[WikiEN-l] Notability meta-guidelines

[Justin Cormack]

On 18 Jan 2006, at 15:39, Steve Bennett wrote:

> Hi,
>   There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
> in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
> notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
> articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
> someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
> stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
> while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
> thousands of active users.
>
> I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at  
> play here:
>
> 1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
> Wikipedia.  {The vanity principle}
>
> 2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
> its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}
>
> 3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
> Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}

I think these are a good start.

2. can be difficult during construction of an encyclopedia, as people
cannot cover stuff in a top down logical order necessarily.

I think there are some generally agreed non-principals too:

a. There should not be arbitrary numeric cutoffs (eg no articles on
cities with fewer than 50000 people or whatever), cutoffs should  
correspond
to categories used in the real world.