[WikiEN-l] Pernicious cases of Process over Product

[Todd Allen]

On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Phil Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Or: The Continuing Saga of the Disaster That is Notability
>
> [[Fábio Pereira da Silva]] is a player on the first squad of
> Manchester United - the current European club football champions. This
> is, by any standard, a big deal. He passes [[WP:N]] trivially,
> requiring all of 15 seconds to find multiple independent sources.
> Nobody sane would dispute that he is a notable, high-profile figure.
>
> However, WP:ATHLETE says that athletes can only be included if they
> compete professionally. he was injured when Man U bought him, and so,
> despite being a high-profile and much-covered signing, he has yet to
> appear for the squad. He's listed as part of the squad. He has a shirt
> number. He's the subject of much media coverage. But he hasn't
> appeared on the pitch yet. And because of close-parsing of WP:ATHLETE,
> his article was deleted. (Mind you, I dispute the entire notion that
> individuals compete in professional soccer. There are no individual
> trophies. Teams compete, and he is a member of Manchester United)
>
> There is no question that he is a notable figure, by both our
> idiosyncratic definition and by any common sense definition. There is
> no question that he is someone we will have an article about. There is
> no question about the accuracy of the article we had. But because of
> technicalities, the article is deleted, and plenty of people are
> willing to wheel war and insist on process over the obvious product.
>
> I will note, my investment in this is that I wanted to know what
> position he played, and I couldn't find it on Wikipedia. Which is to
> say, I was acting as a user in this case, looking up a clearly notable
> person, and was denied because people are insistent on technicality-
> based argument instead of thinking about usefulness.
>
> The real problem here, though, is that our notability policies
> expressly encourage this sort of bean-counting instead of considering
> process. We have reduced inclusion decisions as much as possible to
> mechanical operations, often because of reasoning about how people
> will "abuse" discretion and push for bad decisions on AfD. And so
> instead we have mechanical precision conducting its own abuses with no
> room for discretion-based oversight.
>
> This remains the most pernicious legacy of deletionism on Wikipedia -
> the complete rejection of what our users actually want and use the
> site for in favor of mechanical decision making created because people
> were frustrated at the number of users who wanted to block their
> idiocy in specific cases, so they created a general rule that ignored
> the specific.
>
> I continue to defy anyone to give me one good reason why the complete
> demolition of WP:N and its associated pages, and the replacement of
> them with a simple paragraph on the importance of only documenting
> things of lasting importance would not lead to a better and more
> harmonious project.
>
> -Phil
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Actually, you and I are going to agree to some degree here. If the
article passes the main notability guideline, it is acceptable,
regardless of what a subguideline says. I think, though, that the
general guideline has it right. We shouldn't be -subjectively-
deciding what's of lasting importance, because my version of "This is
of lasting importance" might be your "This means nothing and never
will". So we do what we do in all such cases-we don't editorialize and
argue on our own opinions. We instead look for verification.

Yes, notability is verifiable! In this case, it's as easy as saying
"Have several solid, reliable sources that don't have some vested
interest in publishing material about this chosen to publish a
significant amount about it?" If the answer is "Yes, they have", our
reliable sources are implicitly telling us "Hey, this is important".
If they've published no or trivial coverage, they are telling us "This
is not that important". The GNG says basically what every other
content policy does-when in doubt, look at the references and follow
their lead.

I agree that the sub-notability guidelines allow for the exact kind of
subjectivity we shouldn't have and need to go, both in deleting things
which should be kept and in keeping things that need to be deleted, as
the example you brought up illustrates well. If a(n)
(athlete|fictional character|book|album|person|porn
star|movie|village|foo|bar|baz) has a significant amount of coverage,
it's probably a good candidate for an article. If it has some trivial
coverage or name drops, it might be a candidate to mention briefly in
a different article. If it's not verifiable at all, it stays out. That
should be all we look at-not "Do I think a (gold record|pro
athlete|etc. etc.) is notable?", but "Do the sources we rely on for
our articles think this particular subject is notable, and express
that by writing about them a good deal?"

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.