[WikiEN-l] Proposal: Soft deletion

[Oldak Quill]

On 28/02/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> I'd like to propose a simple approach to dealing with article subjects
> of questionable notability, which may represent a solution to many of
> the conflicts surrounding such articles. I apologize if this has been
> debated before; if so, please point me to the relevant
> thread(s)/page(s).
>
> Our policy is simple: We demand reliable evidence for the notability
> of a subject. While the scope of such evidence will certainly continue
> to evolve, the principle is not negotiable.
>
> We delete articles that fail to establish notability. Deletion hides
> revisions from everyone but admins, a very small percentage of our
> user base. Importantly, it even hides them from the authors of the
> article.

I've always been particularly uncomfortable with using "notability" as
a justification for deletion. It's such a flimsy, changeable notion:
an editor declares an article "non-notable" if they have either not
heard of it, or have little interested in the subject. When you take a
Wikipedia with largely English-speaking editors based in the US and
Europe, notability ends up skewing our coverage. For example, a
relatively obscure cable network show airing in the US will be
"notable" to his group of people, but wouldn't be notable to a group
of Chinese-speaking editors from the PRC. It doesn't really seem to
matter if the article is of potential interest to a particular culture
or that it will be of interest to future readers. It also doesn't seem
to matter that disk space is cheap and that it would be better to side
with caution and keep the article rather than dump it.

Since Wikipedia is a global, multilingual project we should set our
threshold for notability low. A subject that generally isn't notable
to editors in our main demographics should still get an article. I'm
not sure how we should prevent notability having too much influence in
the future.

Your solution makes for a good compromise (and perhaps makes
"notability" workable). It honours the notion enough to remove article
status from some subjects which may not deserve an article, but not
enough to get rid of articles which are of potential interest to some.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)