On 7/1/07, Anthony <wikimail(a)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 .