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

[Charles Matthews]

Ken Arromdee wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Mar 2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>   
>>>  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?
>>     
>
> The same thing that happens if it's in a newspaper (which counts as a
> reliable source) and you don't get the newspaper on the other side of
> the ocean, and the newspapers on your side won't even print it because
> nobody cares about it over where you are.
>
> The same thing that happens if there's some European town which gets an
> article even though nobody in America cares about it and its total population
> is smaller than the audience of Rush Limbaugh.
>
> You're just making an argument for European provincialism disguised as an
> argument against American provincialism.  Notability, either in Wikipedia or
> in real life, doesn't require that everyone in the world care about something,
> just that enough people do.  "Enough people" need not include you.
>
>   
You miss my point entirely. Which is "what if I say" something entirely 
subjective as a judgement of notability, in reply to your subjective 
argument for notability. _That_ is why Wikipedia tries to have _some_ 
objective criteria for inclusion of topics. I made this point to you in 
a previous thread on notability.
>> 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?
>>     
>
> Then you need to have criteria for blogs which are stricter than "every blog"
> but still looser than what we have now.
>
>   
OK, this is a more reasonable debate. If the astronomers say that a 
particular blog on recent astronomy has the sort of stature for 
announcements that would warrant its use as a reference, then its use 
shoudn't be ruled out entirely. But are there criteria that are workable?

Charles