[WikiEN-l] Notability for FLOSS - the public's reaction

[Charles Matthews]

Ken Arromdee wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>   
>> As usual, one has to sift the arguments. Why aren't blogs included under
>> RS? That would be because they are generally unreliable?
>>     
>
> One of the things that's bizarre about notability is that it requires reliable
> sources to establish notability. 
Thought we went into all that ...
>  Something that has a Rush Limbaugh episode
> dedicated to it is probably notable in any sane sense, even if Rush Limbaugh
> isn't a reliable source.  
Sorry, what if I say that I neither know nor care about anything Rush 
Limbaugh does or says (which is true), that I'm on the other side of the 
Atlantic from almost everyone who does care, and that puts me in the 
same position as about 90% of the world's population?
> Likewise, whether blogs are reliable sources
> really shouldn't have anything to do with whether blogs indicate notability.
>
>   
Fundamentally, whether or not we had "notability" or not as a guiding 
principle, the following should be true: the topics on WP should be 
determined by "pull" not "push". I mean thaty editors should be deciding 
what to include by what there is to edit. They should not be generated 
by what is crassly and in bad Latin called a "media agenda". That is 
because this effort is an encyclopedia, not a Limbopedia. Half-baked 
topics should spend time in wiki purgatory, until their sins of 
unreferencedness are expurgated.

Certainly if we didn't have the exclusion of most blogs, we would have a 
system that would be fantastically easy to game: how hard is to get some 
topic mentioned in a dozen blogs? It is true that the mainstream print 
media will run with stories that are basically a put-up job sometimes; 
but that doesn't prove we should be less critical, but more strict.

Charles