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

[Anthony]

On Jan 21, 2008 10:33 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>
Seems to me that would correspond more to popularity than to
"notability".  These two concepts are different, right?

And what's the cutoff which qualifies as "notable enough"?  Google's
PageRank works because there's no cutoff.  If I type in "Wikipedia", I
get the page with the highest PageRank for "Wikipedia".  But if I type
in "Capriccio" I get the page with the highest PageRank for
"Capriccio".  I don't get a message saying "Sorry, no links for
'capriccio' are notable enough".

> 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?
>
I think some people are treating notability that way, and I think this
comparison to Google is a good example of why it's such a bad idea.