{"id":37,"date":"2007-05-13T00:21:51","date_gmt":"2007-05-13T00:21:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2007\/05\/13\/notability-for-deletion\/"},"modified":"2007-05-13T00:26:58","modified_gmt":"2007-05-13T00:26:58","slug":"notability-for-deletion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/2007\/05\/13\/notability-for-deletion\/","title":{"rendered":"Notability for deletion."},"content":{"rendered":"

Notability is a contentious notion on Wikipedia. It originally entered Wikipedia jargon on Votes For Deletion (as was) as a euphemism for “I don’t like it.” (I was there and watched this happen. I was one of those saying “rubbish, there’s no such rule.” So of course someone wrote a rule.) It’s an obvious notion — of course we don’t want non-notable things on Wikipedia — but its application is grossly problematic, because it’s so subjective in practice and becomes a hideous source of systemic bias<\/a>. So inside the wiki people argue endlessly, and outside the wiki it becomes a source of horrible public relations<\/a> because it’s so obviously<\/i> subjective and applied subjectively. And it trashes our usefulness<\/a> for the Long Tail<\/a>, thus damaging our breadth, one of our greatest strengths.<\/p>\n

(I don’t want to seem to be minimising the Firehose Of Crap problem. There are 6,000 deletions every day<\/i> at present. “Notability” is also a euphemism for a quite justifiable “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS CRAP WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU THINKING.” Anyone who thinks they’re an inclusionist needs to read all<\/i> of Special:Newpages<\/a>. Once should be enough.)<\/p>\n

Now, then. The policy on biographies of living people<\/a> was written in a real hurry<\/i> after the Seigenthaler fuckup<\/a>: Jimbo declared “this damn well needs fixing”<\/i> and it had to be swung. So I wrote the second draft based strictly<\/i> on neutrality<\/a>, verifiability<\/a> and no original research<\/a>, so as to avoid the peril of sympathetic point of view becoming mandatory. And it stuck. Because these are the three fundamental<\/i> content policies of the wiki that aren’t up for a vote — if you disagree with them, you’re on the wrong project — it was easy to support an important guideline from the fundamentals.<\/p>\n

Your assignment: Construct a useful notion of “notability” using only<\/i> neutrality, verifiability and no original research.<\/b> Look to the living biographies policy for how it was done previously. Note in particular: you may not<\/i> use What Wikipedia is not<\/a> (especially that “indiscriminate collection of information” one, which is most often explained in terms of phone books but applied in practice as a euphemism for “fancruft”). You may only use the three fundamental rules on content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notability is a contentious notion on Wikipedia. It originally entered Wikipedia jargon on Votes For Deletion (as was) as a euphemism for “I don’t like it.” (I was there and watched this happen. I was one of those saying “rubbish, there’s no such rule.” So of course someone wrote a rule.) It’s an obvious notion … Continue reading “Notability for deletion.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wiki"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4FmVR-B","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}