On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:34:50 +0000, "David Gerard" dgerard@gmail.com 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?
Not, as far as I can tell, the primary notability criterion, which is what some of us believe should supplant all the tortuous subject-specific guidelines.
"A topic is notable if it has been the subject of at least one substantial or multiple, non-trivial published works from sources that are reliable and independent of the subject and of each other.
All we need to do now is define what constitutes a reliable source for different content areas. That genuinely will be context-specific, whereas the existence of sources from which to write a verifiable - and verifiably neutral - article which is not simply a directory entry is pretty much a universal requirement if we aim to stick to the policies of neutrality, verifiability, not publishing original thought, and being an encyclopaedia rather than a directory.
The subject-specific guidelines often boil down to "this is an area where impassioned fans of the subject think Wikipedia should be a directory, and where it is therefore acceptable to draw the entire content of the article from primary sources".
Guy (JzG)