[WikiEN-l] Policies, notability et al, was Request to Wikipedians for BBC Documentary
Surreptitiousness
surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com
Tue Aug 18 22:55:38 UTC 2009
wjhonson at aol.com wrote:
> I believe tantamount not to "rules can be broken" but rather to "rules can
> change". I never advise people to be bold *against* policy, but rather
> to go to the policy discussion pages and see whether or not their
> situation might be an exception that we'd like to include *in* the
> policy.
>
I agree, although I think it depends upon the case. It all depends upon
which policy you are talking about.
> By the way, I dispute that notability guidelines were laid down to
> prevent "advertising, spam and original research". For example I think
> in the Porn Actors notability it states something like that they must
> have appeared in at least five films or something of that sort.
>
Yes, but the driving impetus was to stop vanity pages and advertising,
if you look back at the discussions regarding drafting the porn
guidance, you'll see advertising was a concern for those
participating.The trouble with gaining consensus on anything for fiction
is that there are people who won't even allow a bar like "has to have
appeared in five works of fiction". I've just had to point out to
someone that their whole argument, which was based upon the fact that
subject specific notability guidance couldn't extend or provide an
alternative route to notability beyond that in the main notability
guidance, actually contradicted the notability guidance itself, which
emphatically states the opposite. I'm also concerned with a potential
rewrite of the intro to our notability guidance being discussed on the
talk page, because it looks like it might remove these subject specific
routes. We're kind of losing sight of the argument that we don't have
to think of Wikipedia as paper, and that each article is a different
page and a different entry. We've kind of lost sight of the argument
that because we aren't paper, our articles can be seen as sections of
one large article. So like you say, or at least I'm assuming you're
saying, our porn star coverage is allowed to go to as deep as possible
to ensure our coverage is as broad, wide and encompassing. That means
saying five films is enough, to sate the desire of those who become
immersed in the field. (It's kind of hard to avoid double entendres with
this subject)
> You can certainly create a list of porn actors who have only appeared
> in a single film *without* doing any original research. Remembering
> that source-based research is not "original" just because it's "new to
> a major publication". Original research involves the *creation* of a
> new fact, not just the re-reporting of it no matter the source,
> provided it's been published in some format previously. A video box
> cover is a publication format. So reading names off it, is not
> original research.
>
I'm aware of the arguments. The big flaw in the argument you are
pushing is that our policies, especially no original research, call for
articles to rely mainly on published reliable secondary sources. That's
been in policy in some form or another for ages, I think it is one of
Larry Sanger's additions to the rule book. It's currently coming into
play in a number of places. So yes, fine, you can read stuff of a dvd
box, but the argument is, if that's all you have, then you don't have an
article. You also don't have an article if you have a lot of primary
and tertiary sources, but very few secondary sources. I think the
trouble is that very early on you'd have people interested in science
subjects writing policies over here, and people interested in fiction
subjects writing policies over there, and conflict has ensued when
people discovered the other "set of policies" and started applying them
to the "wrong" subject, if you see what I mean. And original research
is really hard to apply to fiction, because a lot of it surprisingly
does amount to interpretation. Now yes, we should let consensus
determine content, but is that a consensus as defined in policy or by
editors? And then we fall into arguments over what a local consensus
is. Surprisingly few people appreciate the argument that a consensus
enshrined in a policy can be just as localised as any other. I can
never tell if that's small mindedness or political ignorance. I also
find people are too busy arguing at article "a" in order to protect or
advance positions at articles "b", "c" and "d". It would be so much
easier if there was some way of just debating the merits of article "a".
Alternatively, I find the people I think of as my peers are increasingly
avoiding debates and just editing the encyclopedia. I kind of
appreciate and understand that.
More information about the WikiEN-l
mailing list