Stan Shebs wrote:
Philip Sandifer wrote:
And it's a disaster that can be laid squarely
at the feet of the
grotesque axis of [[WP:RS]] and [[WP:N]] - two pages that are eating
Wikipedia alive from the inside out. (And I don't mean this in terms
of community. I mean that they are systematically being used to turn
good articles into crap, and have yet to demonstrate their actual use
in turning bad articles into good ones.)
I can relate to this - just today I had an uninformed editor claim one
of the world's famous postage stamps is "non-notable" because the
article only has one reference - apparently the part where the reference
is a page in the most authoritative works in philately doesn't matter,
because he couldn't manage to find it mentioned more than once online.
The mind boggles at the multiple incompetences, but since it's all done
with templates, even the least capable of editors is enabled to cast
aspersions on good content.
Not long ago there was a proposal to relocate the items that appear on
AfD to the various WikiProjects so that the requests could be looked at
by people who have some understanding of the issue. As usual that got
nowhaere.
Even so, I understand why the guidelines were created,
to close
loopholes that have been discovered and exploited. Alternate ideas that
don't rely on magical thinking are still welcome.
The sad part is that many who quote or apply the rules have absolutely
no understanding of what went into producing those rules.
Ec