[WikiEN-l] Otto Middleton (a morality tale)

[Mark]

On 5/11/11 2:40 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> A while ago there was a discussion at WP:V talk whether we should
> recast the policy's opening sentence:
>
> "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—
> whether readers can check that material in Wikipedia has already been
> published by a reliable source, not whether editors think it is true."
>
> (As usual, the discussion came to nought.) That sentence -- whose
> provocative formulation has served Wikipedia well in keeping out original
> research -- is a big part of the problem.

I think that sentence serves a good purpose in the *opposite* direction, 
though. An opposite common source of Wikipedia-angst is people who have 
good first-hand knowledge that something is both true and notable, but 
sadly, lack any good sources to back that up. So it's worth emphasizing 
up front that our criterion is verifiability as a descriptive matter, 
not truth and notability in some sense of absolute truth. So, some 
legitimately interesting and important stuff may be excluded, at least 
for now, because it hasn't been properly covered in any source we can 
cite. We just aren't the right place to do original research on a 
person, music group, or historical event that the existing literature 
has somehow missed, *even if* it's a grave oversight on the part of the 
existing literature. I wrote a bit more about this elsewhere: 
http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html

But it does get more problematic in the opposite direction, as you say. 
I see the motivation there too: there is a sense in which, if something 
is being discussed a lot, it becomes something we have to cover just by 
virtue of that fact. Meta-notability is also notability, so it would be 
absurd imo to claim that [[Natalee Holloway]] shouldn't be covered. 
Regardless of your opinion on the merits of her media coverage, she 
received such a large amount of it that her disappearance is an 
important event in early-21st-century popular culture. Heck, if we 
wanted *absolute* and philosophical rather than descriptive notability 
standards, I would delete almost every article on a 21st-century noble 
family as irrelevant nostalgic garbage (should anybody care who's the 
pretender to the French throne?).

As one of the replies to your post notes (sorry, I seem to have 
misplaced who it was by), one of the problems is more pragmatic. Perhaps 
we *should* cover some such figures, but only in a limited sense. But 
once we have an article, there's a slippery slope where everything 
tangentially related now can flood in. Perhaps that's what we should 
tackle, though. Is it possible to improve our methods of keeping 
marginal junk out of an article, while stopping short of entirely 
deleting and salting the article?

-Mark