can_It_Be%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Guess_I%27m_Crazy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Found_Out_About_Love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_You,_Samantha
Systematic cleanup is nearly impossible because my time tends to get eaten up with the real basics when I do sweeps. These articles are magnets for copyright violations, for instance. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=In_the_Wee_Small_Hours_of_the_Morn...
-Durova
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 2:59 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Ken Arromdee wrote:
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
Charles
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On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
No reliable sources *for notability* doesn't mean that nothing can be said in the article. The restrictions on reliable sources for notability are stricter than the restrictions on reliable sources for article content. Notability requires that each individual source has significant coverage, and is limited to secondary sources only. Article content allows you to take information from multiple sources each of which only has a small amount of coverage, and it is not limited to secondary sources (in fact, under some circumstances you can even use material written by the subject).
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
No reliable sources *for notability* doesn't mean that nothing can be said in the article. The restrictions on reliable sources for notability are stricter than the restrictions on reliable sources for article content. Notability requires that each individual source has significant coverage, and is limited to secondary sources only. Article content allows you to take information from multiple sources each of which only has a small amount of coverage, and it is not limited to secondary sources (in fact, under some circumstances you can even use material written by the subject).
This tends to indicate that you are better off putting a small section, paragraph, or footnote, in another article, and having the original title redirect to that article instead (or some list or overview of the main topic). It may not be an ideal solution, but it works until more sources are found, or are published, and then the redirect can be turned back into an article.
That way, the information confirmed by reliable sources is kept, the arguments over notability are avoided, and readers looking for something at that title are sent to where they can find the information (they do have to look a bit harder if the location of the information isn't obvious).
This is otherwise known as merging.
The single silliest convention at AfD is the one that says you can't merge an article that is being discussed for deletion. It is silly because on any given day a skilled editor can merge half the articles nominated at AfD, thus retaining the information that has been reliably sourced, rather than losing it. But this is outweighed by most people not considering the merge option and only opting for keep or delete.
Admittedly, some articles aren't really suitable for merging.
Carcharoth
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
No reliable sources *for notability* doesn't mean that nothing can be said in the article. The restrictions on reliable sources for notability are stricter than the restrictions on reliable sources for article content. Notability requires that each individual source has significant coverage, and is limited to secondary sources only. Article content allows you to take information from multiple sources each of which only has a small amount of coverage, and it is not limited to secondary sources (in fact, under some circumstances you can even use material written by the subject).
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything. Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one. The nutshell says "A topic that is suitable for inclusion and has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article". In other words certain topics pass. This criterion isn't saying for sure what is not notable.
Admittedly the rest of the article is badly drafted enough so that the confusion is somewhat forgiveable.
Anyway, recall what notability is for. We use it as a rather crude tool to prise people away from their initial view of what topics should be included, which is typically subjective. And then when they have taken the point that there should be something "objective", we move to saying notability depends on available information. So really notability only functions as a stepping stone across the river: once an editor is on the side of developing content by referencing and thinking in those terms, we can talk to them as colleagues. (Well, doesn't always go that way.) But my point about "logical positivism" was based on that conception, to the extent that people who really believe that an abstract "protocol" could be used to replace dickering on about quite which RS might establish N are doomed to dickering, but at the level of abstract guidelines rather than at AfD. Sufficient conditions for inclusion are cleaner, but (for example) tend to reinforce systemic bias problems. To the extent that you phrased your comment in terms of necessity, you have an abstract point.
Charles
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything.
In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies: anyone who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to satisfy them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything.
In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies: anyone who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to satisfy them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
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If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation and misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than full formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the provisions of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles. Although WP:NOT is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part of it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little better than random. Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what should count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
David Goodman wrote:
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything.
In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies: anyone who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to satisfy them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation and misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than full formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the provisions of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles. Although WP:NOT is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part of it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little better than random. Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what should count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
Many of the inconsistencies exist only in the eye of the species known as the Lesser Horned Wikilawyer - they illustrate the proved that "the Devil can cite Scripture". The phenomenon under discussion belongs really to the Illogical Positivist: the "notability guidelines" are a vast case analysis, and the General Notability Guideline is the default case, meant to catch the situations where no other guideline applies. As we have been saying, it is phrased as a sufficient condition: if it is not also a necessary condition, what happens? Well, the case analysis might not be complete: we might (gasp) have to use our own brains.
Must it be complete? Only if you believe there is a hypostatised concept "notability" that really must be applicable in all cases. I think what is being said above is that there are many of those Illogical Positivists around, and they argue somewhat in the way I'm saying. Now that wouldn't surprise me at all, as a statement. People often enough do use any argument from quasi-policy in what is a rhetorical rather than a logical way.
Charles
The existing situation is of great assistance to another species: the wiki-barrister, expert is using whatever legal processes are available to achieve equity. . If such a person intuitively think an article should be kept, they will find arguments to keep it, and vice-versa. For essentially every article at AfD contested in good faith, they could find plausible arguments based on policy for either keeping or deleting. For the unscrupulous subspecies, they could find arguments of some sort for a good deal that is not really reasonably contestable.
In truth, the only general concept of notability is what articles are suitably important for the encyclopedia that we want to have. Collectively, we can decide on whatever sort of encyclopedia we want, and can consequently have whatever concept of notability we want. There is no actual pre-existing meaning of the term, and WP:N goes to some lengths to distinguish it from any word used in an ordinary way. People argue as if Wikipedia should conform to some standard of notability, but we can have whatever rules we please. We can use a concept like the GNG to whatever extent and in whatever way we decide to use it. For example, some people have argued we should in some fields only count scholarly articles, and no general news sources at all; some people have argued the exact reverse. If we prefer abstract standards, we can have them at whatever level we want. To take an area I work on, we have decided to include all college presidents; we could limit it to major universities, or we could decide to include all high school principals. To take an area where I don't work, we have flipped back and forth on whether to include minor-league baseball players.
Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the encyclopedia should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise. We can have whatever compromise can get enough agreement. It's not a matter of logic, just a matter of of what we can find that works for enough of us to resolve the individual problems. (At present, we use inconsistency as a sort of compromise: of articles on computer programs of very similar marginal importance, and very similar marginal sourcing, about half will be included and half not, so people of all positions on this can say they win half the time, or (more likely) complain that they lose half the time. Personally, I think that's the worst way to find a solution.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net
wrote:
On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a guideline, not an official policy for anything.
In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies:
anyone
who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins. Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
Secondly, you are paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were* interpreted as a necessary condition. Since the article failed to
satisfy
them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation
and
misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than
full
formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the
provisions
of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles. Although
WP:NOT
is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part
of
it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little
better
than random. Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what
should
count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
Many of the inconsistencies exist only in the eye of the species known as the Lesser Horned Wikilawyer - they illustrate the proved that "the Devil can cite Scripture". The phenomenon under discussion belongs really to the Illogical Positivist: the "notability guidelines" are a vast case analysis, and the General Notability Guideline is the default case, meant to catch the situations where no other guideline applies. As we have been saying, it is phrased as a sufficient condition: if it is not also a necessary condition, what happens? Well, the case analysis might not be complete: we might (gasp) have to use our own brains.
Must it be complete? Only if you believe there is a hypostatised concept "notability" that really must be applicable in all cases. I think what is being said above is that there are many of those Illogical Positivists around, and they argue somewhat in the way I'm saying. Now that wouldn't surprise me at all, as a statement. People often enough do use any argument from quasi-policy in what is a rhetorical rather than a logical way.
Charles
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On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:38 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the encyclopedia should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise [...] Personally, I think that's the worst way to find a solution.
I hope I'm snipping in such a way as to not change your argument there, I have no doubt I'll be told if not.
What is the *best* way to find a solution then?
Bod Notbod wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:38 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the encyclopedia should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise [...] Personally, I think that's the worst way to find a solution.
I hope I'm snipping in such a way as to not change your argument there, I have no doubt I'll be told if not.
What is the *best* way to find a solution then?
Solutions take the form of "complicate the flowchart". Add preliminary steps before any deletion, review steps after deletions, and so on. The problem is ... many people active on the site don't have too clear a view of what the current "flowchart" is - or in other words current best practice isn't always followed, and therefore tweaking it doesn't have as much traction as it should. But I do recommend trying to get the overview of what the processes look like, certainly over reading the fine print in [[WP:N]].
Charles
I thing compromise IS the solution.
I said that the sort of compromise by deciding the individual cases half one way half the other on a more or less random basis is the worst way to do a compromise.
I didn't go into the best way to form a compromise. The way that works in the outside world is that someone in authority forces the people to compromise under threat of deciding the issue themselves. Except for behavior, we have no such authority and I wouldn't want us to have one as a general matter. Perhaps we might resort to binding arbitration with an ad hoc arbitrator in some cases. More generally, we did a better method of forming policy. Polls are susceptible to swamping by one side unless there is a serious attempt in more general participation than say , the current BLP poll. Discussions in the usual way can be deadlocked by a single person persisting in an objection, as is happening right now at WT:FICTION.
The only practical hope is for us to attract new people who will come to the discussions without long-set preconceptions about them.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 5:58 AM, Charles Matthews < charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:
Bod Notbod wrote:
On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 7:38 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com
wrote:
Since we have no really universally agreed vision of what the
encyclopedia
should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise [...]
Personally, I
think that's the worst way to find a solution.
I hope I'm snipping in such a way as to not change your argument there, I have no doubt I'll be told if not.
What is the *best* way to find a solution then?
Solutions take the form of "complicate the flowchart". Add preliminary steps before any deletion, review steps after deletions, and so on. The problem is ... many people active on the site don't have too clear a view of what the current "flowchart" is - or in other words current best practice isn't always followed, and therefore tweaking it doesn't have as much traction as it should. But I do recommend trying to get the overview of what the processes look like, certainly over reading the fine print in [[WP:N]].
Charles
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On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, David Goodman wrote:
The existing situation is of great assistance to another species: the wiki-barrister, expert is using whatever legal processes are available to achieve equity. . If such a person intuitively think an article should be kept, they will find arguments to keep it, and vice-versa. For essentially every article at AfD contested in good faith, they could find plausible arguments based on policy for either keeping or deleting. For the unscrupulous subspecies, they could find arguments of some sort for a good deal that is not really reasonably contestable.
This is of course true too. People don't think video game composers deserve to have articles; so they argue for non-notability.
Whether this should be the case is another story. I consider this to be an abuse of the rules.
This is of course true too. People don't think video game composers deserve to have articles; so they argue for non-notability.
Whether this should be the case is another story. I consider this to be an abuse of the rules.
---- That's an example of a fairly common human prejudice against new creative genres. Novels were held in light esteem while Henry Fielding and Jane Austen were writing them--light entertainment for adolescent girls. It wasn't really until Thackeray that the genre became respectable reading for serious adults. When motion pictures were new they were mostly regarded as light entertainment for working class audiences. Partly as a result, nearly 90% of the films from the silent era weren't curated and have been lost forever. Of course 90% of every genre is crap and the Pac-Man theme will probably torment me for the next three hours. But Austen was nearly forgotten for fifty years after her death--I wonder what critics of the next generation will say about the theme music from Morrowind. -Durova
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
This is of course true too. People don't think video game composers deserve to have articles; so they argue for non-notability.
Whether this should be the case is another story. I consider this to be an abuse of the rules.
That's an example of a fairly common human prejudice against new creative genres. Novels were held in light esteem while Henry Fielding and Jane Austen were writing them--light entertainment for adolescent girls. It wasn't really until Thackeray that the genre became respectable reading for serious adults. When motion pictures were new they were mostly regarded as light entertainment for working class audiences. Partly as a result, nearly 90% of the films from the silent era weren't curated and have been lost forever. Of course 90% of every genre is crap and the Pac-Man theme will probably torment me for the next three hours. But Austen was nearly forgotten for fifty years after her death--I wonder what critics of the next generation will say about the theme music from Morrowind.
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
Carcharoth
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
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.
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
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.
And yet - without the first level filtering offered by these rules, we can't easily seek out and remove a lot of obvious abuse.
Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or services. If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our mission statement, we're failing, too.
Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and review this article and ones like it".
If we erase notability completely, every person with net access in the world, everyone's band, all the small businesses in the world, etc. will all end up covered. Say 100x more articles?
We already have large areas that are not well monitored and not well up to existing quality standards.
So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite? Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over time?
Keep in mind participation level statistics, etc...
George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
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.
<snip>
Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or services. If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our mission statement, we're failing, too.
Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and review this article and ones like it".
<snip>
So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite? Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over time?
In this context, I was interested to get an outside view of how knols are doing (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2010/tc20100218_199388.htm occurring in the Signpost story on the Google donation). As we know, knols take inclusionism to one limit, and have wiki-like low barriers to entry, but dispense really with "the community" and "notability". I happen to have had a knol turn up in a Google search for the first time in the past few days, too. It was written by a Wikipedian, was useful to me, was not on a topic Wikipedia would have included (it was a link farm and had little scope for being anything else) - and (as it turned out) was not really as good as another non-knol page I had more trouble finding.
Several conclusions:
- knols are inclusionist in so simple-minded a way that no one (not even Google) thinks they do the same job as Wikipedia; - the 99% figure for knols might be harsh, but it might not, and instead our intensive processes to upgrade content, there is only a very severe "survival of the fittest" that applies (most of the postings are simply going to be entirely ignored); - it is quite a good thing that our baroque model was launched well before knols.
It would be trivial to adapt anything good in the knol model, clearly (just redefine the User: namespace slightly). Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process".
Charles
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
.... Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process".
Either namespace, or another independent namespace ("Drafts").
User namespace makes things harder to find; which is not necessarily appropriate. We want drafts to be communally findable - to encourage contributions, fixes, reviews, and eventual upgrades.
This has floated before, in some variation, and not flown. But perhaps it's time to float it again and see if it flies now.
George Herbert wrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
.... Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process".
Either namespace, or another independent namespace ("Drafts").
User namespace makes things harder to find; which is not necessarily appropriate. We want drafts to be communally findable - to encourage contributions, fixes, reviews, and eventual upgrades.
This has floated before, in some variation, and not flown. But perhaps it's time to float it again and see if it flies now.
Right. But doing things with aliases is not exactly out of reach.
And I'm somewhat surprised, considering it all, that there isn't even an editorial guideline on moving drafts? Not that I would feel compelled to read it, but it seems an omission.
Charles
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:56 PM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
.... Perhaps this contains the germ of an idea: a process "Drafts for mainspace", a review debating unuserfying. The "Bizarre Records" solution to our problems - "just what <s>the world</s> Wikipedia needs, another <s>record label</s> contentious process".
Either namespace, or another independent namespace ("Drafts").
User namespace makes things harder to find; which is not necessarily appropriate. We want drafts to be communally findable - to encourage contributions, fixes, reviews, and eventual upgrades.
Userspace does have the benefit of being *blatantly* unofficial, which is sometimes a good thing with drafts, especially if those drafts have problematic content that's being indexed by search engines.
Aside from that issue, though, a "Draft" namespace does sound like a smoother workflow, as you suggest. If you can't get a canonical namespace in, "Wikipedia:Drafts/Page[/Version]" might not be a bad naming convention.
-- Luna Santin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Luna_Santin
On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, George Herbert wrote:
Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a closing admin would make of it... :-)
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.
And yet - without the first level filtering offered by these rules, we can't easily seek out and remove a lot of obvious abuse.
My point isn't that we should do away with notability; it's that we should *fix* it.
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.
On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, David Goodman wrote:
The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
I'm trying to figure out if you're arguing with me. You're right, of course, the rules are completely messed up.
But I think it's fair to say that "notability rules are only a sufficient condition and it's possible for something to not satisfy the rules and still be notable" is a *very* unpopular position, to the point where it may as well not be true.
Ken Arromdee wrote:
On Tue, 23 Feb 2010, David Goodman wrote:
The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to justify almost any decision--even without using IAR.
I'm trying to figure out if you're arguing with me. You're right, of course, the rules are completely messed up.
But I think it's fair to say that "notability rules are only a sufficient condition and it's possible for something to not satisfy the rules and still be notable" is a *very* unpopular position, to the point where it may as well not be true.
It's the difference between "never say never" and "never say "never say never""? This is after all what IAR is there for.
Failure of the General Notability Guideline to give the right result may indicate that a special guideline might be more helpful. If the work of creating such special guidelines has gone about as far as people want, and if certain classes of information (such as what is happening on the "street" or in places where the usual media don't document them) are excluded by consensus, and if "notability" is applied as a generic test to topics that (for example) don't have a WikiProject interested in arguing in other ways, then what you say may represent the simplest broad generalisation.
That's a few ifs and buts.
Charles
On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Ken Arromdee arromdee@rahul.net wrote:
I stumbled into this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Kinuyo_Yamashit...
My personal summary: Notability requirements shown to be utterly broken for popular culture topics.
Yeah. It's difficult. The discussion looks like a 'no consensus', but throw in the socking accusations and the BLP background, and you can understand the result, even if you disagree with it. I would look up some sources, but I really hate those "pseudonym in another language in an obscure and emerging genre (video music)" cases. You really can't make much progress with those unless someone actually goes and writes a book about it, or you know the other language (and I know no Japanese at all).
Carcharoth
And it doesn't help that composers lend themselves to being indexed in databases and general name-checking without substantive content.
For example, look at the hits for Kinuyo in my CSE: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009114923999563836576%3A1eorkzz2gp4&q=%22Ki...
Leaving aside the issue that I have no idea whether to whitelist originalsoundversion.com as a RS or blacklist it as a database/blog filling up my results, note that there are tons of references & mentions, but few substantive discussions. (Ironically, one of the more prominent hits is an osv.com post criticizing the deletion: http://www.originalsoundversion.com/?p=7667 )