This would move the battle from one place to hundreds of places. In general, spreading a problem over more articles is less good than having one central place to discuss whether the article should be included in the main space. More over, it would burden article authors even more in attempting to maintain articles. This is a general habit of of the pedia where arguments at the meta level are dumped on editors because the meta level gets tired of the argument. Editor time is undervalued as it is, spending it to avoid meta-level arguments is a sign of failure at the meta-level.
Notability is, in fact, a two way protection. It protects the quality of the pedia, and it protects the people below the threshold of notability from being attacked in a wikipedia article, and having that vault to the top of a google search. Since people have been denied employment based on google searches, it would not take very long for this to cause a problem.
Finally, one can generate an amazingly large body of objects which cite only each other, and which look like information. In my "random article" edit swaths, a significant fraction have been "Romance of the Three Kingdom" references, which have exploded in popularity because of a computer game based on RoTK. There are hundreds of locations, characters and events mentioned in RoTK. Many of them are documentable historical people, while others are referenced only in RoTK. One article I edited read as if the events mentioned were factual.
Now take some long running roleplaying campaign. There are long running role playing campaigns that have been going for more than thirty years. They have thousands of locations, thousands of characters, and histories that stretch back thousands of years. It is all verifiable, because such campaigns often have web sites, or codifications of history. Now get one person from the campaign willing to put all of this information on wikipedia - it isn't that strenuous to write a python script that will take articles from fan source and dump them into wikipedia.
Wikipedia is ultimately for readers. The question on any article should be "would any reasonable person want to look this up?" For small towns, even very small ones, the answer is "yes". For fancruft which has reached out into the general culture, even if in minor ways, the answer is yes. For self-contained, self-referential worlds, the answer is no.
In an encyclopedia that is still lacking articles, or has only bare stubs, on some of the most influential thinkers in their fields, opening the flood gates to people typing in their high school roleplaying campaign is a poor idea.
On Jan 10, 2007, at 1:06 AM, Steve wrote:
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.