Quoting Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
On Nov 11, 2007 7:23 PM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
It depends on the project. Some projects (MILHIST comes to mind, there are others), would be quite trustworthy and even now often nominate inappropriate articles in "their" area for AfD themselves. Others (ROADS comes to mind, I recall them sending out a "newsletter" when a few road articles were up for AfD with an undisguised canvassing attempt, as well as many projects on fictional subjects) would simply reject any request to delete -any- type of cruft in "their" area.
Sadly this shilling has two sides. While what you say is entirely true, there is almost nobody around on wikipedia who would say that despite military history buffs monomaniacal interest in their subject, something most people would find zero interest in, means it should be presumed a priori likely to be non-encyclopaedic.
Well, part of the issue is that Mil History is well-established so even the tiniest of military history matters often have many reliable sources. If more new interests like webcomics want to be treated the same way they need to create more reliable sources. I mentioned at one point to Badlydrawnjeff on a related note that one serious solution to a lot of problems were for someone to start a reasonably well-edited Journal of Popular Culture. Unfortunately, many of these groups focus on adding material to Wikipedia. If they put the same effort in to make reliable sources, they'd get the Wikipedia material by default.
All of that said, general assumptions about lack of notability of an entire area is generally unproductive and should be avoided if possible.