[WikiEN-l] Gated Communities - Notable or not?

[Ian Woollard]

On 21/01/2008, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> this seems a little circular.


It does *seem* so, but it's not circular, since nobody is made notable by
noting themselves.

how do we tell who is notable in the first
> place?


Because other people note them in turn. ;-)

and how to we get out of this trap?


If you think about it, this is the same kind of problem faced by search
engines. When you do a search for web pages they give you what we can call,
for the sake of this argument, the 'most notable' web pages that contains
the words you're looking for, where notability is related by how many web
pages link to a page, and how many link to the pages that link to them, and
so on.

Which is the same thing, And it's a solved problem.

So in principle the same formal algorithms (e.g. PageRank) can be applied to
the wikipedia concept of notability (but of course notability in this case,
not over webpages, instead over all the books, films, magazines, people's
comments etc. etc.) And we would get an unambiguous number that corresponds
to notability.

Of course in the real world, we aren't running the algorithm, and we expect
that editors to more or less know who and what are notable and who aren't,
and it may look very different at first. But I think if you look at what the
people are doing, it amounts to essentially the same idea as what google do
with webpages; but run in peoples heads in a distributed way, they keep
track of the most notables for the subjects they are interested in in much
the same way.

Right?

--
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>

-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.