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

Wed Jan 23 05:02:28 UTC 2008

Articles are intellectual units as well as physical one. They are not fixed
length pages  that we have to fill. There are only two limitations: one is
technical--for the next few years at least very long articles are not usable
by a considerable fraction of our readers. The other is organizational--we
do not really know how to write and organize long articles for readability,
besides or extremely crude tables of contents.
There is no limitation in the other direction, no inherent reason why a
short item cannot be an article just the same as long one can.  There is no
reason why subjects about which only a little can be written can not have
separate articles if they are distinct; we can list groups of articles as
easily as we can sections of a single article. There is no reason at all why
we can not have one line articles.
Nor is there a reason we should have articles about everything that is
possible to write about from reliable sources. In fact, that's been rejected
by NOT NEWS. We deliberately decided that there were certain kinds of
articles we did not want to write about in WP, even though we could. anyone
who really thinks that all that is needed for notability should want to
reject that policy.

There is only one practical consideration about what ought to be an article:
Google does not presently index redirects. Therefore, only those items which
are actual articles will come of the top of Google searches. We ought not to
be dependent on Google this way, but in practice we are--it's how people
find our articles. it's how people know about us. I'm not sure we would have
been much of a success without them.

On Jan 22, 2008 7:52 PM, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 22, 2008 5:14 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> >
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> >
>
> Google is meant to be indiscriminate and to index everything (or at
> least everything which a robots.txt or the like doesn't explicitly ask
> it not to). Wikipedia is explicitly not intended to be so.
>
> So, what do we ask? "How much independent reliable source material is
> available on this subject?" If the answer is "a large amount", we
> write a full article. If the answer is "a little bit", we might have a
> suitable list or parent article to make a mention. If the answer is
> "none", we write nothing. All of these are in keeping with our core
> policies. "No original research" indicates that we don't second guess
> reliable sources, just follow their lead. If their lead is "this isn't
> important enough to write about", we don't say "Well they're wrong",
> we follow their lead-and don't write. Undue weight indicates much the
> same thing-sources indicate how much weight we give something. If they
> decide "very little", we write very little. If they decide "none", we
> write nothing. We don't decide, reliable and independent sources do.
> Period. That's our metric. We don't need any other. Nice, simple, and
> no need for editors to decide at all.
>
> As to determining reliability, this is a solved question. Nature and
> Science are reliable sources. The Weekly World News is not. The New
> York Times is a reliable source. A tabloid sensationalist rag is not.
> In some cases there might be an edge case, but in most cases we can
> use simple metrics. Is the source widely regarded as reliable? Is it
> written, peer-reviewed, editorially controlled, and/or fact-checked by
> professionals? Is it cited by other sources known to be reliable?
> Again, we let others decide, we don't need to do so ourselves, and we
> -shouldn't- be doing so ourselves.
>
> --
> Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG