[WikiEN-l] Defeat: Notability is Policy

[White Cat]

We assume good faith. It isn't OR to say that Jean-Luc Picard is bald. If
you watch any episode of the next generation this is trivial to establish.
However this information isn't available for free. You'd need to either buy
a dvd or watch it on TV and pay by watching commercials.

Shows like Star Trek are inherently notable. An average Star Trek episode
has a rather crowded audience. Now an average home video does not. Perhaps
only the baby's parents care about the video. Now on a traditional
encyclopedia you would not find an article on individual star trek episodes.
We are fortunately not such an encyclopedia. If people want to write about
fiction, who are we to tell them that they can't.

Of course OR is unwelcome but OR is hardly a major problem. Eventually every
article will be rewritten to the quality standards of every/most guideline
out there. Not complying with guidelines makes an article problematic but
that doesn't mean we delete it on sight. It is a work in progress.

[[WP:SPINOUT]] and [[WP:STUB]] are not banned. However if you interprete
WP:V like that you are puging such articles.

    - White Cat

On Feb 2, 2008 3:14 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 02/02/2008, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > If this trend doesn't
> > stop I think it might be better to start fragmenting Wikipedia into more
> > special-interest subgroups, as was done with Comixpedia, Wookieepedia,
> > and so forth. If we can at least keep them with the same licensing and
> > wiki code then perhaps someday it can all be brought back into the same
> > fold again by some other aggregator.
>
> I think that this is a good idea. That way the people that make the
> decisions on notability are more likely to have a firm handle on what
> is notable in the particular area they are using. One of the problems
> in the wikipedia and the *world* is that people tend to deny the
> importance of things they are not familiar with; and the wikipedia
> tends to reflect that, and that tends to cause deletionism.
>
> > The key problem for me is the "third party" requirement. I can write an
> > accurate article on an episode of a TV series by using the DVD and its
> > commentary track as a source, for example, and anyone else with a few
> > dollars to spare can get their own copy and verify my work, but for some
> > reason even if I'm perfectly willing to spend hours and hours crafting
> > this article to whatever standards of quality are desired it's just not
> > acceptable to have it on Wikipedia.
>
> That's a subtle form of OR though. It's OR that the TV series is
> important enough to be in the encyclopedia in the first place. How
> could anyone ever remove anything? How could anyone ever prove or
> disprove that an untraceable editor had nothing to do with the TV
> series in the first place? At least if it's we trace the notability to
> a reliable source then self-interested articles are much less likely,
> and it's fairly unambiguous whether we can add it or not. There needs
> to be some rules, and the rules need to more or less work.
>
> These rules more or less do work.
>
> > There's _baby_ in that bathwater.
>
> Mmm. But is it a beautiful baby? If there's not even any 3rd party
> information on it, probably not, except to its parents.
>
> Aren't we mostly trying to collect the shiny stones that are lying on
> the beach that is this world, the ones that people are interested in,
> not just the dull rocks?
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
> imperfect world things would be a lot better.
>
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