[WikiEN-l] Primary schools - notability

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 17, 2007, at 6:39 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:

> Shakespeare lived 500 years ago, Fibonacci 800, and Augustus Ceasar
> more than 2000 years ago. Their notability has nothing to do with
> culture, not only our culture but the entire world has changed
> dramatically since then.
>
> Let's say that these three guys are completely forgotten in a century.
> Would that take away their notability? Of course not. Their influence
> on the world has been so dramatic that they have forever earned their
> place in the pantheon of greatness that we call
> [[Category:Biography]].

The last paragraph is, of course, ludicrous - if they're completely  
forgotten in a century then the Wikipedia of 2107 shouldn't have an  
article on them. We should, because they are very much remembered.

The important thing to recognize here is that notability is still  
socially determined - as is clearly evidenced by the tendency to use  
"notable" and "encyclopedic" as synonyms. Surely encyclopedicness  
isn't objective - it's the very definition of subjective, in that it  
depends entirely on the judgment of encyclopedias, and thus, by  
extension, on subjective human judgment.

It's easy to reject this as needlessly philosophical, but I don't  
think it is. Quite the contrary, I think it's absolutely vital to our  
understanding of how the selection of articles for encyclopedias is  
done. There's not a standard that's external to encyclopedia-writing  
for these things. It's a judgment call. To claim that there is some  
external and objective source from which notability derives is to  
remove human judgment from the equation.

-Phil