[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Mon Mar 8 02:32:42 UTC 2010
At 04:34 AM 3/7/2010, Charles Matthews wrote:
>Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>What I'm seeing from
> > Mr. Matthews is an argument, that, no, the guidelines should prevail,
> > and we should not change the guidelines to reflect actual practice.
>I'm certainly not saying that, and it doesn't represent my view. I
>didn't understand what you were saying so well, at first.
Thanks for noticing and acknowledging that. It helps.
> Proposals to
>create nearly 200 stubs in an area on the assurance that they are
>probably verifiable somehow falls under a different general heading, the
>creation of a "walled garden" of material where ordinary editors are
>basically told to keep out.
Well, not exactly. But because the standard set up by the decision
about the assurance is simple and applicable to all 200 articles, it
would become difficult to AfD them. And it should be difficult,
except in one way. If one disagrees with the standard, discuss the
standard. Consensus can change. But individually AfDing the articles,
making a claim that has been repeatedly rejected, no, that's not okay.
Making that global decision on notability, which would apply only
specifically to the specific international organization and its
members, and only by extension and individual decision to many more
international organizations of similar nature, simply allows results
to become predictable without writing them in stone.
Nothing about this would prevent "ordinary editors" from working on
the articles.
> Walled gardens are no good when "editors
>assumed to know" are in charge of the content.
That's correct. But this was not the issue here.
>Some better approach
>needs to be negotiated, allowing at least some informal guidelines to
>emerge.
Yes, exactly. Documenting actual practice, without presuming that
this is binding. It's actually the Wikipedia way, but it's being lost
(because it's presumed that guidelines are binding, that became
obvious in this affair, and then, if they are binding, they must be
written authoritatively and prescriptively, which then can make them
impossible to manage, editing them becomes highly contentious, with
decisions being made by the few who care to deal with those pages....
On the other hand, that some kind of result happened and was
sustained isn't deniable. Until and unless it changes and that is sustained.
>(Example: which scholastic philosophers to include? We tend to
>go by the contents of academic works of reference as at least a sensible
>approach.)
That's right. It's posible to decide, for example, that all
philosophers listed in some authoritative reference are notable, ipso
facto. That doesn't mean that no others are notable, but it does mean
that far less time might be spent demanding sources or the article
will be deleted. Someone, instead, who sees unsourced material might
tag it, or, later, remove it, but the article doesn't then get
deleted. The listing in the authoritative source would remain, as a minimum.
Another example I'd propose, without insisting on it, particularly
(i.e., maybe it's a bad idea, it's just being proposed as something
that could be considered), it's a case I ran across when I started
looking at abusive blacklistings. Lyrikline.org is a German poetry
site with the support of the German government; it's quite notable.
It has a review process by which it decides what poets to host, and
it hosts a biography, some poetry, and audio of the poet reading. It
would be possible to determine, as an example, that all poets with
lyrikline.org pages were, ipso facto, notable. As I recall, we might
gain several hundred poet stubs, fairly easily. (The poets are from
all over the world.)
Why would this indicate notability? Well, the decision that is being
made there is whether or not the poet is notable! And that decision
is being made by those knowledgeable in the field. It's probably a
sounder decision than one made by the general Wikipedia editorship.
By adopting it, we could avoid a lot of unnecessary dispute.
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