On 7/1/07, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
But, to me, the key question is : what are they finding? If there are no encyclopedic (in the sense that I discussed above) sources to support an article, then we should not have an article regardless of the demand.
The way you have described encyclopedic sources, I'm not even sure they should be in the article in the first place. Except in corner cases (a topic which is notable for being notable), notability is a topic for discussion pages, not for the article itself.
I'm not sure you understand what I was getting at. I don't advocate a discussion of notability in the article, but the use of sources that establish notability, as opposed to sources that just provide raw data and do nothing more than establish the mere existence of a person.
It is the mission of journalists and historians to satisfy that demand by creating secondary sources through synthesising primary ones like court documents, not ours. It is our mission to write encyclopedia articles once those secondary sources exist.
There are at least two secondary sources for BP, the Toledo newspaper article and the Snopes article.
Snopes is not enough to prop up an encyclopedia article, and this Toledo newspaper article, well, where is it? It's not in the article versions I examined, and the last time this issue came up on the mailing list nobody produced it and I couldn't find it despite an extensive database search .