On 11/28/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/28/06, Tony Jacobs <gtjacobs(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
What definition of "notable" are you
using? The only definition of that
word that matters at Wikipedia is: "A topic is notable if it has been
the
subject of multiple, non-trivial published works
whose sources are
independent of the subject itself." That's not true of GNAA, ergo
they're
not "notable", which simply means that
it's impossible to write a
properly
verifiable article about them. We don't want
to keep an unverfiable
article
around, no matter how much "consensus" may hoot and holler for it, so we
delete it.
People who want to know about GNAA can still look them up at ED, which
has
no problem covering topics that we eschew.
The problem with this trend is that it relegates certain aspects of
internet
culture which tend not to get press coverage into the dustbin.
As much as I hate GNAA and everyone involved in it, it IS notable among
the
realm of internet troll activities.
If we have the (harmless, real, but equally badly documented)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.fan.warlord entry....
The issue of valuing paper over non-paper sources, and the problems this
provides for internet topics (not to mention lots of other popular culture
issues) has been discussed a number of times. I have seen people remove
links on the grounds that they are blogs...when it happened to be a "blog"
hosted by the book's publisher (Oxford University Press), in which the
author of the book was interviewed by the publisher's blogger.
There are reasons to put higher value on some sources than on others, but
seriously, one needs to use a modicum of common sense. Of course on the
GNAA issue, what bothers me more is the fact that an article that survived
17 AfDs (or however many there really were) is closed after 2 days as a
delete, based, it would appear, on WP:RS rather than WP:V