[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Angus McLellan]

>  Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:09:24 -0700
>  From: Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>
<snip>
>  David Goodman 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?
>  >
>  The reality, though, tends to be rather more political and content-based
>  than that. Articles don't get deleted on their own, and relatively few
>  are nominated for deletion by people applying some sort of theoretical
>  objective standard (of notability or utility or anything else).
>
>  The cases that are controversial are mainly in areas where there are
>  significant groups of people actively campaigning for a reduction in
>  coverage---mainly anything to do with pop culture or recent news. If you
>  write about an underground rapper with a large YouTube following, you're
>  going to run into objectors. If you write about the most obscure
>  19th-century government official you can dig up, on the other hand,
>  nobody is going to object.

We have very few policies that govern content. The main ones are
verifiability, what wikipedia is not, neutral point of view,
biographies of living people and no original research.

If you write about some dead C19th official, you'll likely be using a
book as a source for the article so verifiability is no problem,
you'll be unlikely to run into blp as everyone concerned is dead, you
probably won't manage to add too much original research unless you try
really hard, you're unlikely to have an axe to grind, which only
really leaves not to worry about. As for nobody objecting, they might
if the subject is a baronet, or if the book you used wasn't in
English, or worse yet not in the Latin alphabet, and there are no
ghits.

Write about some rapper you're a fan of, or a TV programme you watch,
and there's likely no book, you may or may not be neutral, like as not
we'll get novel - and probably wrong, unless you're a real-life expert
- conclusions drawn from listening and/or watching, living people are
in there, and the chances are good that some sort of stuff which
wikipedia is not gets involved.

An article on a contemporary topic is less likely to meet content
policies, or to be able to be fixed up, than a geostub or a biography
of a very dead person.

Angus