[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia broken

Sat Apr 8 00:01:47 UTC 2006

Steve Bennett wrote:

>On 4/7/06, Matt Brown <morven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>Good luck on getting consensus on that.  Attempts to define notability
>>have been rather unsuccessful.  Projects to define notability in
>>particular subject areas, rather than globally, have had more success,
>>but are still controversial and are explicitly guidelines rather than
>>policy - because of the simple fact that any mechanical process like
>>that will have false positives / negatives.
>>
>
>If we can't agree on even basic principles of notability, something is
>wrong. We must be able to explain why we don't want 50 articles on the
>same pokemon character. Even in broad, general, non-mechanical terms,
>there must be *some* binding common principle.
>
Welcome to one of the big unsolved problems of Wikipedia.

If it's any consolation, the problem is not unique to us. For
example, the vaunted 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, where
notability was decided by the top experts in the various fields,
has almost no articles on corporations, even though many were
already bestriding the world by 1900, and were rather more
important than the subjects of many of the articles that EB did
include.  The brief references to corporations that you'll find
are either connected with the biographies of the founders, or
are in some articles on locations and products relevant to the
business. So even what seems like a very solid approach, the
consensus of experts, can have blind spots.

Per-project criteria seems to be our best bet for now. It would
be useful to encourage projects to write down more of the criteria
they use informally now, and then to have some generalist-type
person collect the successful criteria and assemble into a sort of
meta-guideline that could be consulted when thinking about what to
do for new areas.

Stan