[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the ThirdWorld

[Steve]

To me the issue of notability has always been a bloated one. I'll even go so
far as to say that Wikipedia's quality wouldn't change substantially if we
could rewind history and expunge notability as an issue ever.

The primary fear is that WP will become "cluttered". However, articles that
are objectively not-notable will have very little connectivity with any
other articles. Therefore, non-notable articles will only exist within
small, obscure pockets.

It's akin to the logic Google uses to determine the weight of a site with
its PageRank system, which gives notable weight to sites linked to.

Let's suppose for fun that the burden of notability shifted from article
creation to inter-article linkage. So, I could create an article about
myself. But when I attempted to inject it into [[Philadelphia]], I'd have to
prove that my article was substantially relevant to anyone interested in the
subject of Philadelphia. If the decision to link to me was made by philly
watchers/readers, I'd venture to guess you're already talking a more diverse
and subject-intelligent crowd than the regulars at AfD. Of course, these
kinds of edits are routine--they are reverted just as routinely.

So, even in the extreme case that all articles were acceptable, my vanity
page would be nothing more than a desolate, unconnected article that nobody
would ever find accept by [[Special:Random]]. Of course, the slippery slope
folks will tell you that if this were allowed to happen the WP servers would
blow up and Larry Sanger's fork would rule the world, and eventually fund a
robot army, resurrect Dracula-Hitler-Tyrannosaurus, and end humanity.

-S

On 1/9/07, Frederick Noronha <fred at bytesforall.org> wrote:
>
> For someone like me, the strength of the Wikipedia lies mainly in the
> fact that it has space also for my village of 8000 to be written about
> for a global audience (in a factual manner, of course). If things that
> are important to me are going to be seen as "peripheral" (just because
> they lack size or not being visible enough in cyberspace), then in
> what way is it different from the mainstream... that has kept me out
> in the cold for so long, anyway?
>
>