"I haven't heard about it" or "I don't like it" are bad arguments and have nothing to do with notability. Notability is not hard and fast, but not as flimsy as you make it out to be. We have have plenty of notability criteria around and someone should be able to show why an article doesn't meet any of those before they have any chance of successfully deleting or nominating something.
Mgm
On 2/28/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
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@gmail.com)
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