[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Matthew Brown]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I will repeat my conviction that our notability guidelines are the
>  biggest PR blunder we engage in.

Perhaps, as David says, BLP are greater, but the problem there is not
generated by Wikipedia's internal culture; it's created by people
coming in from outside to add things.  'Notability', though, is a
problem we grew all on our own.

>  Which is all the more frustrating given that the problem with most of
>  these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a
>  fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts
>  of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on
>  a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a
>  distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable
>  content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced
>  elsewhere.

Exactly.  And it's got to the point now that deletionists are
enforcing "one topic, one article" by making it impossible to break
out further information to sub-articles, which is the natural and
hypertext thing to be doing.

-Matt