User:DGG/notability & inclusion

This is a collection of some of my views on inclusion in Wikipedia, compiled & modified from what I've said here in various places. Some of them are accepted policy, some are, unfortunately, not�–—or at least not yet.

General rules

1. WP:N is routinely (and grotesquely) misinterpreted to mean "the subject has sources, of certain specific types". The inclusion criterion is being important enough to be in an encyclopedia, in whatever way determined--sometimes from work produced--sometimes from awards--sometimes from positions--and sometimes, in case there is no actual direct criterion, the extremely indirect criterion of WP:GNG, which is therefore indeed the default. It's a very imprecise default, subject to many distortions: negative ones, in culture areas or subject fields for which such sources are hard for us to work with; positive ones, where the increasing omnipresence of the Googles makes it possible to find multiple sources that fit the criterion for almost everything of certain types, however unimportant.
   1. We deal with the over-inclusiveness of the GNG by prohibitions on certain types of articles; we deal with the under-inclusiveness by special rules in the few cases we agree on them. By a legal fiction, we pretend that the alternate rules are justified as surrogates for notability by GNG, implying that the are such sources. In reality, the GNG is a surrogate for being able to determine notable by direct criteria.
   2. The deletionists have long been using the GNG to exclude articles--they will soon be faced with the choice of either remaining deletionists by abandoning the GNG, or keeping the GNG and being the wildest type of inclusionist.

specific Types of subject

Explanations

Redirection as deletion

Redirection is in fact exactly equivalent to deletion except it provides a link for searching within wikipedia and it makes it possible to get at earlier versions of the article if one is sophisticated enough to know how to do it--most ordinary readers are probably totally unaware of the way to see the material that was redirected. Further, it prevents the title from showing up in a high position in Google, which is--de facto--an extremely common method of accessing wikipedia. The use of redirection in practice is almost always done as a gentle way of deletion, and it is time the community recognized this. They both remove the content. A true merge is another matter. Most merges in the articles of this sort & often elsewhere have resulted in drastic loss of content, and often this is deliberate-- and in fact can even be appropriate. the term "smerge" has been sometimes used in afd discussions when this is the intended result. Such merges are an intermediate form of deletion. True merges, where all of the non-duplicative content is retained can be a true editing matter, determined in part by factors other than notability, including the length of the articles involved. But when they are in effect a decision that the article does not deserve separate treatment by our rules, then it is again , a gentle form of partial deletion, that also removes the material from prominence in Google. DGG (talk) 18:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC) (from the [1]

the general notability criterion

Re Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lauren Harries

• Delete An interesting instance of the bankruptcy of our N=2RS rule in Wikipedia:Notability (people) There is nothing actually notable in any non-WP sense of the word, but there is media publicity in RSs including the Guardian for the trivial accomplishments. If we mean what the text says, that "anyone at all with the sources is presumed to be notable," the article must go in. Frankly, I don't think we mean it literally, and it's time we revised WP:N to say what we mean, which I think is that having 2 RS is a factor, not a presumption of notability, relevant when there's no other usable criterion. Here the sable criterion is that the accomplishments are trivial. DGG (talk)

the present situation in Wikipedia today

WE have actual workable guidelines only in a very few areas, such as athletes, and the ones we do have are frequently challenged. The general guidelines depend on the chance of sourcing; since this gives absurd results, we qualify it by NOT and BLP and a very elaborate reading of what makes a RS to get some degree of discrimination between what two newspapers or books happen to cover and any real meaningfulness for an encyclopedia. I wonder what we would get by a match in Google News or Books or Scholar to find everyone mentioned twice (they wont let the database be used that way, so it isn't practical). I wouldn't call the this a guessing game, I would call it a game of being able to make an argument and get enough support for it--which is a combination of logic and skill and community feelings and power and chance and the mood of the day. DGG (talk) 14:21, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Uselessness of the current guideline

We use it only because we have nothing better, not because there's consensus. It is worse than useless, actively misleading, because it confuses the question of accidents of what type of sources happen to be findable by the people here, with suitability for detailed treatment and a headline. Fortunately, its days are numbered, because in a year or two Google books will be able to find such references on anything at all that has ever been in print anywhere, and we'll need something more discriminating than the ability to count as far as 2. But more fundamentally, I think the entire concept of notability is wrong and unhelpful. I think we have totally confused 3 different problems:

1 whether the content belongs in Wikipedia at all

2 in what detail the material should be treated

3 whether the material should go as part of a paragraph on a more general topic, as an item in a list, as a section of a bigger article, or as a separate article.

We have been concentrating upon the 3rd of these, and it is really the least important of the three. For most topics, it doesn't actually matter from an encyclopedic standpoint whether it should be part of a long article or separate smaller one. Paper encyclopedias have been made with many short articles or with fewer but longer ones, and they work equally well and have been equally successful, though the trend in the last 20 or 30 years has been to smaller chunks. But whatever difference it makes in print is much less for the web. In print, long articles needed an index; with hypertext, the material will be found just as well no matter where it is or how it is organized. Why then do we even care about what should have a separate article? Basically, because the outside world treats it as a standard of merit with respect to the subject. Many people like to see themselves and their groups and the things that interest them with as big headlines as possible, even if the content is just the same. (This is exaggerated by the increased prominence Google or other search engines give to article titles). I would myself, like to see the entire concept of notability removed from wikipedia, and replaced by the separate concepts of suitability, importance, and useful arrangement--by points 1, 2, 3 above.

This is not a statement from an inclusionist point of view--I am actually much more of a mergist, and only support many of the articles I do because of the unfortunate fact that in the present editing framework, merged content on certain subjects tends to get deleted unreasonably. Anyone can edit implies not just that anyone can add, but anyone can remove, and removing is so much the easier. Even those who cannot write can erase. DGG (talk) 18:44, 10 February 2009 (UTC)