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

[Robth]

On 9/23/06, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> If it's third-party verifiable, why not?
>
>
> - d.

Well, the reason that's always struck me as the most compelling,
although I don't know that I've actually heard anyone use it
(probably because I've been pretty successful in ignoring AfD),
is that if we admit everything that's third party verifiable we will
have expanded well past the point where our core group of editors
is capable of enforcing our core content policies (particularly
NPOV) on the amount of material we'll have.  We may have already
expanded to this point, for that matter; I certainly know that we've
passed the point where we're no longer able to prevent a large portion
of the articles from really sucking (see WP:CBM, especially the stuff
that's been tagged for a year or more).  This is a problem because
people who see badly written or non-neutral articles as one of the first
things they encounter at Wikipedia are probably either going to go
away and not contribute or contribute stuff that meets the same
description.

AaronSw's survey results have shown that most material is contributed
by drive-by editors, but most formatting, wikifying, etc.--i.e. actually
incorporating the new stuff into the encyclopedia--is done by core
community members.  Notability provides a method of callibrating
the amount of incoming content at a level that our existing group
of core editors can actually handle and assimilate.  The question,
in my opinion, when considering the inclusion of an article, is not
"is this subject notable enough to be worth writing/reading about",
but rather "if we include this subject and all equally notable subjects,
will our regulars be able to enforce the core policies on the resulting
influx of articles.

So, to get back to the original question of this thread, I think we
should be concerned about the dropping inclusion threshold for
pop culture at least, since that's an area where it seems to me
that the community as it exists is not successfully enforcing
important policies such as NPOV and whichever non-core-but-
still-important policy says states that we want encyclopedia
articles, not trivia piles.  Some subjects aren't a problem;
very few Rambot articles get taken over by hagiographers or
POV warriors.  A fair number of school articles do end up
contravening NPOV.  We should draw conclusions about the
effect of including these various article types based on the
current state of similar articles that we already have, and draw up
whatever standards we need to make sure that we can manage
the material we take on in that subject area in the future.

--Robth
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Robth)