[WikiEN-l] Most Baffling Articles Award 2007

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 17, 2007, at 6:57 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

>
> While I do agree with you on this article, your general point I find
> very questionable. When did it become such a ridiculous idea that
> subjects of articles in an *encyclopedia* should meet some criterion
> of notability? That is the way encyclopedias always have been.
>

Argument from tradition seems to me difficult with Wikipedia.  
Encyclopedias, after all, have always been written on paper, by  
experts. Notability, in that case, was a factor of including only the  
most important information - after all, if you add an article on  
chicken hypnotism, you have to remove another article.
> There are of course very pragmatic reasons for requiring notability
> (maintainability, privacy and original research, amongst others), but
> there are very convincing philosophical arguments that convinces me
> that it is a Good Thing. We are an encyclopedia first, everything else
> second. With every decision we make, that should be our number 1
> consideration. If we let non-encyclopedic topics in we will be a worse
> encyclopedia, and therefore we shouldn't do it. How is that not all
> that matters?

But see, this is where the argument gets strange - what's  
"encyclopedic" is a factor of a restriction on paper encyclopedias  
that we don't have. Since Wikipedia is vastly larger than any paper  
encyclopedia, we've already clearly abandoned any standard of  
encyclopedicness that can be derived from an external standard having  
to do with "what encyclopedias are." The standards thus become very  
much subjective - we delete articles, essentially, because a lot of  
people don't like them, and describe this dislike in terms of whether  
the article is encyclopedic.

The useful description is "if we let topics in that it is impossible  
to write a good article about." But that has nothing to do with  
notability as such.

-Phil