[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Matthew Brown]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Probably not. The thing is the wikipedia gets to be the top of google
>  searches because it's generally fairly reliable. Likewise high up in
>  the web rankings. If we start allowing less obviously notable things
>  in, then the average quality can only go down, and eventually that
>  will get reflected in how people treat us.

I'm afraid this is an example of rather muddy-headed thinking on your part.

Firstly, we honestly should not give a damn whether our Google
rankings are high or low.  We're not in the business of producing
Google rankings, and we don't get ad revenues from the hits.

Secondly, our Google rankings and our rankings on peoples' personal
indicators of reliability are to do with the fact that we are likely
to have pretty good content on a topic searched for, compared to what
else is available online in one place.

If a person searches for something, the existence or non-existence of
articles unrelated to their interests doesn't alter the quality of the
information they find on what they ARE searching for.  It's simply
invisible.

However, if someone searches for something and we DON'T cover it -
because some ad hoc 'consensus' of half-a-dozen AFD regulars decided
it was 'non-notable' - then Wikipedia has failed to provide
information.  That tends to leave people with a bad taste in their
mouths; double that if when they searched last week, Wikipedia DID
have the information they wanted and now doesn't.

'Non-notable' content only 'hurts' our quality if you are measuring
quality by some pretty odd measures.

Yes, it's embarassing when some blogger points out that we cover some
random Pokemon better than we cover a head of state.  The solution to
that isn't to delete the Pokemon.

I think this is one way in which we are - as we often are - WAY too
over-sensitive to outside criticism.  We handle it poorly and
panicked, and often make matters worse.

>  Yes, there's always going to be losers with any thing that helps
>  maintain quality. Most of the measures we have are only correlated
>  with quality, not direct measures. That means that some things get
>  excluded when they shouldn't. But my point is that this is probably
>  unavoidable if we want a high quality encyclopedia, which to be
>  brutally honest, it doesn't sound like you do, particularly- you value
>  covering 'everything' higher.

It might be better if you didn't assume that because people disagree
with you they don't value the encyclopedia.

I also see no reason why we have to use any automated measure of
quality that creates 'losers'.  We don't have to do everything by
algorithm.

-Matt