[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

[Matt Brown]

On 4/7/06, Steve Bennett <stevage at gmail.com> wrote:
> I totally support that. I would also like the basic reasons for
> notability guidelines to be stated more explicitly. We don't, from
> memory, have any rationale stronger than "Wikipedia is not paper, but
> still!"

Good luck on getting consensus on that.  Attempts to define notability
have been rather unsuccessful.  Projects to define notability in
particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success,
but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than
policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like
that will have false positives / negatives.

> So we first need to explain why we don't want infinite numbers of articles:
> - We can't maintain them all to an acceptable standard

This one is a valid point.  If the interest level in a particular
topic is just not there, no encyclopedia-worthy article can be created
or maintained.

Thus an informal rule of notability: if not enough people are
interested in writing about it, it's probably not notable enough, at
least yet.  Of course, certain groups of 'interested' are not well
represented yet online in general or on wikipedia in specific.

> - We do have physical standards

Clarify?

> - Articles on trivial topics damage the credibility of the
> encyclopaedia as a whole

Controversial - and attempts to codify that have been roundly rejected.

I believe one of Wikipedia's /strengths/ is its breadth of topics;
people come to us partly because we have obscure articles.

> Then we need to explain how we determine notability, and how we decide
> what's in and what's out:
> - For recent creations of mankind, newspaper articles are virtually a
> requirement

Strongly disagreed.  Many topics are outside the scope of newspapers.

If you extend that to the technical and specialist press, you have a
stronger case, but still, I am very uneasy about that as an absolute
requirement.

> - For societies, clubs etc, longevity and true notability compared to
> peers are required

Agreed here - and some might be worthy of mention as a list item only.

> - Our natural bias against popular culture

Please say 'my' rather than 'our' here.  A casual study of Wikipedia
would probably show a bias /towards/ popular culture.

SOME Wikipedia editors have a bias against popular culture.  These
people may even be quite influential.  However saying that there is a
CONSENSUS bias against popular culture is incorrect.

> It seems like it might not be a bad idea to establish some precedents
> or borderline cases. "If your website is not at least as notable as
> foofoo.com, which has been repeatedly rejected, don't even bother".

Useful, but I feel it just moves the goalposts; there's no way to
objectively reduce notability to a number for numeric comparisons
against other subjects.

-Matt