[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 5:14 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>>> I never understood, why does notability require a reliable source anyway?
>> Doesn't - urban myth put about by people with a kindergarten version of
>> logical positivism. But no reliable sources means nothing can actually
>> be said in an article that has any content. "X is famous for being
>> famous" - we get round to deleting articles like that.
>
> No reliable sources *for notability* doesn't mean that nothing can be said in
> the article.  The restrictions on reliable sources for notability are stricter
> than the restrictions on reliable sources for article content.  Notability
> requires that each individual source has significant coverage, and is limited
> to secondary sources only.  Article content allows you to take information
> from multiple sources each of which only has a small amount of coverage, and
> it is not limited to secondary sources (in fact, under some circumstances
> you can even use material written by the subject).

This tends to indicate that you are better off putting a small
section, paragraph, or footnote, in another article, and having the
original title redirect to that article instead (or some list or
overview of the main topic). It may not be an ideal solution, but it
works until more sources are found, or are published, and then the
redirect can be turned back into an article.

That way, the information confirmed by reliable sources is kept, the
arguments over notability are avoided, and readers looking for
something at that title are sent to where they can find the
information (they do have to look a bit harder if the location of the
information isn't obvious).

This is otherwise known as merging.

The single silliest convention at AfD is the one that says you can't
merge an article that is being discussed for deletion. It is silly
because on any given day a skilled editor can merge half the articles
nominated at AfD, thus retaining the information that has been
reliably sourced, rather than losing it. But this is outweighed by
most people not considering the merge option and only opting for keep
or delete.

Admittedly, some articles aren't really suitable for merging.

Carcharoth