User:SMcCandlish/Notability and Deletion policy
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This page in a nutshell: This is a historical document, a diary of sorts of my views on and involvement with the evolution of the "notability" concept on Wikipedia starting in 2006. I have edited it very little since then, other than some cleanup in late 2007. Every few years I add an update at the bottom. |
Notability and Deletion policy
- Note, 8 December 2007: My views on this topic have changed radically in the last 18 months; as a result, this version is a substantial overhaul of the early-mid 2006 original.
Wikipedia's capacity to catalogue everything we collectively know is effectively unlimited, so the more extreme
Cleaning up the mess
I had historically been very skeptical and vocally critical of "notabilty" concepts of various sorts in Wikipedia, period, because of how poorly they were constructed, especially as to their level of personal-preference interpretability. What alarmed me about the
Through a lot of stress and just dogged insistence, my flagging of WP:N as a {{
Yet AfD abuse remains
However, despite December 2006 - February 2007 improvements in the guideline's wording, scope, intent and raison d'etre, problems with WP:N's application in AfD remain, largely stemming from the imprecise, subjective and radically changing nature of the "notability" concept in Wikipedia from 2004-2006. The idea veered wildly from "importance" to "fame" to "actionability" (huh?!) and various other concepts before settling down to the more objective criteria we now have (as of early 2007), namely that an article subject needs to be attestable by multiple, independent, reliable sources (the primary notability criterion, or PNC). Meanwhile many Wikipedians had already latched on to one or more of the older, flawed conceptions of notability, and are still using them in AfD as we speak, blissfully unaware that the PNC exists at all, much less that it has replaced the old "famousness", "popularity", and "importance" kinds of notability concepts.
I agree that most (though by no means all) of the articles successfully AfD'd probably did need to be either removed or improved drastically (and I nominate articles for deletion myself, and have lost an article to that process, without putting up a fight about it since the article did in fact have a lot of problems). But it ought to be for valid reasons! There are some useful essays out there about the nature of notability and what not to say in AfD, but they simply don't go far enough.
A proposed solution
I think it is going to take a concerted editor education campaign, perhaps with some inline warning templates for use in response to malformed "NN"
AfD has other problems, though
Invalid "me too, but I don't really understand policy at all" !votes are not the only AfD issue. A serious one is admins closing debates as delete when there is a "consensus" of only a tiny handful of editors. I see this all the time, and have successfully returned articles to AfD via the Deletion Review process in a couple of egregious cases. Three !votes after a week that say "Delete", or even "Strong, speedy delete" for that matter (which is silly; if the AfD really was a
Loose ends, and a way out
Another lingering problem is that WP:N is as much a guideline on what makes an article worth keeping as it is a deletion tool, but the subject-specific notability criteria enumerated at
I am personally in the process of trying to create
There are also other loose ends. For example, there is also a content guideline against use of
2010 update
Reviewing this old essay in January 2010, I find that a lot has changed, especially the development of
2012 update
I've seen a lot of further improvement.
2017 update – we still have some problems
The GNC is now the
We clearly do still have at least two problems. Over the last several years, these things have become very clear:
- It's nearly impossible to create an article here about an important and influential academic, unless by chance they're a charismatic publicity hound. A scientist may have their work cited literally thousands of times, but not be covered in-depth in multiple, independent, reliable sources (GNG). The only ones who are ones who do TV shows, popularized-science books, and other things that make them "celebrities", or those who unfortunately get embroiled in a public controversy.
This problem is why the proponents of WP:Notability (academics) are trying to hold it out as something that supersedes the GNG. The motivation is well-meaning, but this approach is terrible and dangerous – it inspires others to try this with their pet topics, too, even when there's no similar justification.
- On the other hand, WP is just damned well drowning in bios of pseudo-celebrities. Virtually anyone who's ever appeared in more than one episode of any TV show or had a single in the pop or R&B charts can have an article here. We have thousands upon thousands of junk stubs that are never going to improve. They're worthless dreck; the average Discogs.com entry has way more and better info on these people, whiile being a huge database of minor entertainers is not Wikipedia's job. Someone like, say, Chipo Chung has some movie and TV credits in minor roles, and has been interviewed and had some fluff articles written about her in celeb and entertainment rags. Oh, and she did some charity work. I sent this to AfD, and it was kept as "no consensus". Years later, the page has not improved noticeably and in some ways is worse – it is not better sourced, but it has more trivia. And this is one of the borderline cases. Innumerable articles on actors, bands/musicians, pornstars, writers, local politicians, executives, models, sportspeople, etc., etc., are flooding Wikipedia (along with non-bios on not-really-notable songs, albums, films, companies, etc.). It's a maintenance and quality-control nightmare.; most of these publishers are owned by the same companies that own the movie studios, record labels, and TV networks; those of the former that are not house organs are still totally dependent on the latter – the vast majority of their income is from entertainment advertising dollars.
Let's be very clear: landing some acting jobs in TV shows and movies doesn't make someone actually notable in an encyclopedic sense; it just makes them competent in their profession. The only difference between these people and those who are really competent bartenders and cab drivers is that there's a cult-of-personality-and-scandal marketplace surrounding people connected with the entertainment industry. The coverage they get is not really independent
What's the solution?
One idea I've been mulling is to augment the GNG with topically specific definitions of what "reliable sourcing" means for notability purposes. If that sounds weird, consider that we're already doing exactly that, just minus the "topical" part: what constitutes reliable for GNG purposes is narrower than that required for in-article sourcing, in that "multiple" and "in-depth" are added. So, it's not much of a stretch to add another layer; e.g. for academics, in-depth coverage need not be required, but frequent citation would be. For entertainment "figures", entertainment press would be unreliable for notability purposes.
This would effectively import the only good part of
That's all I'll write about this for now, other than to suggest that the real future of the SNGs could be housing this kind of material, with their gist summarized at
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 02:25, 17 December 2017 (UTC); revised a little at 22:23, 7 January 2018 (UTC).