[WikiEN-l] Tim Noah addresses the notion of notability in another Slate article

[Stan Shebs]

David Gerard wrote:
> Hm, true. But our present notability guidelines suffer from (a) their
> original purpose (as an excuse) (b) arbitrary numerical cutoffs.
> There's something important being missed: what precisely are we
> talking about?
>   
I think everybody does have a intuitive notion of notability, but the 
intuition isn't very precise, and it's different for different people.

The print encyclopedias make it easier for themselves in two ways: 
physical size, so if you only have so many pages, you just pick the N 
most important topics, and the editor-in-chief, whose personal 
preju^Wintuition will be the tie-breaker for any hard choices. We've 
taken away both of those convenient but capricious criteria, and are now 
faced with deriving "notability" from first principles.

I don't have any answers, but I think people are slowly and painfully 
converging on something like meaningful criteria. Verifiability is a 
factor, amount of verifiable information is a factor, size and 
open-endedness of subject space is a factor. Per-project seems less 
troublesome than WP-wide, not least because the notability discussion is 
built on shared knowledge.

Stan