On 24 March 2012 16:23, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]> wrote:
> I think it is important to remember why we're doing this. Our purpose > isn't the judge people's notability. Our purpose is to provide useful > information to people. It is clear from the page views they get that > BLPs are useful to people. As long as there are sufficient reliable > sources to write more than a stub about someone, then I don't see why > we shouldn't have an article about them. That is basically what the > General Notability Guideline says. > > One of the more obvious problems with WP:NOTE is that it has been fairly unclear whether it is a necessary or a sufficient condition for notability. As currently written it is phrased as a sufficient condition, which somewhat surprises me. (Not the confusion itself, which explains why a thread like this can contain diametrically opposite opinions.) But for reasons internal to what we think guidelines are there for. Guidelines, after all, function best when they give editors a clear idea of what Wikipedia expects of them, personally. Like it says ,"a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow". Editors should attempt only to create articles on notable topics, in other words. Reading the guideline the other way round is obviously possible; and the way the main text is phrased might suggest it. But, and here's the point of the thread in fact, it is perfectly possible to argue that reading the GNG as a sufficient condition for anything is flawed. Wikipedia is a wiki, and wikis do give you permission to edit. Saying that verifiability from enough reliable sources is a sufficient condition that an article can exist carries its own assumptions. In particular the "salience" condition for biographical facts gets lost. I see that whatever we used to have written about this concept has become hard to find onsite, which is troubling. Non-salient facts from dodgy sources added to biographies is almost a definition of tabloid writing, so I think we should be concerned. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
