[WikiEN-l] Deletionism fails to serve the readers

[Jeff Raymond]

On Wed, June 6, 2007 9:33 am, William Pietri wrote:

> It's especially hard for me in that I used to understand it. I used to
> feel that it mattered a lot. Sometimes, I can almost get it again--and
> then it's gone. It's very frustrating. Although I'm glad to enforce
> community standards when I put on my admin hat, it bothers me that I
> don't have a deep understanding of it.
>
> Is there a good exposition of it somewhere beyond WP:N? Or perhaps
> better, an examination of it?

Somewhat ironically, the setup w/Wikipedia:Notability is what's probably
made "notability" untenable, especially with the adoption of Uncle G's "On
Notability" essay, which, while well written, completely missed the point.

Notability started out as a good way of saying "We want articles on X, but
not all articles on X, so we talked about it and decided that we can have
an article on this aspect of X if it does A, B, and/or C."

The new focus on sources (not entirely a bad thing) put the concept of
notability into a Wikipedia-only facet for a short time, where people
decided that notability wasn't what a subject did, but whether a subject
was discussed in the mainstream.  All well and good in theory, but it a)
misunderstood notability, and b) expanded the concepts of our
verifiability policy beyond what it even required.

So, at that point, even if an article's subject was verifiable, if it
wasn't verifiable *enough*, it stopped being notable.  And this was
somehow preferable.

We've reached a tenuous stalemate of sorts at WP:N - the guideline no
longer requires source counting and instead discusses the quality of
coverage, while pointing people to the long-standing guidelines that
actually understand notability for topics, but it's still not perfect.

As The Cunctator said, notability being abandoned for deletion purposes
would probably be a great idea in theory, except that a) what do we do
with non-notable material, and b) how can we keep that from being abused
in terms of notable material?

-Jeff

-- 
If you can read this, I'm not at home.