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

[Geoffrey Burling]

David Gerard wrote:

> 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?

The reason why anyone would bother wanting to read the article in 
question. Well, that's what I'm trying to convey whenever I use the 
words "notable" or "notability".

Even then, my concerns can often be satisfied simply by rewriting the 
article's opening paragraph. For example, if an article begins with 
"Linus Torvalds is a Finnish computer programmer", that sentence would 
greatly tempt me to nominate the article for deletion on the basis that 
Torvalds was not notable. However, I know something about computers, so 
I know that hypothetical opening sentence should be rewritten as "Linus 
Torvalds created and manages the development of the Linux operating system."

I'll admit that biographies are the low-hanging fruit in this exercise; 
when one begins to consider articles about ideas, literature, groups and 
businesses & so on that it gets more difficult or separate the notable 
from the cruft. Still, if an article has a strong lead paragraph that 
explains the significance of its subject in a few sentences, notability 
should not be an issue. It's when the writing is bad (or the requirements 
of NPOV or attribution force the opening to be undeniably uninformative) -- 
or someone is attempting to slip in yet another example of vanity, PR or 
other garbage -- that the issue of "notability" is raised.

But I'm probably unique in this usage.

Geoff