[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Kurt Maxwell Weber]

On Saturday 08 March 2008 02:36, Ian Woollard wrote:
>
> Um. I think we want people to read the wikipedia though.

I don't see why.  Personally, I couldn't care less.

> Why would 
> people bother contributing if nobody reads it?

Because it's fun.

> Do our audience want us 
> to be high in google rankings?

> There's subtle problems with abandoning notabilty, like every corner
> store in the entire damn world would want and would be able to get a
> wikipage. 

And what's wrong with that?

> That's one of the important functions that notability deals with,
> without it, every single tiny company in the whole world will have an
> article for business reasons,

So?  As long as it's factual and NPOV, what do we care WHY it's there?

> So ANY junky article in the wikipedia, is BIG in web terms. Do we have
> a responsibility to the rest of the web? Not per se. But the rest of
> the web decides how big we are and they can diminish us;

So what?

> that could 
> well mean that our current best articles become a lot less
> significant.

So what?

>
> Not if the wikipedia has an article on almost every word in the
> English language, which it soon will have, and has effectively SEO'd a
> bunch of non notable articles on any particular topic up above the
> rest of the web. I say that it's really not a good idea at all for the
> wikipedia to do that; they trust us, and we must not abuse that trust.

We don't ask them to trust us; we have no responsibility to maintain it.

>
> No, I said that they valued covering everything HIGHER than they
> valued quality, and I stand by that assessment.

It's a correct assessment.  Why is it wrong to hold that position?
-- 
Kurt Weber
<kmw at armory.com>