On 9/15/05, Keith Old <keithold(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tony,
Fair point in that I used the words wrongly
However, I feel that my words have been taken out of context. I was
responding to a admin who was claiming that the word notable should not be
used in AfD discussions and he would speedy keep any votes in which the
word
was used.
My point was, and remains, that notability is a central concept in AfD
discussions as much as verifiability.
No. With the exception of biographical articles, attempts to incorporate
notability into the deletion policy have repeatedly failed. Verifiability is
rightly central to all wikipedia editing policy. Notability is and will
likely remain an ill-defined concept, only grudgingly accepted, if that.
There is a fairly large minority of Wikipedians who follow a precept
articulated once by Jimbo Wales: that when people use the word notability,
what they're really getting at is verifiability. An obscure individual about
whom nothing can be ascertained except what he himself, or his mother, wrote
into a Wikipedia article, can be described as non-notable in that sense.
That is not a widely accepted meaning of the word--far from it--but I think
it's the only one that even comes close to a useful definition. It would
only gain anything like wide acceptance if we could agree on a method of
quantifying the verifiable information available, and I fear that would be
far too ambitious a project for this little encyclopedia.
If a user wishes to assert that the
article is worthy of an A7 speedy delete on the
grounds that it isn't
notable, it should be open for him or her to do so.
Absolutely not. The A7 speedy says nothing about whether an article is
notable, only whether it contains an assertion of notability. This is,
unless that CSD is changed, non-negotiable.