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

[Ray Saintonge]

David Gerard wrote:
> 2009/9/24 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>   
>> He said sections, not articles. WP:UNDUE applies within articles.
>> Whether a version of WP:UNDUE should apply across the whole
>> encyclopedia is essentially the question of notability repackaged. And
>> when you spin sections out of existing articles to form new articles,
>> then WP:UNDUE clashes with WP:NOTABILITY (expand a section - you may
>> be unbalancing the article; spin off section to form a new article -
>> you may be unbalancing the encyclopedia).
>>     
> That's a view of the project that comes from an immature understanding
> of it. Unbalancing an article is all visible on the same page;
> however, three million Simpsons articles is *invisible* to the readers
> of articles on particle physics unless they specifically go looking
> for them. It actually doesn't affect them at all.
>
> Back in the early days of the odious origins of the jargon word
> "notability", back when it was a buzzword on VFD meaning "I haven't
> heard of it," people would raise this as one of the spurious arguments
> that made no sense on a moment's reflection. Like the one that too
> much text would overload the servers, so the okemon articls had to go.
>
> Please don't say this stuff without at least a moment's thought on
> whether it actually makes any sense.
>
>   
Thanks, I was trying to make sense of it before responding. ;-)

I must say too that the use by some of "WP:XXXX" in some form tends to 
be a shortcut for a whole lot of opinions about which there may or may 
not be agreement. 

I take the simple view that if something was notable as a section of an 
article it will retain its notability when split off as a separate 
article.  The idea that making some part of an article would give undue 
weight to that part seems terribly unwiki.  We used to support the 
notion of leaving something for others to do; but now it seems as though 
we expect everything in an article should be developed at a proportional 
rate, and always perfectly.  This may be fine for feature articles, and 
the people who have bought into that process.  Personally I don't give a 
damn about feature articles; I'm just not that much of an egotist.

I believe in an ever improving encyclopaedia; I only fail to be obsessed 
by that.

Ec