[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Bryan Derksen]

Todd Allen wrote:
> There's nothing wrong with redirecting tons of permastubs to a single,
> manageable list. That would be true of stars in a galaxy, or tiny
> towns in a county, or episodes in a TV series, or albums from a band
> when the albums themselves have received little or no coverage, or the
> majority of players on a sports team, or.... Most of those things have
> little to no secondary source material, so a list makes far more sense
> than a thousand articles that will never get better, and may have
> inexperienced editors look at them, decide they're "too short", and
> put in a bunch of unreferenced speculation/original
> research/trivia/"Family Guy mentioned it once!". If it turns out an
> element or two of the list gets enough source material to write a good
> article on it, it can easily be split out, while leaving the rest of
> the list items as redirects. That's simply good organization.

In most of those cases it's possible to put in a lot of material that 
you would dismiss as "unreferenced speculation/original
research/trivia" but which is IMO (and I the O of a lot of other 
editors) perfectly reasonable and valuable information to have in an 
article. For example, a plot summary and cast listing of a TV episode is 
neither unreferenced nor original research nor trivia.

By smushing everything together into one giant list page a lot of that 
information is going to be thrown away. I think you're going to have to 
come up with a reason for throwing that information away beyond simply 
asserting that it's "non-notable". The validity of judging things based 
on their "notability" is what's under discussion here, you can't just 
assume it.

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