[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Sage Ross]

> Philip Sandifer wrote:
> > The problem he has? Notability. Specifically the arbitrary and
> > capricious way in which AfD targets things, questions their
> > notability, and uses guidelines that make no sense from the outside.

One of the big things that rankles me is the large swaths of content
that are in clear violation of WP:N and the more specific guidelines,
but that are de facto acceptable.

Television episodes are the clearest examples I know of.  We have a
guideline for fiction notability and there's been a centralized
discussion that more or less follows WP:N:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/Television_episodes

But this is blatantly disregarded for many series.  See, for example,
all the articles linked from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Battlestar_Galactica_%28re-imagined_series%29_episodes

For most episodes, there is nothing to establish notability.  For this
particular series, there is a moderate amount of information available
about production through podcasts and blogs by the creators, but that
stuff isn't in the episode articles for the most part.

Standard practice has diverged considerably from the official line,
and I agree with Phil that we need to amend WP:N in particular to be
more accommodating of content where the subject can at least be
verified to exist (e.g., webcomics, Battlestar Galactica episodes,
marginally notable real people).

I developed this line of argument a little further in a recent blog post:
http://ragesossscholar.blogspot.com/2007/02/wikipedia-original-research-and-popular.html

-Sage