[WikiEN-l] Who wins

Thu Apr 20 21:09:58 UTC 2006

>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.

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.

Pete