On 01/02/2008, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Those of you who have been following the strange life of "notability" on Wikipedia as it evolved from a series of debates on VfD about deletion philosophy to an ill-defined word used to bite newbies, and then to a series of ill-defined guidelines used to bite newbies will be saddened to know that the last firewall on this issue has now been breached, and notability has been enshrined at the level of policy instead of guideline.
Despite a number of objections, consensus seems to be forming on WP:V to include the line "If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it." in the policy. This line may be familiar in its more-cited form, "A topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject," from WP:N.
So there you go. The process that is most often used to generate bad press, hurt feelings, and upset newbie contributors is now enshrined as policy.
Go us?
I've always considered the former definition to be "verifiable", and the latter "notable". Verifiable is a pretty objective, pretty easy-to-use guideline - something is either verifiable or it is not. Notability (the key word in the definition is "significant"), is a subjective judgment. Since there is no fixed definition, it changes per person. Notability is so flexible that it can mean many things to many people and is often used as a proxy to delete articles people think shouldn't be on Wikipedia for other reasons.