From: "Anthony DiPierro" Neither do our vandals. I'd go as far as saying that the majority of CSD-A7 deletions that are immediately recreated go from "Joe Bloggs is a bicyclist from Melbourne" to "Joe Bloggs is a notable bicyclist in Melbourne". This is a Good Thing, as claiming notability is not the same as asserting it, and Mr Bloggs and his bike can be deleted again. I'm always surprised that the vandals haven't worked out that they should *assert* notability. But they don't and I think the reason is: they can't. A good encyclopedia article, especially one about a person or group, sums up the entire article in the first sentence. You learn everying that is notable and important about the subject in a couple of dozen words (less in the better written articles). Anything, anything at all, that is notable can be summed up in the opening sentence. Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia anyone can edit. Jimbo Wales is an internet entrepreneur who founded Wikipedia. ABC is a national television and radio network in the United States. If it's not notable, you can't sum it up. So you get CSD-A7 articles that wander all over the shop - sometimes for thousands of carefully crafted words - but don't assert the notability of the subject because they can't. Of course, there is a large grey area on either side. It is, after all, perfectly possible to write an article about Albert Einstein without once summing him up and asserting notability for him. Difficult, but not impossible. Albert Einstein was a Swiss patent clerk who later became a professor. Articles like that by right shouldn't be deleted since the person in question was and is notable. But it's not up to another editor to discover why someone or something is notable and insert it. It's *certainly* not up to our customers - millions and millions of readers - to try to guess why the person is included if they don't know already. If that article stayed up, it becomes the equivilant of the old empty articles that I seem to remember as a feature of Wikipedia 5 or 6 years ago. And it's less likely to grow into a full article than a redlink would, as it acts as a barrier to growth. On the other side, it is possible to assert notability where no exists, but when people do that they tend to assert improbable or just downright bollocks notability. Joe Bloggs is a bicyclist from Melbourne who owns all the money in the world and your sister. Joe Bloggs is a bicyclist from Melbourne who has ridden around the world 18 times since he first learned to ride a bike when he was 3 months old. If true, these things would be a sign of notability. But they then fall foul of CSD-G1 - patent nonsense - and bite the dust on that score. I think it's a small thing to ask of an article and its creator - assert some reason why this subject should be in our encyclopedia. If they don't, CSD-A7. If they do but don't do it very well, AfD. If they do but it's a lie, CSD-G1. But it's very difficult to *define* what is and isn't an assertion of notability. Notability is largely a /quality/, a property something has or doesn't have. Producing an exact definition of what an assertion of it looks like is probably beyond the English language. Like modern art, you can't produce a definition of it, but know it when you see it! I think we can trust our admins to rule on it, if nothing else because admin actions are undoable. And if something or someone *is* notable after all, an article will spring up in its place later and hopefully better. For AfD decisions its harder to know if we can trust the consensus, but that's because the cut-and-dried non-notables have been deleted by admins already. Its the grey-area ones that go to AfD and are subject to people's prejudices, deletion/inclusion leanings and the author's potential for disrupting of the process. If AfD worked, it would be the ideal place to discuss all of these things. Ho hum. =REDVERS= ___________________________________________________________ Switch an email account to Yahoo! Mail, you could win FIFA World Cup tickets. http://uk.mail.yahoo.com