[WikiEN-l] Schools, notability, inclusionism, deletionism, etc.

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Stephen Streater wrote

> Some of us are working on a new notability guideline:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOTABILITY
> 
> The key to me is that the content is reliable,
> which is covered by the first two points under
> Rationale:
> In order to have a verifiable article, a topic must be notable enough  
> that it will be described by multiple independent sources.
> In order to have a neutral article with minimal errors, a topic must  
> be notable enough that there will be non-partisan editors interested  
> in editing it.

It all sounds much like what Jimbo took to saying on the subject. It helps to exclude some promotional and journalistic froth. Does it do much else?

Example (has happened on the site), some science competition winner, a no doubt bright teenager, gets plenty of media coverage for a ho-hum bit of work. The press release adds the usual kinds of hype (e.g. anything at all to do with a prime number gets related to public key crypto, gasp). We can cut this out as not notable, because unless it warrants the learned journal route to publication it's below threshold.

That's OK; but the learned journals contain an immense amount of the truly tedious and the me-too. Saying 'verifiable' just ducks the issue, really.

Years of debate have only proved that, while we may know what we are doing, that's not because we have a theoretical criterion for inclusion. We have numerous operational criteria.

Charles

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