[WikiEN-l] Another notability casualty

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

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.