[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:53 PM 2/24/2010, Ken Arromdee wrote:
>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.

Wikipedia painted itself into this corner.

Before being blocked, a minor inconvenience this week, I came across 
a situation with 13 AfD's filed on national member societies of the 
International Amateur Radio Union. Some of these societies had 
existed since the 1920s, and it is a certainty that reliable source 
exists for them, but those sources can be a devil to find, unless 
someone has access to and is willing to comb through old issues of 
QST, or can search in local print archives of newspapers from the 
time of recognition or other notable events.

WP:CLUB notes that national-level nonprofit organizations are 
*generally* notable. In this case, the IARU, at some point, when they 
were not members and did not participate in the decision except by 
applying, decided to admit them as the sole representative of the 
entire nation in the IARU. We  have the IARU as a source for the fact 
that they are the national members, and the IARU points to the 
national societies' web sites, and we often have those sites as a 
source for additional information about the societies, information 
that is highly likely to be true. In ordinary language, that means 
that they are "reliable" for that purpose. This is not controversial 
information.

But the problem is obvious. I proposed a change to the guideline, a 
special provision, that *generally* a recognized national member 
society of a notable international society would be notable. If you 
know the notability debates, you can anticipate the objections. 
"Notability is not inherited." A bit more puzzling was the claim that 
the IARU was not independent from the admitted member. As to the act 
of admission, it certainly was! It will only admit one society, and 
it appears that when there are conflicting claimants, they want them 
to get it together and form a uniting society. Tehy want one 
representative in the nation to represent the international union to 
the government of that country, and, as well, to represent the 
country's interests before the IARU and international bodies.

I got practically no support at the relevant talk page (it is the 
talk page for the guideline that WP:CLUB) points to. And there was no 
support at WP:RSN for the proposition that the IARU was reliable for 
the purpose of determining membership and official web site URL.

Yet what happened at AfD? Out of 13, 11 closed as Keep, 1 as Delete, 
and 1 as No Consensus. Some of the Keep results had exactly the same 
lack of "independent sources" as the Delete result.

Guidelines are supposed to represent actual practice, not prescribed 
practice. The point is to avoid disruption from AfDs that will fail, 
or from insistence on keeping something that will be deleted. But the 
editors who sit on the guidelines seem to think otherwise, and one of 
them complained that editors, voting in the AfD, were not following 
the guideline, and he helpfully pointed to it. As he had just changed 
in an effort to make crystal clear his interpretation, which was 
obviously not theirs!

By not allowing guidelines to move to represent actual practice, when 
there is an opportunity, disruption and senseless debate continues. 
Someone else will read the existing guideline, interpret it with a 
literalist understanding ("there *must* be at least *two* independent 
reliable sources, period, no exceptions) and then file an AfD, 
wasting a lot of time. In this case the editor filed 13, and there 
were obviously many more on the way, there are something like 200 
such national societies.

There is an alternate interpretation. The stubs should be deleted. 
And they were only kept because people interested in amateur radio 
voted for them. Suppose this is the case. (It's not. DGG was asked 
about one of these AfDs and he basically came up with the same 
arguments as I did.) If it's the case, then the guideline should be 
clarified so that the rest of us won't make that mistake again, of 
trying to keep stuff that will only be deleted, and, instead, we will 
pull the stubs back into a list article. A similar list article had 
existed previously, and it had been decided that stubs were cleaner 
and better, because there is, in fact, a lot of reliable information 
about these societies, that could indeed be put in a list article 
(where some kinds of self-published information can be used), and 
having looked at the articles and reflected on the list possibility, 
I agree with the standing consensus. But nobody voted to remove the 
information, just to delete the articles. It's an absolutist 
understanding of what an "article" must be, based on a technical 
failure, the failure to find what surely must exist, independent 
sources for these societies, some of which are pushing ninety years 
in existence.

Sorry, something that might look like "instruction creep" is actually 
necessary, or the same battles get fought over and over. And over. As 
long as it is understood that the guidelines are not rigid 
regulations, there isn't a problem with that. And consensus can 
change, so when actual outcomes are seen, and stand, that contradict 
a guideline, the guideline should be changed no matter what the 
rule-bound think "should be" the rule.