[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Judson Dunn]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 1:27 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

I lean towards if people can find reliable sources for the fire dept,
and can actually stir up an article that's more than 2 sentences, why
not. The lower balance on that I would use is utility and
maintainability. Would a fire dept article be useful? Possibly,
especially if there is something interesting about the fire dept
there, but I'm not sure an article on every street would be
maintainable, in the sense that one might expect enough traffic for it
not to devolve into nonsense/spam.

It's certainly a very complex subject, and there are arguments on both
sides. I would like to see the pendulum swing a little more in the
more open direction, but the actual policy changes that would come to
make that happen are complex. I would suggest that utility and
maintainability be key, but I'm certainly interested in seeing what
the community decides. :)

I do think, more than most of our other policies, notability is
hurting our image. I also think many of the people that feel that way
aren't wikipedians, and are just angry that something they care about
got deleted, without putting much thought into what that inclusion
would mean for the encyclopedia as a whole. There are a lot of
solutions, as some people said above, maybe transwiki these to some
other site would be even better.

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion