[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Feb 2010, Carcharoth wrote:
>> Interesting comparison with historical antecedants! This is more the
>> sort of level of debate I'd like to see at AfD. I wonder what a
>> closing admin would make of it... :-)
>
> You shouldn't *need* to go through this level of debate just to keep a page
> around when the notability rules could be fixed instead.  Otherwise we're
> no longer the encyclopedia anyone can edit, we're the encyclopedia that
> anyone with an extraordinary level of debate skills can edit.

And yet - without the first level filtering offered by these rules, we
can't easily seek out and remove a lot of obvious abuse.

Even with the most expansive idea of what topics an encyclopedia
should include, it's an encyclopedia, not a phone book, or website
directory, or place for people to advertise their companies or
services.  If we fail to enforce "...The Encyclopedia..." part of our
mission statement, we're failing, too.

Notability ends up being shorthand for a lot of things; one of them
is, "this isn't important enough that I think we can reasonably QA and
review this article and ones like it".

If we erase notability completely, every person with net access in the
world, everyone's band, all the small businesses in the world, etc.
will all end up covered.  Say 100x more articles?

We already have large areas that are not well monitored and not well
up to existing quality standards.

So - posting the question - are we better off as the encyclopedia that
is 99% crap, or as the encyclopedia that anyone can almost edit, but
not quite, actually restricted to a somewhat enlightened elite?
Neither extreme being actually idea or real, what side of the spectrum
do we want to try to aim at, and how do we want to try to move over
time?

Keep in mind participation level statistics, etc...



-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com