On 01/01/2008, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Bleh. We tried to enforce thinking?
I really hate "notability". There's this general issue of what do we include, and what do we not include, and there are probably 4 or 5 totally different approaches we could take...and "notability" is one of the worst. Someone fix it, pls, tx.
No. All the others are worse. Importance sounds great until you realize that rather a lot of our articles would be about sanitation engineers and would have to pretty much entirely consist of original research. Mind you that assumes that we could even a agree that preventing large numbers of human deaths is important.
"Everything we can find a source for" fails to consider the existence of tabloids and various propaganda organs.
"Everything we can find a reliable source for" apparently violates BLP.
"Everything we can find a non trivial number of reliable sources for or show that such sources are likely to exist" is pretty much identical to notability.
"Everything that people agree should be in an encyclopedia" might look good on paper but a case could be made under it for deleting [[Cat]]
No notability is a good as you are going to get. Well enough defined that people can generally agree what to argue over and fuzzy enough to avoid breaking down too spectacularly when faced with a corner case.