[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia notability (was "Opt Out for Not So Notable Biographies")

[John Lee]

On 4/10/07, Matthew Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/9/07, Seraphim Blade <seraphimbladewikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "From the independent sources available, could a comprehensive,
> > high-quality (GA/FA) article be written on this subject someday?"
>
> I think this would be a terrible criterion to use for this purpose.
> Not every worthwhile subject has sufficient to say about it to make a
> FA or even a GA as currently defined.
>
> -Matt


Haha, it's a little known fact that GA was originally created as a form of
recognition for articles which would never be able to attain FA status or
close to it, because of various deficiencies (e.g. insufficient sources due
to systemic bias in secondary source material). (Or, at least, this is what
Worldtraveller, the fellow who came up with GA, told me a year or two ago.)
I still recall how just a month or two after GA's inception, several short
articles which I could never bring up to what is currently B-class status
because of insufficient source material (just to name two, take the two
[[Karamjit Singh]]s) were rejected by GA. Standards creep works that fast,
apparently.

Sorry to digress - I'll try to redeem myself by suggesting that even tying
inclusion criteria to some relatively low standard at the present, e.g.
C-class, may not work too well thanks to how our standards for articles
continue to rise. In a number of cases, these standards become arbitrary and
mindlessly enforced, such as an obsession for demanding footnoting where it
isn't necessary (e.g. articles which rely on a few core high-quality web
sources) - so I would think it's a bad idea to get *this* objective about
inclusion criteria.

I think we will always have to have some element of subjectivity about our
inclusion criteria. We used to require very subjective criteria because our
rules were poorly-developed (which is why I used to support a
not-too-well-defined idea of notability), but nowadays thanks to rules
creep, we don't need as much subjectivity as we used to. But we shouldn't go
overboard in the objective criteria either - I think we already have a
surfeit of clue being substituted by mindless rules. If anything, perhaps
the reason AfD is working less well these days is that it has adopted the
worst of both worlds - it uses subjective criteria to delete the wrong
articles, and mindlessly wields objective criteria with the same result in
other areas.

Anyhow, I'm rambling now. Just my two cents.

Johnleemk