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

[David Goodman]

The criteria are the same as for any other source: whether it is used
in publications that are acknowledged to be reputable. It is the way
the outside world looks at it.


David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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