[WikiEN-l] And now for a word on trivial BLPs

[Tony Sidaway]

On 5/29/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> I wonder also how this meshes with notability being "permanent".

The statement that notability is permanent gets it wrong because it
assumes that we all agree what notability is, that we don't change our
evaluation over time, and that relative importance doesn't change over
time.  They all change over time.  Pepys used to be just this guy from
the seventeenth century, until some scholars worked out how to read
the forgotten shorthand code of his diaries.  Now he's a great source
of information about the restoration period.

The notability guidelines can be useful, but the overarching concept
of notability is too tenuous to be more than a rule of thumb, a tool
used by AfD to help to plod through the 100-or-so deletion nominations
every day.