On 1/10/07, Stirling Newberry <stirling.newberry(a)xigenics.net> wrote:
This would move the battle from one place to hundreds of places. In
general, spreading a problem over more articles is less good than
having one central place to discuss whether the article should be
included in the main space. More over, it would burden article
authors even more in attempting to maintain articles. This is a
general habit of of the pedia where arguments at the meta level are
dumped on editors because the meta level gets tired of the argument.
Editor time is undervalued as it is, spending it to avoid meta-level
arguments is a sign of failure at the meta-level.
1) I don't see how article maintenance would be slightly changed. People
would revert irrelevant additions. How is this different from what happens
today? If you're saying that for some reason the load would spike, I'd
definitely be interested to hear your reasoning.
2) Its "dumped" on them because they are more likely to be somewhat
sufficiently self-informed on the topic. Not because editors upstairs are
'tired' of it. Oh contraire, AfD wouldn't let that 'burden' go without
a
fight!
Notability is, in fact, a two way protection. It protects the quality
of the pedia, and it protects the people below the
threshold of
notability from being attacked in a wikipedia article, and having
that vault to the top of a google search. Since people have been
denied employment based on google searches, it would not take very
long for this to cause a problem.
You've taken my 'extreme argument' case as a literal proposition. Tisk tisk.
All I meant to illustrate was that the 'notability' issue, even taken to its
extreme (All articles are notable) produces very few problems. At present,
notability is held as sacred and its defenders fierce.
-S
On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:06 AM, Steve wrote:
To me the issue of notability has always been a
bloated one. I'll
even go so
far as to say that Wikipedia's quality wouldn't change
substantially if we
could rewind history and expunge notability as an issue ever.
The primary fear is that WP will become "cluttered". However,
articles that
are objectively not-notable will have very little connectivity with
any
other articles. Therefore, non-notable articles will only exist within
small, obscure pockets.
It's akin to the logic Google uses to determine the weight of a
site with
its PageRank system, which gives notable weight to sites linked to.
Let's suppose for fun that the burden of notability shifted from
article
creation to inter-article linkage. So, I could create an article about
myself. But when I attempted to inject it into [[Philadelphia]],
I'd have to
prove that my article was substantially relevant to anyone
interested in the
subject of Philadelphia. If the decision to link to me was made by
philly
watchers/readers, I'd venture to guess you're already talking a
more diverse
and subject-intelligent crowd than the regulars at AfD. Of course,
these
kinds of edits are routine--they are reverted just as routinely.
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