[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[David Goodman]

The practical questions are in the middle: to use one of your
examples: will they use one about the fire department in Pancake Tx,
(assumed population, 20,000) ?  Will they use one about the main
street in that town?  In either case, should we have it as a separate
article?

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Judson Dunn <cohesion at sleepyhead.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber <kmw at armory.com> wrote:
>  > On Friday 07 March 2008 20:35, Ian Woollard 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.
>  >
>  >  Even if I grant your point (which I don't, because I fail to see how adding
>  >  factual information REDUCES quality...that's about the most absurd thing I've
>  >  ever heard), I still fail to see how it's relevant.
>  >
>
>  Google search rank is mostly a function of the page for a specific
>  search term, so having an article about [[Bulbasaur]] (a pokemon)
>  doesn't really affect our search results for [[Cholesterol]]
>
>  http://www.google.com/search?&q=bulbasaur
>  http://www.google.com/search?&q=cholesterol
>
>  People, when talking about Bulbasaur online, will link to Wikipedia,
>  upping its pagerank, and when people talk about cholesterol they will
>  do the same. Probably not the same people. ;)
>
>  If we created an article that no one links to, or people link to some
>  other source for that subject a lot more it won't be in the top
>  results. I don't see that that would affect our highly ranked search
>  terms though. I do think google rank matters, in a way. It is how most
>  of our readers find us, and if there is a group of people uninterested
>  in others reading the articles I think we would be at an argumentative
>  impasse.
>
>  Anyway, I much prefer Utility as a criteria. Would people use an
>  article about cholesterol, yes. Would they use one about Bulbasaur?
>  yes. Would they use one about a Leica D-lux 3, yes. Would they use one
>  about every fire hydrant in Pancake, TX? No.
>
>  Luckily this is solved by our other inclusion policies already, it
>  would be trivial to find reliable sources for the first three, much
>  harder, if it's even possible, for the fourth. We don't really need
>  any new policy, we just need to get rid of notability for good.
>
>  Judson
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG