On 1/19/06, Peter Mackay <peter.mackay(a)bigpond.com> wrote:
Well, yes, but it paves the way, you see. The question
seems to be,
for notability: "Where do you draw the line?"
Well, yes. But before you even draw the line, you must ask "roughly
what kinds of things do we want IN, and what kinds of things do we
want OUT?"
And again I make the point that if DG is getting hot
under the collar about
the buyers, sellers, collectors and experts of dolls starting up their own
wiki because they are concerned that their articles will be deleted by
ignorant teenagers, then what on earth is wrong with including fast food
outlets, which are worth far more than even the most expensive doll on eBay.
I didn't follow the thread, but presumably they weren't listing
individual copies of models of dolls, but rather the model as a whole?
Similarly, the Ray's pizza shop example was about a phenomenon of
similarly-named shops, without delving into the locations of
individual members.
Not that I'm arguing for a string of articles on
fish and chip shops, but
the criteria for notability must necessarily be flexible depending on the
topic.
I think we should first have these "meta-guidelines" established,
independently of any domain. We should work out once and for all why
we even want to have notability guidelines. Mostly this seems to be
expressed as "Wikipedia isn't paper, but let's get real here" or
"Space is cheap, but it isn't free".
Once we have such meta-guidelines (or call them "general principles"
or "notability policy" or something if you like), then individual
domains can express those meta-guidelines in ways that make sense for
the domain. Starting from scratch for each domain, as is the case
now, means one domain may be turfing out every article which doesn't
satisfy rigid criteria for inclusion while another turfs out almost
nothing. Hence, popular but very local music groups get turfed. And
inconsequential beetles get kept.
Steve