[WikiEN-l] Human dignity

[Steve Bennett]

On 7/18/06, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Could you give me a definition of "notability" that is not entirely
> centred around the culture and experience of the person who uses it?

Well you can come up with lots of definitions for different classes of
things. The top 10 richest people in some category, top 10 most
decorated athletes in another, etc, are all notable. An overall
definition is tricky, but we must take into account that there are two
reasons for having articles in Wikipedia: either because the subject
is notable, or for completeness. Most communes in France aren't
notable - but having reference material on all the communes is pretty
useful. (and there are better, less contentious examples)

On that last note, it would be interesting to formulate a rule like:
If X% of all members of some class are "notable", then articles for
all members of that class should exist.

Then, what should X be?  30? 50?

> I'm yet to hear one. IMO, we should completely abandon, or redefine,
> "notability" for something more tangible, measurable and worthy of our
> efforts.

Yep. Because the fundamential issue here is not "is Y notable?" It is
"should we have an article on Y?" Therefore the issue should be called
"includability" or something. And then we can formalise what we
already all basically agree on: that the rules for what we do and
don't include depend to a great extent on the individual subject
matter. But that perhaps there are a couple of common principles that
can be applied to them. I tried to come up with some a few months ago,
maybe it's time I had another go.

Steve