On 18 Jan 2006, at 15:39, Steve Bennett wrote:
Hi,
There are a great deal of arguments over what is and isn't notable
in various fields, but not much agreement on what the goals of having
notability guidelines at all - or why we want to delete well written
articles about arguably "unimportant" topics. In particular, as
someone recently pointed out, why we want to (hypothetically) keep a
stub written about a species of extinct beetle little is known about,
while we would delete a page about an internet chat site with
thousands of active users.
I suggest that there are some underlying, unspoken principles at
play here:
1) A subject should not become *more notable* by appearing in
Wikipedia. {The vanity principle}
2) A subject should not appear in Wikipedia when many more subjects in
its category or field do not. {The insignificance principle}
3) Imaginary or fictitious subjects have less right to appear in
Wikipedia than other subjects. {The fancruft principle}
I think these are a good start.
2. can be difficult during construction of an encyclopedia, as people
cannot cover stuff in a top down logical order necessarily.
I think there are some generally agreed non-principals too:
a. There should not be arbitrary numeric cutoffs (eg no articles on
cities with fewer than 50000 people or whatever), cutoffs should
correspond
to categories used in the real world.