[WikiEN-l] Defeat: Notability is Policy

[Philip Sandifer]

On Feb 1, 2008, at 6:39 PM, Steven Walling wrote:

> Get over it. Nobility has been being used as (effective) policy for  
> many
> months, if not years.

It's been used. I've yet to see any evidence of its effectiveness, and  
particularly no evidence that it is meaningfully superior to a general  
policy of deleting based on qualitative rather than quantitative  
judgments.

> Of course deleting any article is going to get
> emotional, people are invested in article's they write. But that  
> level of
> emotion doesn't negate the fact that we just simply can't include  
> every
> possible topic under the sun and still produce an accurate and  
> reliable
> encyclopedia. Space is not the issue, quality is. The breadth has to  
> stop
> somewhere, so we can get to depth.
>

Anybody who claims that the deploying of notability on AfD has a thing  
to do with assessing the quality of articles is lying to you.

> And the WP:V addition is a fabulous idea. I've always operated that  
> way, and
> it is (to me) the core reason we need notability: we can't be  
> accurate on a
> subject if there aren't reliable sources available. If accuracy is  
> literally
> impossible, then we shouldn't have an article on it.

Deleting poorly sourced articles that cannot be improved is not a bad  
idea. Enshrining the idea that we must do so on the level of policy,  
however, is a terrible idea.

-Phil