[WikiEN-l] Notability in Wikipedia

[Ken Arromdee]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Charles Matthews wrote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notability_in_Wikipedia
> >   
> Rather misses the points that (a) the "sources" metric for notability is 
> horribly bad, in that "famous for being famous" rates much higher than 
> "made an obscure medical advance that only saves thousands of lives a 
> year", unless you work on it, and (b) notability is a really bad concept 
> for determining inclusion, except that we have no snappy replacement.  
> Inclusion is what matters, ultimately.  "Voting on notability" is 
> obviously evil piled on evil, but somehow the double negative has worked 
> for us.

Another point: I've never understood (at least since starting to think about
it) why notability should have anything to do with reliable sources.  It
seems to me that what we really want is *widely used* sources.  If something
receives heavy coverage in an unreliable source, it makes no sense not to
include it.