[WikiEN-l] The Economist on "notability"

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 13, 2008, at 11:34 AM, Ian Woollard wrote:

> Yes, I completely agree with that. Provided the conclusion drawn is
> not synthetic- it has to be totally unarguable from the source, then
> the piece itself is a very good source on what it said.
>

I feel obliged to point out that, as a scholar working in popular  
culture, the phrase "totally unarguable from the source" is almost,  
but not entirely, meaningless. I point this out because it's an  
arbitrarily high standard that almost any claim can be argued to fall  
short of. The reasonable standard is "arguable straightforwardly from  
the source." That is, anybody reasonable, upon looking at the source  
and the claim, would go "OK, yes, I see why that claim is being made."  
One advantage of this standard over others is that we have a large  
number of reasonable people who can perform this check with no  
equipment other than their own presumably good judgment.

> But that's very different from notability. Notability is whether what
> it says or is is actually important, rather than what it exactly says.
>
> And it's critical that these not be confused.
>
> In other words, notability is about whether we are violating NPOV by
> even mentioning it in the wikipedia. Are we giving it undue weight by
> making an article about it?
>

No. That is not what notability is. There are many problems with  
having an article on my quite wonderful but largely non-notable little  
sister. None of the ten largest problems are that the article would  
violate NPOV.

> If you have (say) 3.5 million articles in the wikipedia and somebody
> makes an article on a random star in the sky, it had damn well better
> be the case that that star is about as important as the other 3.5
> million other articles.

This is a standard I cannot even begin to wrap my head around. How  
would one even begin to go about discussing whether Alpha Centauri,  
the 1985 film Legend, and squirrels are all equally important? Equally  
important to and for what? Whatever value [[WP:N]] provides, it is  
manifestly not a way to judge the comparative importance of two  
million concepts.

-Phil