[WikiEN-l] Who wins

Sat Apr 22 18:19:05 UTC 2006

Pete Bartlett wrote:

>>I personally think this is yet another example of WP:V being swept aside under an
>>avalanche of Google hits, a problem in several areas at present where
>>all the POV pushers have to do is spam as many blogs and web boards as
>>they can find and suddenly an article must be verifiable (it's just
>>that the reliable source is a long way down the list, honest).  A
>>supposed meme which inspires such fierce passions and which has had
>>its fans searching the world at the urging of a website, but which can
>>only come up with a single mention in a foreign-language newspaper,
>>does not sound to me like the kind of thing for an encyclopaedia. More
>>something for a Wikicities project.  but then, I am older than your
>>average Wikipedian, and I've seen my kids obsessed by, and lose
>>interest in, many things along the way.  Whether Warhammer is "better"
>>than Pokemon I wouldn't like to say...
>>Guy (JzG)
>>    
>>
>
>As I too become long in the tooth I come more and more to the opinion
>that it is waste of time trying to find "one size fits all" standards of notability and verifiability
>to apply to all articles. Seems to just generate year after year of policy-fiddling and pointless arguing.
>
You make me feel like a walrus.

>So I wonder if it would be more pragmatic to drop these arbitary thresholds and just say "sources are required". 
>Each article has the best sources we can find for that topic. If the best sources are blogs then fine -
>the reader is left to him/herself to determine notability based on their own frame of references.
>
>Well-established material gets book citations.
>New material gets journal citations.
>Internet memes gets blog citations.
>Horses for courses.
>
>This idea is analogous to the idea of NPOV - we just provide the data and the reader does the hard work.
>  
>
I still don't like blogs, and I attach far more importance to 
verifiability than notability. 

Unfortunately, your suggestion requires a more than liberal application 
of common sense.  That alone dooms it.

Too many people live in the kind of ordered universe that can be 
completely defined by a set of rules that is always insufficient to the 
task.

Ec