[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[David Goodman]

The existing situation is of great assistance to another species: the
wiki-barrister,  expert is using whatever legal processes are available to
achieve equity. .  If such a person  intuitively think an article should be
kept, they will find arguments to keep it, and vice-versa. For essentially
every article at AfD contested in good faith, they  could find plausible
arguments based on policy for either keeping or deleting. For  the
unscrupulous  subspecies, they could find arguments of some sort for a good
deal that is not really reasonably contestable.

In truth, the only general concept of notability   is  what articles are
suitably important for the encyclopedia that we want to have. Collectively,
we can decide on whatever sort of encyclopedia we want, and can consequently
have whatever concept of notability we want. There is no actual pre-existing
meaning of the term, and WP:N goes to some lengths to distinguish it from
any word used in an ordinary way. People argue as if Wikipedia should
conform to some standard of notability, but we can have whatever rules we
please. We can use a concept like the GNG to whatever extent and in whatever
way we decide to use it. For example, some people have argued we should in
some fields only count scholarly articles, and no general news sources at
all; some people have argued the exact reverse.   If we prefer abstract
standards, we can have them at whatever level we want.  To take an area I
work on, we have decided to include all college  presidents; we could limit
 it to major universities, or we could decide to include all high school
principals.   To take an area  where I don't work, we have flipped back and
forth on whether to include minor-league baseball players.

Since we have no really universally agreed  vision of what the encyclopedia
should be, almost any decision is the result of compromise. We can have
whatever compromise can get enough agreement. It's not a matter of logic,
just a matter of of what we can find that works for enough of us to resolve
the individual problems. (At present, we use inconsistency as a sort of
compromise: of articles on computer programs of very similar marginal
importance, and very similar marginal sourcing, about half will be included
and half not, so people of all positions on this can say they win half the
time, or (more likely) complain that they lose half the time.  Personally, I
think that's the worst way to find a solution.


 David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG


On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:58 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> David Goodman wrote:
> > David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 6:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On Mon, 22 Feb 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
> >>
> >>> You are paraphrasing from [[Wikipedia:Notability]]. However, as is
> >>> common enough in this (endless, unresolved) discussions, you are not
> >>> doing so accurately enough. Firstly, [[Wikipedia:Notability]] is only a
> >>> guideline, not an official policy for anything.
> >>>
> >> In practice, guidelines end up having the same effect as policies:
> anyone
> >> who can quote them in a dispute that is anywhere near close always wins.
> >> Policies don't appreciably differ from guidelines in this respect.
> >>
> >>
> >>> Secondly, you are
> >>> paraphrasing from the detailed explanation of the first section, but
> >>> missing the essential (really) point. Which is that "If a topic has
> >>> received significant coverage in reliable sources  that are independent
> >>> of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a
> >>> stand-alone article" is a sufficient condition, not a necessary one.
> >>>
> >> In the very example I'm bringing up, the notability guidelines *were*
> >> interpreted as a necessary condition.  Since the article failed to
> satisfy
> >> them, it was deleted for lack of notability.
> >>
> >> And I'd wager that notability is pretty much always used this way.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > If you look at enough AfDs, you can find every possible interpretation
> and
> > misinterpretation. A great many articles have been kept with less than
> full
> > formal sourcing by the GNG guideline, and a great many have been deleted
> > even though they had it. Such deletion is usually done under the
> provisions
> > of WP:NOT, which rules out a great many types of articles.  Although
> WP:NOT
> > is policy, there are very few agreed guideline for interpreting any part
> of
> > it, so the actual decision sometimes seem to come out only a little
> better
> > than random.  Other decisions are made on the technicalities of what
> should
> > count as a reliable source for the purpose--and again, there is not very
> > great consistency. The present rules at Wikipedia are so many and
> > contradictory that it is possible to construct an argument with them to
> >  justify  almost any decision--even without using IAR.
> >
> Many of the inconsistencies exist only in the eye of the species known
> as the Lesser Horned Wikilawyer - they illustrate the proved that "the
> Devil can cite Scripture". The phenomenon under discussion belongs
> really to the Illogical Positivist: the "notability guidelines" are a
> vast case analysis, and the General Notability Guideline is the default
> case, meant to catch the situations where no other guideline applies. As
> we have been saying, it is phrased as a sufficient condition: if it is
> not also a necessary condition, what happens? Well, the case analysis
> might not be complete: we might (gasp) have to use our own brains.
>
> Must it be complete? Only if you believe there is a hypostatised concept
> "notability" that really must be applicable in all cases. I think what
> is being said above is that there are many of those Illogical
> Positivists around, and they argue somewhat in the way I'm saying. Now
> that wouldn't surprise me at all, as a statement. People often enough do
> use any argument from quasi-policy in what is a rhetorical rather than a
> logical way.
>
> Charles
>
>
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