[WikiEN-l] Notability and ski resorts (was: Newbie and not-so-newbie biting)

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 9:02 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> OK, but take the argument that there aren't so many ski runs in
> Australia, and transfer it to some micro-sub-genre of heavy metal:
> "There just aren't so many perishthrashglam bands here, so we think it's
> just fine to have articles on all of them". Doesn't look so good.

Point taken, but I would distinguish between categories that are
arbitrarily finite, and those that are necessarily finite. It would
theoretically be possible to have maybe one or two more ski resorts in
Australia - but no new mountains are being created, so it's limited.
And even the smallest resorts are pretty big operations (well, in
Australia anyway - the smallest NZ fields are run by ski clubs), have
been around for decades, have their own postcodes..etc etc.

Or to put it differently: the bar to entry to being a ski resort is
much higher than the bar to entry to being a perishthrashglam band, so
merely by existing you've done something worth writing about.

> The connection of ski runs with the naming of geographical features
> probably saves them (the cavalry coming) in numerous cases. It would be
> perverse to say an article about the feature couldn't mention the ski
> area appropriately, and include a relevant category.

Yeah, although the mapping isn't one-to-one. In Australia, ski resorts
correspond roughly with mountains, but in other countries, many
resorts can share one mountain.

> Yes it is sui generis, but WP:NOT is part of that, not an add-on. I'm
> somewhat concerned that a reliance on "reader survey" will indeed tend
> to blur all tried-and-tested criteria for inclusion, for the sake of
> other stuff that is not too useful (e.g. "I wish you'd include more
> movie rumors because I really like to read about them"). Downmarket beckons.

Yes, the question about what to include and why is a difficult one
that there really isn't much agreement on. I would much rather see a
definitive reason like "We don't include articles about potential
movies because they are too subject to abuse" rather than "We don't
include articles about potential movies because traditional
encyclopaedias never did, and we're pretending we're a traditional
encyclopaedia".

Steve