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Isn't this redundant to WP:V and WP:NOT?-- Serviam (talk) 19:43, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
{{
see}}
note pointing here), but deprecating
WP:N in favor of
WP:NOT would surely result in a loss of clarity. —
xDanielx
T/
C\
R 09:46, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
I have a question. Would you guys say that The Futon Critic is reliable/notable. I am using two links, http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7279 and http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7318, for the series Moonlight, and they state the source websites, but I cannot find the original info. Can I use The Futon Critic as a source? Corn.u.co.pia ♥ Disc.us.sion 07:33, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
We are at a point where there's no forward progress on any of the points raised in the last month; people have dug their trenches and settled in. At this point, the only thing to do is to take this to the next level and get an RFC ready. However, this is no ordinary RFC: this one needs to be broadcasted as wide as possible, and I'm thinking we want to get this to a watchlist noticy, among other pages, and run in the same approach that the C-Class assessment was handled - it's a !vote but going for minimal discussion (though not preventing any at all).
There are two main issues that all the above proposed points bring out; however, I would say we do not have to present them in these ways - we need simple questions with summary of the issues, so however these are poised doesn't matter, just as long as they are.
I am not asking for people to answer these questions now, but instead, what unbiased, short, appropriate language would it take to put in a good RFC that is aimed for very wide level discussion. Maybe it's better to put these specifically in the light of fictional works, but it should be noted that how this resolves for fiction will also apply to any other area.
Getting answers to these two points, to me, resolves every dispute on this page at which we can tweak the language as needed, and filter those changes to FICT and other places. Mind you, if you feel there's a third (or more) distinct point that needs to be brought to wide-area agreement, that can be added, but lets try to keep the RFC as short and sweet in text language as possible just to avoid confusion. -- MASEM 14:00, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
My main concern is that the proposals are malformed. That doesn't bother me: I don't think we should pin down these proposals into perfect language, since that will need to be done incrementally. I think at this point we need to get the *spirit* of each proposal to a wider set of critics. But my concern is that they will be dismissed as too vague, when really this is only the first step and implementing the spirit of a proposal will take some work in of itself. I'm not sure I'm being clear, so let me sum it up: I want people to say they oppose or support a proposal because of its overall spirit and purpose, not because of its exact wording. Communicating that is important. Randomran ( talk) 17:43, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
There is a prolific inclusion of articles in Wikipedia which are coming from other language Wikis. Many subjects can never be verified from English sources and sources provided are often not in English. Are subjects of articles for which there are no English sources, notable for the English Wikipedia?-- mrg3105 ( comms) ♠♥♦♣ 23:58, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
I have userspaced a draft of a possible RFC to address the two key issues above that I think will allow us to work on exacting the wording of specific guidelines from that. It can be found at User:Masem/NoteRFC, please edit freely (but remember, this is the RFC, so it needs to be neutral on the issue).
I'm not exactly sure if we want a typical discuss based RFC or more a straight up !vote like was done with.. I think the C-Class addition. I'm thinking the latter for easiest accounting of the process. -- MASEM 14:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
It seems like a good start. We do want to be neutral, although I'm not sure if the current version is neutral or not, but I'm not real fond of the word "esoteric." I do think we should make this a straight up or down vote. When we get results from that, what to do can then be decided. We've discussed this for a year, and it's pretty much opinion, so we should just figure out what people's opinion is. I think if we start with how to fix things, we'll get a bunch more people stating similar arguments to the ones we've heard. After a while it will die down, and it will be the people on this page stating their same arguments again. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) ( contribs) 22:45, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I hate to be a drag, but I think we're going about this entirely the wrong way. These are very abstract and vague questions to anyone who hasn't been paying close attention to this discussion over the past month. What we have above are approximately 13 proposals, many of which can be grouped sensibly. They offer a solution that people can either accept or reject. These questions are so removed from an actual solution that I'm not even sure if people would understand the consequences of their answer. I think we gain a great deal of simplicity and clarity by just putting the proposals to a wide audience. The proposals aren't as clear as they could be, but they're better than the RFC I'm seeing here. Randomran ( talk) 06:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I've been working on this in my userspace, and it's in a shape where I think it's ready to show - User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes. It's a conversion of our articles on the TV show Heroes to take advantage of sub-articles, and nest them sensibly. I've only done four character and episode articles, but trimmed all of them down to a reasonable and concise level. I've removed all outbound links except for ones within the sub-article format. That leaves a few artifacts where there was any formatting in the double brackets, but it's not a big issue for the purposes of looking at it.
There are things we could do to improve the sub-article formatting at the top if we were to use templates instead of enabling the sub-article functionality in the mainspace (which would require some hacking of mediawiki to make work at all). But the basic idea is there, and I have to say, I like how it navigates the topic - it really does do a nice job of collapsing our far-flung coverage on the topic into a coherent, organized whole. Some of the improvement was because I took a hatchet to parts of the articles, but other improvement is because these articles are, for the first time, actually connected and working together to present the topic.
Have a look at it. I think it works. I think it's good coverage. I think we should make it happen. Phil Sandifer ( talk) 00:50, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
( contribs) 01:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
(redent)The Gunsmoke example is an interesting one. It hasn't established notability at this point. There's probably 100's of books that discuss it, but waiting for people to read them (eat their veggies) before we can wrtie about it (dessert) would make us a poor encyclopedia for quite a while. Right now it wouldn't even warrant seperate pages for the TV and radio shows. Two editors (and sometimes me) have been working on 30 Rock lately. You can see the ep pages at List of 30 Rock episodes. With 30 Rock we've been eating our veggies before dessert, and it's making for some very nice pages. The problem is that there are probably less than 10 TV shows with the right editors to make that work (Lost, Dr. Who, Simpsons, Heroes is borderline, etc.). We need these changes until all the shows have the right kind of editors. Ideally, ten years from now when every Ivy League school has a class where freshman make wiki articles into FA, then we can cut what is truly not needed. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) ( contribs) 04:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm still not excited about the use of dir-style subarticles; it "exposes" too much of WP's internals (from a software, OOP standpoint). However that does give me an idea that to achieve the same goal for any fictional element that does not have significant notability outside of its work (this includes both notable elements of the work and non-notable elements), maybe we require that such articles titles are always disambiguited even if it is the only article named that way (and of course, redirecting from the non-disamb title). So you'd have "The Constant (Lost episode)" as the visible article title; this requires no internal wiki changes either. However, either way, this also seems like needless duplication of what should be explicitly stated in the first sentence of the lead. -- MASEM 04:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Phil's demo was a lot cooler to use than I expected. I found myself wishing the navigational breadcrumbs at the top were larger and more obvious. -- Gmaxwell ( talk) 13:33, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
One glitch that will need to be pointed out is that sub-articles for plot summaries cannot have fair-use images. To use a fair-use image, you have to have analysis and commmentary. Plot summaries are neither.
Kww (
talk) 03:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The sub-articles structure at least seems to be generating interest, so I'll work on some general style guidelines for that to give an answer to the questions of how various pieces of stupidity will be prevented. Until then, though, I wanted to point out User:Phil Sandifer/Plot, which is a draft of a guideline on writing plot summaries that, hopefully, will be able to be pointed to when it's necessary to curb bad and overly verbose summarizers, and will hopefully teach people how to do better work. I'd love comments on it - would its advice, if implemented, help the problem? Phil Sandifer ( talk) 15:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Reviewing the discussion here I see what appears to be a hopeless level of factionalism. There seem to be groups in favor of practicing a highly narrow standard of inclusion, and groups in favor of fairly broad standards of inclusion. Both sides have their share of impressive arguments, both have their share of fallacious arguments. Neither is so substantially larger or more compelling than the other that it has any hope of a decisive victory.
This isn't a new class of argument; indeed, it's gone on for many years. All rational participants with more than a trivial amount of experience with the projects should have no expectation of it ending anytime soon. Yet all continue to fight, because a failure to do so would be to concede ground to the other side. It's effectively a civil war and like so many others, it's poisoning us, sapping our resources, and distracting us from what we really need to accomplish.
In my view the reason that there is such energy and activity behind many of the modern fictional subjects is simply because a LOT of people are interested in these subjects (compare [3] to [4]). Some of us regard that situation as unfortunate, but it is not our job to criticize society nor within our power to change it. We need to work with what we have, and one of the things we have is an enormous number of people interested in these subjects, as well as a large number interested in writing about them.
I think we should be able to agree that many of the more-niche articles on fictional subjects are rubbish: there is no shortage of episode articles which consist of nothing but analysis-free plot blow-by-blows, and character articles which consist of nothing but marginally useful quotations. (Such problems are not limited to fiction, of course, but there seem to be more niche fiction articles than in other subjects.) Some people here hold the opinion that by their nature these articles will never merit quality encyclopedic coverage, but all should agree that many of them could be much, much better. With the level of interest in these subjects as great as it is, efforts to 'solve' their problems through deletion are certain to fail. Meanwhile, good contributors burn out over the disputes and new contributors model their behavior after the low quality articles.
We need to come to a compromise position if for no other reason than that it would allow us to focus our energy on the problems we can solve rather than wasting it on the ones we can't. In the threads above there was a proposal to treat the niche fiction articles as "sub-articles", accepted as notable by the notability of their parent under which a different, and generally more permissive, standard of inclusion would apply. I think this is a good proposal, since it would allow us to end the arguments by accepting the material, but keep the material orderly and confined so that it doesn't spread out across the whole project and reduce the project's maintainability overall.
I hope we can stand back and examine long view on this, and consider the most fruitful ways of using our time. -- Gmaxwell ( talk) 01:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
The problem is not that encyclopedias shouldn't be covering Princess Sally Acorn (a minor character from Sonic the Hedgehog licensed works). That article's existence does no harm to anyone. The problems arise when you try to write Princess Sally Acorn with respect to WP:V and WP:NOR (and WP:NOT#PLOT, to a lesser extent).
There's just nothing to say. When you get out the sharp scissors and cut away everything that isn't a list of things Sally saw/did, lists of episodes/issues, and the usual speculation/fanon/fanfic/bullshit, you aren't left with anything. At best, you're parroting a handful of childrens' guides to whatever series. There's so little information, so few facts, so little anything on such characters, that having an article serves only as a honeypot for the kind of nonsense that well-intentioned, ignorant-of-policy fans inevitably dump on such articles.
Leaving these articles alone says that Wikipedia's guidelines don't matter. They regularly stomp all over WP:V, WP:NOR, all sorts of parts of the MOS, and just generally set a bad example. This makes cleaning up other articles harder, because people point to them and say, "Why can't my article be an exception too?" Anyone who remembers the Pokémon test is familiar with this effect. Bad articles cannot be tolerated because they make it harder to make other articles better.
Deletion is the answer, but not the kind you think. The only way to fix these articles is to do so one-by-one, getting out the sharp scissors and cutting out everything that doesn't belong out of each article individually. Plot summary that isn't concise, speculation, trivia...all of that has to go. Once you've cut away everything that doesn't belong, you need to take what little is left and restructure it into the most efficient form. Sometimes this will mean omitting mention of the many minor characters or individual chapters/issues/episodes, or it may not.
WP:N, as it's written, is a massively useful tool for this kind of editing. Tightening it would make it easier to nuke and pave such articles, but nukes are not very precise tools. Loosening it would mean we'd have some series end up with all of [exceedingly large class] getting articles and we'd be back to Pokémon Test 2.0, making it extremely difficult to fix any articles. We have a compromise, right now, and as far as I can tell it has a plurality of support.
tl;dr version: Arguing here is useless, bad articles hurt Wikipedia, go fix articles the hard way, WP:N is a compromise and I like it. - A Man In Bl♟ck ( conspire | past ops) 04:10, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Historically, mainspace hasn't used sub-articles. Before implimenting them, this should get a much wider discussion than just WP:N. I recommend starting at one of the Village Pumps. Sub-articles are used in other spaces, sucha s Wikipedia: and User: and their related talk spaces. Personally, I like sub-articles but I think before they are implemented, we need 1) a good discussion to see if the existing consensus against them has changed, and 2) technical tools to manage them as a group. Renames of sub-articles can become problematic if someone doesn't move all of them. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 15:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Historical note: There was once some discussion (don't ask me where, I'm sure it's still around somewhere) to use a similar system to this to "namespace" articles, prior to the introduction of categories. For example, you might have an article "England" and "England/London". It was abandoned as unworkable (and eventually forgotten after we got categorisation) due to the non-uniqueness problem mentioned elsewhere (maybe London should be in "Cities/London" instead? And don't get me started on the political ramifications of whether it should be "Ulster/Belfast", or "Northern Ireland/Belfast", or "Ireland/Béal Feirste"). That said, your approach here might turn out to be workable, as it's less wide in scope, but I just wanted to mention this. I'll try to find the old discussions. -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 11:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I've put together a badly written draft of a proposal I'd like to see. Some parts are tighter than others, but here it is:
The reason I like it is because it gets away from abstract questions and gets right down to business: here are a bunch of different compromises, which one(s) do you like? The only thing I might change (besides dropping the individual editors' names -- I've included those temporarily for clarity) are allowing the supporters of each proposal to rewrite them based on the discussion that's already ensued at this page, allowing them to be clarified and improved. I would also try to improve the wording and layout of the table of contents. Also, if someone wanted to withdraw or squash a proposal before we put it to the larger community, that could only make this more efficient. People hate reading a lot of detail.
I'm not saying it's perfect. But hopefully you can understand why I prefer it to Masem's. It may be possible for Masem's proposed RFC to incorporate what I like about this approach... I think it's more clear, less abstract, and easier to form an opinion on. Randomran ( talk) 08:01, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I propose that we remove the last two proposals from User:Randomran/test. (3.3) WP:POSTPONE is an interesting proposal, but is off topic and should be considered on its own. And (3.2) User:Kevin Murray's proposal that reader interest can generate notability strikes me as unlikely to gain support, as per WP:INTERESTING.
(3.1) User:Peregrine Fisher's proposal is actually decent, and I might even support it myself. But I think it might be outside of the scope of the two main issues at hand. I'm more on the fence on this proposal, .
If we can trim back the last three proposals, we might be able to focus on the two main issues at hand. Thoughts? Randomran ( talk) 01:18, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Gavin reversion "WP:BIO is already prominently featured in the Template:Template:Notabilityguide)" misses the point that negative BLPs (not BIO) are a very serious issue, and the evidence is that this one specific issues is not linked sufficiently prominently. WP:BLP is already mentioned in the lead, but given the seriousness of the issue, and the fact that many newcomers may reasonably expect that complying with WP:N is sufficient for new articles, I believe it is appropriate to list it again at the bottom of the page. In short, for negative BLPs, WP:N is too weak and WP:BLP is the governing policy. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 09:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I've got a first stab at a guideline for branching at User:Phil Sandifer/Branching. My goal with it is to try to prevent the rapid expansion and bloat that came with categories by specifically delineating what Branching is a tool to solve, and making it clear what it is and is not. This does not amount to inclusion criteria as such, but I think it will go a long way towards working as them in practice. But I'd love to hear comments at this point. Phil Sandifer ( talk) 16:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree that w need to get away from the "article" emphasis. Conventional paper encyclopedia have varied over those with many short articles, and a relatively small number of long ones--think of the two parts of Brittanica. There is no good solution in paper, only the choice of which inconvenience: either requiring an index, or jumping back and forth. On the web of course there is. The problem here is reader expectations--that an article by itself is in some sense a signal of importance. This is echoed by the extra emphasis that pagerank gives to article titles, and the desire of people and organisations for an article about themselves. To pick an example: there is in principle no difference between having individual articles on all the characters of a fiction, and having the same information in one longer article. There is only the practical difficulty of dial-up connections--which still does make anything over 32 or 64 k disadvantageous for many users--and those users are perhaps our most important ones, with fewer alternative resources. But the real problem is content: though there is no essential difference between merged or unmerged articles with the same net content, there is a difference in principle between those with more content and less. For the major characters in a fiction, it's OK to have one large article with full information on them all, or the necessary number of short articles--but it is not OK to have one large article with one or two lines on each, or a group of short uninformative stubs.
In practice, this is the problem: the people who dislike individual articles on characters (or roads, or schools, or whatever) also dislike having the same material merged into larger articles--what they basically want is to have less material on these topics at all. As our structure is set up, this is best negotiated via afd discussions of individual articles, and if we can find alternatives to resolve questions of how much should be merged in an equally open fashion, that would be very good. What this will not however settle is the question of what degree of depth of coverage is encyclopedic. DGG ( talk)
I don't expect that this will change policy, but I felt a need to discuss this. Recently, an article on New York State Route 32 was named as a featured article. To me, this highlighted what Wikipedia is becoming and what it instead should be.
Wikipedia is NOT a catalogue of everything that exists in the world. If it were, every single person, notable or not, would have their own articles. Why does Wikipedia have an article about every single state road in America? These roads are simply not notable in and of themselves.
For some roads, such as US 1, US 66, the Autobahn, that are historically or culturally significant for some reason, they should have articles in Wikipedia. That's fine. But every single state road? What is notable about every single state road that they should all, every last one of them, be included in Wikipedia? Take the featured article on NY 32. I won't deny it - it's a well-written article, it's thorough and comprehensive. But what is notable about that road? Did Washington march along this route in the Revolutionary War? Was it part of the Underground Railroad? Did bootleggers smuggle 50% of all outlawed alcohol into New York City during Prohibition along this road? If not, then this road is just another state road, one of many, many thousands in this country (and I realize that Wikipedia is global, please forgive my chauvinism), all equally unimportant, and all, equally unworthy, unnotable, for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Even granting that there should be an article on every single state road in this country (which I do not grant, by the way), why is a turn-by-turn listing of every mile of the road included? How is that possibly notable, or possibly worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia? Here's a quote from the "What Wikipedia is Not" page: "When you wonder what should or should not be in an article, ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an encyclopedia." No way someone would crack open an encyclopedia to look up NY Route 32, let alone a turn-by-turn analysis of every mile of it.
Here's a quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Notability is sometimes used as a synonym for verifiability, although others disagree. Notability to many is related to importance. Articles should be relevant to a reasonable number of people." Well, let me say that verifibility is not equivalent to notability. Notability is most definitely related to importance. And a complete catalogue of all the state roads in America is not important.
Another quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Many editors also believe that it is a fair test of whether a subject has achieved sufficient external notice to ensure that it can be covered from a neutral point of view based on verifiable information from reliable sources, without straying into original research." If you look at the discussion section of NY 32, you will see that there is plenty of original research going on - "While driving up to the Catskills last weekend to go snowshoeing I kept my eyes open for a good spot for an image, and found one even better, here near Katsbaan." Even under Wikipedia's own guidelines, this plentitude of original research shows that NY 32 is not notable.
At the very most, this article on NY 32 - just another state road - should be 3 paragraphs long, namely, the first 3 paragraphs of the article. At the very least, this article should be deleted entirely.
Otherwise the name of this website should be changed to WIKILOGUE. -- Jgroub ( talk) 15:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC) Jgroub ( talk)
Inherently non-notable, IMO, are county roads, as we decided in USRD a long time ago (other than lists of them in each county, or county roads that have some of notability independent of being county roads) and even long undesignated roads that don't have some other claim to fame ( Clinton Road, Shades of Death Road, to claim two examples from my watchlist). But not every single road and street anywhere ... if we did have articles about that, then your complaint would make some sense. But we don't, so it doesn't.
Please read User:Scott5114/Highway notability FAQ. Thanks. — Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 18:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I remember, by way of example, back when everyone and their brother was putting articles about their podcasts up and those of us who did newpage at the time could guarantee ourselves several new AfDs every night just on podcasts. I think we finally decided on some rule that the top 100 podcasts were notable. That led in part to the whole WeHateTech affair, which I can't even find anything on anymore (short version: two guys from Singapore complain that their tech podcast, WeHateTech, repeatedly gets deleted under a variety of names and that they will get the article on some way or another because their rivals at this Week in Tech had one, and those people were idiots to hear these guys talk about it (Twit had been kept because it featured contributors who were already notable)). At one point they conceded, OK, we're not one of the top 100 podcasts but we're among the top 100 tech podcasts, so shouldn't that count for something? Eventually it ended with them getting indefblocked (I don't think we troubled with a ban) for legal threats.
To me it shows why that sort of "top 100" criterion is never a good idea if it doesn't reflect some pre-existing conensus cutoff like the Top Forty or Hot Hundred for singles. I honestly have no problem with "state roads yes, county roads no", which makes perfect sense to me and frankly seems a lot less arbitrary than other criteria for roads (you should see how much tooth-gnashing the musical-artist notability standards create). Daniel Case ( talk) 02:55, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) First, full disclosure: I did hear about this discussion off-wiki, although I was not asked to comment. This is a very odd complaint. Long ago Wikipedia reached a consensus about its notability guideline for highways. Mitchazenia has been perhaps the site's most diligent and productive editor in this area--he has contributed over five dozen good articles and is well on his way to bringing New York state highways up to featured topic status. Now an account with fewer than 50 edits in its history is arguing unilaterally for the deletion of all this hard work. Jgroub, early on you added trivia to articles. Some Wikipedians are strongly anti-trivia, and one of the replies to such people is If you don't like it, don't read it. Wikipedia has nearly two and a half million articles that have nothing to do with highways. You are welcome to read them and add to them. Perhaps bring a trivia article to good article candidacy. I encourage you to show consideraton for the hard work and dedication of editors who do productive work within the boundaries of longstanding guidelines. Respectfully, Durova Charge! 20:05, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I see the concept of inherent notability being bandied about again, and will again strenuously object. Nothing, nothing at all, is inherently notable. Not a person, not a place, not a road, an asteroid, a star, nor a television episode. I would be extremely surprised if there weren't multiple sources on this road that discuss issues about this road directly and in detail, so the road probably is notable, but that's a result of the sources, not some inherent magic about roads.
Kww (
talk) 21:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Where do we draw the line? We may as well devolve down into county and town roads (if there is such a thing as town roads) based on their level of usage. I see someone has already listed an article for the street I live on - 79th Street (Manhattan) - and that street is only about a mile long. At least the article is mercifully short. But where does it all end? With all of us having our own articles in Wikipedia? I won 1st prize in the LIFA debate in 1982. I also won a verdict for a client of $450,000 in 2002. My name is listed in connection with a number appeals (some of them winners!), in the printed and bound permanent volumes of caselaw in New York State. Is all of that notable enough? Should I have an article? I'm not trying to be an egotist here, but tell me why I shouldn't. -- Jgroub ( talk) 02:23, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I am very new to all of this - if there has been an extensive discussion about why the line has been drawn to include state roads and exclude county roads, then please help a guy out and point me to it, because I don't know where in the archives to look or even how to search.
As for the criteria of removability being that an article, or family of articles, be non-expandable stubs or lack adequate sourcing, I'm sure I could write an article about 78th Street in Manhattan (one removed from the article on 79th Street) that would do the trick on both scores. But 78th Street is just another street in Manhattan. Non-stubbiness and enough sources cannot be alone be the standard for notability. -- Jgroub ( talk) 02:36, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
And looking a little more closely, I see that there is an article on Manhattan streets, 1-14. Here's the effervescent entry on 13th Street: "13th Street is almost the southernmost numbered street to cover the entire width of Manhattan without changing directions, but diverts briefly northward as it meets 8th Avenue." ALMOST! SO CLOSE! Hey, I almost won the Golf Championship in 8th grade; do I rate a mention? There is nothing notable about these streets that they deserve to be listed! Where does it stop? -- Jgroub ( talk) 03:07, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Like I've said before, If you have enough verifiable information to write a [featured article] about something, the question of "notability" is moot (and ideally unasked). Sorry. — CharlotteWebb 02:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Okay, you have got to be kidding me. No way is someone going to come up and question the existence of over ten thousand state route articles. Yeah, I've got a heavily biased view, seeing as I write these articles myself. But Wikipedia's been around for what, six years now? If they've stayed around for this long (with new ones being added every day), I strongly doubt they will get deleted now. The notability issue is ludicrous. They are official routes and every route has a story behind them (when I say story, I mean history, stuff like that). NY 32 being a Good Article, then a Featured Article, then featured on the main page... If you do want to put up 12 FAs, 2 FLs, 8 A-class articles, 118 GAs (which most of them are New York state routes I must admit), 882 B-class articles, and all the way down to 6103 stubs (which you seem to prefer) up for AfD, go right ahead. This is Wikipedia, where anything goes. I must commend your effort to change consensus. While I do disagree with your point of view, everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all remember that. C L — 06:08, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
All this having been said, and said repeatedly, leads me to believe that Wikipedia should no longer be considered an encyclopedia. It should be considered a catalogue of all human knowledge, and thus should be renamed accordingly to WIKILOGUE. -- Jgroub ( talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Articles under USRD (WP U.S. Roads) & NYSR (WP NY State Routes) jurisdiction are slowly being cleaned up, and will eventually be of good standards. This has gone on too far, and what is the point of continuing an unnecessary discussion.Mitch32( UP) 18:37, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
In the 4 plus years that I've been active at Wikipedia, I've noticed many discussions (read: arguments) about terms that have definitions unique to Wikipedia. For example, I have a little background in structured consensus decision making in the outside world, and the definition of "consensus" varies from that realm to the Wikipedia realm, and both are different from the common vernacular usage. The same thing is true with "Verifiability", "Notability", "Encyclopedic", and many other terms bandied about. Often, the disagreements that come up in discussions relate to the different meanings that people bring to these terms. When I see disagreements about these terms, I try to look at them practically, and weigh them against the overall goal of the project to be a "collection of all human knowledge". There are practical reasons for our policies and guidelines, and our use of terms like "verifiability" and "notability" are related to these practicalities. For me, they all tie together and become an over-arching concern about keeping the project manageable. At the core is keeping everything verifiable. Notability, I think, has become one way of determining what is verifiable and what isn't. If you can write an article about virtually anything so that the facts can be verified with notable sources, then you have a valid Wikipedia article.
The above discussion points out the logical disconnect in our policy. I think Jgroub has a valid point in asking why a state road would be notable and a rural one would not. However, to my way of looking at it, it isn't that we need to delete more articles and have stricter, more exclusionary policies. No, on the contrary, I think that the discussion points out that our "notability guidelines" and discussions about "what Wikipedia is not" are backwards. They have created artificial limitations on what articles may exist. I see nothing wrong with Wikipedia having, within it, a gazetteer of most of the places in the world, even if many of them are just short stubs. I also see nothing wrong about having short articles about people who have only briefly been in the news. As long as the articles have verifiable citations from notable sources, what is the problem? An obscure place may someday be the location of a major news event. When it does, we can be a good source of information for people who want to know about the place. Similarly, an obscure person may become the focus of world attention for some reason. So what is the problem with keeping all well sourced articles from notable sources, even if the subject is obscure?
There seems to be two definitions of "Encyclopedic". One pertains to being found in print versions of the encyclopedia (which we are making obsolete). The other pertains to all subjects and all knowledge. Wikipedia is most definitely "not" paper -- everyone would agree with this. So why do so many people think we need to have limitations on subject matter that are similar to paper encyclopedia? -- ☑ SamuelWantman 06:07, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 20 | ← | Archive 23 | Archive 24 | Archive 25 | Archive 26 | Archive 27 | → | Archive 30 |
Isn't this redundant to WP:V and WP:NOT?-- Serviam (talk) 19:43, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
{{
see}}
note pointing here), but deprecating
WP:N in favor of
WP:NOT would surely result in a loss of clarity. —
xDanielx
T/
C\
R 09:46, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
I have a question. Would you guys say that The Futon Critic is reliable/notable. I am using two links, http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7279 and http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7318, for the series Moonlight, and they state the source websites, but I cannot find the original info. Can I use The Futon Critic as a source? Corn.u.co.pia ♥ Disc.us.sion 07:33, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
We are at a point where there's no forward progress on any of the points raised in the last month; people have dug their trenches and settled in. At this point, the only thing to do is to take this to the next level and get an RFC ready. However, this is no ordinary RFC: this one needs to be broadcasted as wide as possible, and I'm thinking we want to get this to a watchlist noticy, among other pages, and run in the same approach that the C-Class assessment was handled - it's a !vote but going for minimal discussion (though not preventing any at all).
There are two main issues that all the above proposed points bring out; however, I would say we do not have to present them in these ways - we need simple questions with summary of the issues, so however these are poised doesn't matter, just as long as they are.
I am not asking for people to answer these questions now, but instead, what unbiased, short, appropriate language would it take to put in a good RFC that is aimed for very wide level discussion. Maybe it's better to put these specifically in the light of fictional works, but it should be noted that how this resolves for fiction will also apply to any other area.
Getting answers to these two points, to me, resolves every dispute on this page at which we can tweak the language as needed, and filter those changes to FICT and other places. Mind you, if you feel there's a third (or more) distinct point that needs to be brought to wide-area agreement, that can be added, but lets try to keep the RFC as short and sweet in text language as possible just to avoid confusion. -- MASEM 14:00, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
My main concern is that the proposals are malformed. That doesn't bother me: I don't think we should pin down these proposals into perfect language, since that will need to be done incrementally. I think at this point we need to get the *spirit* of each proposal to a wider set of critics. But my concern is that they will be dismissed as too vague, when really this is only the first step and implementing the spirit of a proposal will take some work in of itself. I'm not sure I'm being clear, so let me sum it up: I want people to say they oppose or support a proposal because of its overall spirit and purpose, not because of its exact wording. Communicating that is important. Randomran ( talk) 17:43, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
There is a prolific inclusion of articles in Wikipedia which are coming from other language Wikis. Many subjects can never be verified from English sources and sources provided are often not in English. Are subjects of articles for which there are no English sources, notable for the English Wikipedia?-- mrg3105 ( comms) ♠♥♦♣ 23:58, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
I have userspaced a draft of a possible RFC to address the two key issues above that I think will allow us to work on exacting the wording of specific guidelines from that. It can be found at User:Masem/NoteRFC, please edit freely (but remember, this is the RFC, so it needs to be neutral on the issue).
I'm not exactly sure if we want a typical discuss based RFC or more a straight up !vote like was done with.. I think the C-Class addition. I'm thinking the latter for easiest accounting of the process. -- MASEM 14:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
It seems like a good start. We do want to be neutral, although I'm not sure if the current version is neutral or not, but I'm not real fond of the word "esoteric." I do think we should make this a straight up or down vote. When we get results from that, what to do can then be decided. We've discussed this for a year, and it's pretty much opinion, so we should just figure out what people's opinion is. I think if we start with how to fix things, we'll get a bunch more people stating similar arguments to the ones we've heard. After a while it will die down, and it will be the people on this page stating their same arguments again. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) ( contribs) 22:45, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I hate to be a drag, but I think we're going about this entirely the wrong way. These are very abstract and vague questions to anyone who hasn't been paying close attention to this discussion over the past month. What we have above are approximately 13 proposals, many of which can be grouped sensibly. They offer a solution that people can either accept or reject. These questions are so removed from an actual solution that I'm not even sure if people would understand the consequences of their answer. I think we gain a great deal of simplicity and clarity by just putting the proposals to a wide audience. The proposals aren't as clear as they could be, but they're better than the RFC I'm seeing here. Randomran ( talk) 06:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I've been working on this in my userspace, and it's in a shape where I think it's ready to show - User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes. It's a conversion of our articles on the TV show Heroes to take advantage of sub-articles, and nest them sensibly. I've only done four character and episode articles, but trimmed all of them down to a reasonable and concise level. I've removed all outbound links except for ones within the sub-article format. That leaves a few artifacts where there was any formatting in the double brackets, but it's not a big issue for the purposes of looking at it.
There are things we could do to improve the sub-article formatting at the top if we were to use templates instead of enabling the sub-article functionality in the mainspace (which would require some hacking of mediawiki to make work at all). But the basic idea is there, and I have to say, I like how it navigates the topic - it really does do a nice job of collapsing our far-flung coverage on the topic into a coherent, organized whole. Some of the improvement was because I took a hatchet to parts of the articles, but other improvement is because these articles are, for the first time, actually connected and working together to present the topic.
Have a look at it. I think it works. I think it's good coverage. I think we should make it happen. Phil Sandifer ( talk) 00:50, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
( contribs) 01:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
(redent)The Gunsmoke example is an interesting one. It hasn't established notability at this point. There's probably 100's of books that discuss it, but waiting for people to read them (eat their veggies) before we can wrtie about it (dessert) would make us a poor encyclopedia for quite a while. Right now it wouldn't even warrant seperate pages for the TV and radio shows. Two editors (and sometimes me) have been working on 30 Rock lately. You can see the ep pages at List of 30 Rock episodes. With 30 Rock we've been eating our veggies before dessert, and it's making for some very nice pages. The problem is that there are probably less than 10 TV shows with the right editors to make that work (Lost, Dr. Who, Simpsons, Heroes is borderline, etc.). We need these changes until all the shows have the right kind of editors. Ideally, ten years from now when every Ivy League school has a class where freshman make wiki articles into FA, then we can cut what is truly not needed. - Peregrine Fisher ( talk) ( contribs) 04:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm still not excited about the use of dir-style subarticles; it "exposes" too much of WP's internals (from a software, OOP standpoint). However that does give me an idea that to achieve the same goal for any fictional element that does not have significant notability outside of its work (this includes both notable elements of the work and non-notable elements), maybe we require that such articles titles are always disambiguited even if it is the only article named that way (and of course, redirecting from the non-disamb title). So you'd have "The Constant (Lost episode)" as the visible article title; this requires no internal wiki changes either. However, either way, this also seems like needless duplication of what should be explicitly stated in the first sentence of the lead. -- MASEM 04:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Phil's demo was a lot cooler to use than I expected. I found myself wishing the navigational breadcrumbs at the top were larger and more obvious. -- Gmaxwell ( talk) 13:33, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
One glitch that will need to be pointed out is that sub-articles for plot summaries cannot have fair-use images. To use a fair-use image, you have to have analysis and commmentary. Plot summaries are neither.
Kww (
talk) 03:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
The sub-articles structure at least seems to be generating interest, so I'll work on some general style guidelines for that to give an answer to the questions of how various pieces of stupidity will be prevented. Until then, though, I wanted to point out User:Phil Sandifer/Plot, which is a draft of a guideline on writing plot summaries that, hopefully, will be able to be pointed to when it's necessary to curb bad and overly verbose summarizers, and will hopefully teach people how to do better work. I'd love comments on it - would its advice, if implemented, help the problem? Phil Sandifer ( talk) 15:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Reviewing the discussion here I see what appears to be a hopeless level of factionalism. There seem to be groups in favor of practicing a highly narrow standard of inclusion, and groups in favor of fairly broad standards of inclusion. Both sides have their share of impressive arguments, both have their share of fallacious arguments. Neither is so substantially larger or more compelling than the other that it has any hope of a decisive victory.
This isn't a new class of argument; indeed, it's gone on for many years. All rational participants with more than a trivial amount of experience with the projects should have no expectation of it ending anytime soon. Yet all continue to fight, because a failure to do so would be to concede ground to the other side. It's effectively a civil war and like so many others, it's poisoning us, sapping our resources, and distracting us from what we really need to accomplish.
In my view the reason that there is such energy and activity behind many of the modern fictional subjects is simply because a LOT of people are interested in these subjects (compare [3] to [4]). Some of us regard that situation as unfortunate, but it is not our job to criticize society nor within our power to change it. We need to work with what we have, and one of the things we have is an enormous number of people interested in these subjects, as well as a large number interested in writing about them.
I think we should be able to agree that many of the more-niche articles on fictional subjects are rubbish: there is no shortage of episode articles which consist of nothing but analysis-free plot blow-by-blows, and character articles which consist of nothing but marginally useful quotations. (Such problems are not limited to fiction, of course, but there seem to be more niche fiction articles than in other subjects.) Some people here hold the opinion that by their nature these articles will never merit quality encyclopedic coverage, but all should agree that many of them could be much, much better. With the level of interest in these subjects as great as it is, efforts to 'solve' their problems through deletion are certain to fail. Meanwhile, good contributors burn out over the disputes and new contributors model their behavior after the low quality articles.
We need to come to a compromise position if for no other reason than that it would allow us to focus our energy on the problems we can solve rather than wasting it on the ones we can't. In the threads above there was a proposal to treat the niche fiction articles as "sub-articles", accepted as notable by the notability of their parent under which a different, and generally more permissive, standard of inclusion would apply. I think this is a good proposal, since it would allow us to end the arguments by accepting the material, but keep the material orderly and confined so that it doesn't spread out across the whole project and reduce the project's maintainability overall.
I hope we can stand back and examine long view on this, and consider the most fruitful ways of using our time. -- Gmaxwell ( talk) 01:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
The problem is not that encyclopedias shouldn't be covering Princess Sally Acorn (a minor character from Sonic the Hedgehog licensed works). That article's existence does no harm to anyone. The problems arise when you try to write Princess Sally Acorn with respect to WP:V and WP:NOR (and WP:NOT#PLOT, to a lesser extent).
There's just nothing to say. When you get out the sharp scissors and cut away everything that isn't a list of things Sally saw/did, lists of episodes/issues, and the usual speculation/fanon/fanfic/bullshit, you aren't left with anything. At best, you're parroting a handful of childrens' guides to whatever series. There's so little information, so few facts, so little anything on such characters, that having an article serves only as a honeypot for the kind of nonsense that well-intentioned, ignorant-of-policy fans inevitably dump on such articles.
Leaving these articles alone says that Wikipedia's guidelines don't matter. They regularly stomp all over WP:V, WP:NOR, all sorts of parts of the MOS, and just generally set a bad example. This makes cleaning up other articles harder, because people point to them and say, "Why can't my article be an exception too?" Anyone who remembers the Pokémon test is familiar with this effect. Bad articles cannot be tolerated because they make it harder to make other articles better.
Deletion is the answer, but not the kind you think. The only way to fix these articles is to do so one-by-one, getting out the sharp scissors and cutting out everything that doesn't belong out of each article individually. Plot summary that isn't concise, speculation, trivia...all of that has to go. Once you've cut away everything that doesn't belong, you need to take what little is left and restructure it into the most efficient form. Sometimes this will mean omitting mention of the many minor characters or individual chapters/issues/episodes, or it may not.
WP:N, as it's written, is a massively useful tool for this kind of editing. Tightening it would make it easier to nuke and pave such articles, but nukes are not very precise tools. Loosening it would mean we'd have some series end up with all of [exceedingly large class] getting articles and we'd be back to Pokémon Test 2.0, making it extremely difficult to fix any articles. We have a compromise, right now, and as far as I can tell it has a plurality of support.
tl;dr version: Arguing here is useless, bad articles hurt Wikipedia, go fix articles the hard way, WP:N is a compromise and I like it. - A Man In Bl♟ck ( conspire | past ops) 04:10, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Historically, mainspace hasn't used sub-articles. Before implimenting them, this should get a much wider discussion than just WP:N. I recommend starting at one of the Village Pumps. Sub-articles are used in other spaces, sucha s Wikipedia: and User: and their related talk spaces. Personally, I like sub-articles but I think before they are implemented, we need 1) a good discussion to see if the existing consensus against them has changed, and 2) technical tools to manage them as a group. Renames of sub-articles can become problematic if someone doesn't move all of them. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 15:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Historical note: There was once some discussion (don't ask me where, I'm sure it's still around somewhere) to use a similar system to this to "namespace" articles, prior to the introduction of categories. For example, you might have an article "England" and "England/London". It was abandoned as unworkable (and eventually forgotten after we got categorisation) due to the non-uniqueness problem mentioned elsewhere (maybe London should be in "Cities/London" instead? And don't get me started on the political ramifications of whether it should be "Ulster/Belfast", or "Northern Ireland/Belfast", or "Ireland/Béal Feirste"). That said, your approach here might turn out to be workable, as it's less wide in scope, but I just wanted to mention this. I'll try to find the old discussions. -- tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 11:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I've put together a badly written draft of a proposal I'd like to see. Some parts are tighter than others, but here it is:
The reason I like it is because it gets away from abstract questions and gets right down to business: here are a bunch of different compromises, which one(s) do you like? The only thing I might change (besides dropping the individual editors' names -- I've included those temporarily for clarity) are allowing the supporters of each proposal to rewrite them based on the discussion that's already ensued at this page, allowing them to be clarified and improved. I would also try to improve the wording and layout of the table of contents. Also, if someone wanted to withdraw or squash a proposal before we put it to the larger community, that could only make this more efficient. People hate reading a lot of detail.
I'm not saying it's perfect. But hopefully you can understand why I prefer it to Masem's. It may be possible for Masem's proposed RFC to incorporate what I like about this approach... I think it's more clear, less abstract, and easier to form an opinion on. Randomran ( talk) 08:01, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I propose that we remove the last two proposals from User:Randomran/test. (3.3) WP:POSTPONE is an interesting proposal, but is off topic and should be considered on its own. And (3.2) User:Kevin Murray's proposal that reader interest can generate notability strikes me as unlikely to gain support, as per WP:INTERESTING.
(3.1) User:Peregrine Fisher's proposal is actually decent, and I might even support it myself. But I think it might be outside of the scope of the two main issues at hand. I'm more on the fence on this proposal, .
If we can trim back the last three proposals, we might be able to focus on the two main issues at hand. Thoughts? Randomran ( talk) 01:18, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Gavin reversion "WP:BIO is already prominently featured in the Template:Template:Notabilityguide)" misses the point that negative BLPs (not BIO) are a very serious issue, and the evidence is that this one specific issues is not linked sufficiently prominently. WP:BLP is already mentioned in the lead, but given the seriousness of the issue, and the fact that many newcomers may reasonably expect that complying with WP:N is sufficient for new articles, I believe it is appropriate to list it again at the bottom of the page. In short, for negative BLPs, WP:N is too weak and WP:BLP is the governing policy. -- SmokeyJoe ( talk) 09:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I've got a first stab at a guideline for branching at User:Phil Sandifer/Branching. My goal with it is to try to prevent the rapid expansion and bloat that came with categories by specifically delineating what Branching is a tool to solve, and making it clear what it is and is not. This does not amount to inclusion criteria as such, but I think it will go a long way towards working as them in practice. But I'd love to hear comments at this point. Phil Sandifer ( talk) 16:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree that w need to get away from the "article" emphasis. Conventional paper encyclopedia have varied over those with many short articles, and a relatively small number of long ones--think of the two parts of Brittanica. There is no good solution in paper, only the choice of which inconvenience: either requiring an index, or jumping back and forth. On the web of course there is. The problem here is reader expectations--that an article by itself is in some sense a signal of importance. This is echoed by the extra emphasis that pagerank gives to article titles, and the desire of people and organisations for an article about themselves. To pick an example: there is in principle no difference between having individual articles on all the characters of a fiction, and having the same information in one longer article. There is only the practical difficulty of dial-up connections--which still does make anything over 32 or 64 k disadvantageous for many users--and those users are perhaps our most important ones, with fewer alternative resources. But the real problem is content: though there is no essential difference between merged or unmerged articles with the same net content, there is a difference in principle between those with more content and less. For the major characters in a fiction, it's OK to have one large article with full information on them all, or the necessary number of short articles--but it is not OK to have one large article with one or two lines on each, or a group of short uninformative stubs.
In practice, this is the problem: the people who dislike individual articles on characters (or roads, or schools, or whatever) also dislike having the same material merged into larger articles--what they basically want is to have less material on these topics at all. As our structure is set up, this is best negotiated via afd discussions of individual articles, and if we can find alternatives to resolve questions of how much should be merged in an equally open fashion, that would be very good. What this will not however settle is the question of what degree of depth of coverage is encyclopedic. DGG ( talk)
I don't expect that this will change policy, but I felt a need to discuss this. Recently, an article on New York State Route 32 was named as a featured article. To me, this highlighted what Wikipedia is becoming and what it instead should be.
Wikipedia is NOT a catalogue of everything that exists in the world. If it were, every single person, notable or not, would have their own articles. Why does Wikipedia have an article about every single state road in America? These roads are simply not notable in and of themselves.
For some roads, such as US 1, US 66, the Autobahn, that are historically or culturally significant for some reason, they should have articles in Wikipedia. That's fine. But every single state road? What is notable about every single state road that they should all, every last one of them, be included in Wikipedia? Take the featured article on NY 32. I won't deny it - it's a well-written article, it's thorough and comprehensive. But what is notable about that road? Did Washington march along this route in the Revolutionary War? Was it part of the Underground Railroad? Did bootleggers smuggle 50% of all outlawed alcohol into New York City during Prohibition along this road? If not, then this road is just another state road, one of many, many thousands in this country (and I realize that Wikipedia is global, please forgive my chauvinism), all equally unimportant, and all, equally unworthy, unnotable, for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Even granting that there should be an article on every single state road in this country (which I do not grant, by the way), why is a turn-by-turn listing of every mile of the road included? How is that possibly notable, or possibly worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia? Here's a quote from the "What Wikipedia is Not" page: "When you wonder what should or should not be in an article, ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an encyclopedia." No way someone would crack open an encyclopedia to look up NY Route 32, let alone a turn-by-turn analysis of every mile of it.
Here's a quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Notability is sometimes used as a synonym for verifiability, although others disagree. Notability to many is related to importance. Articles should be relevant to a reasonable number of people." Well, let me say that verifibility is not equivalent to notability. Notability is most definitely related to importance. And a complete catalogue of all the state roads in America is not important.
Another quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Many editors also believe that it is a fair test of whether a subject has achieved sufficient external notice to ensure that it can be covered from a neutral point of view based on verifiable information from reliable sources, without straying into original research." If you look at the discussion section of NY 32, you will see that there is plenty of original research going on - "While driving up to the Catskills last weekend to go snowshoeing I kept my eyes open for a good spot for an image, and found one even better, here near Katsbaan." Even under Wikipedia's own guidelines, this plentitude of original research shows that NY 32 is not notable.
At the very most, this article on NY 32 - just another state road - should be 3 paragraphs long, namely, the first 3 paragraphs of the article. At the very least, this article should be deleted entirely.
Otherwise the name of this website should be changed to WIKILOGUE. -- Jgroub ( talk) 15:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC) Jgroub ( talk)
Inherently non-notable, IMO, are county roads, as we decided in USRD a long time ago (other than lists of them in each county, or county roads that have some of notability independent of being county roads) and even long undesignated roads that don't have some other claim to fame ( Clinton Road, Shades of Death Road, to claim two examples from my watchlist). But not every single road and street anywhere ... if we did have articles about that, then your complaint would make some sense. But we don't, so it doesn't.
Please read User:Scott5114/Highway notability FAQ. Thanks. — Scott5114 ↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 18:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I remember, by way of example, back when everyone and their brother was putting articles about their podcasts up and those of us who did newpage at the time could guarantee ourselves several new AfDs every night just on podcasts. I think we finally decided on some rule that the top 100 podcasts were notable. That led in part to the whole WeHateTech affair, which I can't even find anything on anymore (short version: two guys from Singapore complain that their tech podcast, WeHateTech, repeatedly gets deleted under a variety of names and that they will get the article on some way or another because their rivals at this Week in Tech had one, and those people were idiots to hear these guys talk about it (Twit had been kept because it featured contributors who were already notable)). At one point they conceded, OK, we're not one of the top 100 podcasts but we're among the top 100 tech podcasts, so shouldn't that count for something? Eventually it ended with them getting indefblocked (I don't think we troubled with a ban) for legal threats.
To me it shows why that sort of "top 100" criterion is never a good idea if it doesn't reflect some pre-existing conensus cutoff like the Top Forty or Hot Hundred for singles. I honestly have no problem with "state roads yes, county roads no", which makes perfect sense to me and frankly seems a lot less arbitrary than other criteria for roads (you should see how much tooth-gnashing the musical-artist notability standards create). Daniel Case ( talk) 02:55, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) First, full disclosure: I did hear about this discussion off-wiki, although I was not asked to comment. This is a very odd complaint. Long ago Wikipedia reached a consensus about its notability guideline for highways. Mitchazenia has been perhaps the site's most diligent and productive editor in this area--he has contributed over five dozen good articles and is well on his way to bringing New York state highways up to featured topic status. Now an account with fewer than 50 edits in its history is arguing unilaterally for the deletion of all this hard work. Jgroub, early on you added trivia to articles. Some Wikipedians are strongly anti-trivia, and one of the replies to such people is If you don't like it, don't read it. Wikipedia has nearly two and a half million articles that have nothing to do with highways. You are welcome to read them and add to them. Perhaps bring a trivia article to good article candidacy. I encourage you to show consideraton for the hard work and dedication of editors who do productive work within the boundaries of longstanding guidelines. Respectfully, Durova Charge! 20:05, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I see the concept of inherent notability being bandied about again, and will again strenuously object. Nothing, nothing at all, is inherently notable. Not a person, not a place, not a road, an asteroid, a star, nor a television episode. I would be extremely surprised if there weren't multiple sources on this road that discuss issues about this road directly and in detail, so the road probably is notable, but that's a result of the sources, not some inherent magic about roads.
Kww (
talk) 21:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Where do we draw the line? We may as well devolve down into county and town roads (if there is such a thing as town roads) based on their level of usage. I see someone has already listed an article for the street I live on - 79th Street (Manhattan) - and that street is only about a mile long. At least the article is mercifully short. But where does it all end? With all of us having our own articles in Wikipedia? I won 1st prize in the LIFA debate in 1982. I also won a verdict for a client of $450,000 in 2002. My name is listed in connection with a number appeals (some of them winners!), in the printed and bound permanent volumes of caselaw in New York State. Is all of that notable enough? Should I have an article? I'm not trying to be an egotist here, but tell me why I shouldn't. -- Jgroub ( talk) 02:23, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I am very new to all of this - if there has been an extensive discussion about why the line has been drawn to include state roads and exclude county roads, then please help a guy out and point me to it, because I don't know where in the archives to look or even how to search.
As for the criteria of removability being that an article, or family of articles, be non-expandable stubs or lack adequate sourcing, I'm sure I could write an article about 78th Street in Manhattan (one removed from the article on 79th Street) that would do the trick on both scores. But 78th Street is just another street in Manhattan. Non-stubbiness and enough sources cannot be alone be the standard for notability. -- Jgroub ( talk) 02:36, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
And looking a little more closely, I see that there is an article on Manhattan streets, 1-14. Here's the effervescent entry on 13th Street: "13th Street is almost the southernmost numbered street to cover the entire width of Manhattan without changing directions, but diverts briefly northward as it meets 8th Avenue." ALMOST! SO CLOSE! Hey, I almost won the Golf Championship in 8th grade; do I rate a mention? There is nothing notable about these streets that they deserve to be listed! Where does it stop? -- Jgroub ( talk) 03:07, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Like I've said before, If you have enough verifiable information to write a [featured article] about something, the question of "notability" is moot (and ideally unasked). Sorry. — CharlotteWebb 02:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Okay, you have got to be kidding me. No way is someone going to come up and question the existence of over ten thousand state route articles. Yeah, I've got a heavily biased view, seeing as I write these articles myself. But Wikipedia's been around for what, six years now? If they've stayed around for this long (with new ones being added every day), I strongly doubt they will get deleted now. The notability issue is ludicrous. They are official routes and every route has a story behind them (when I say story, I mean history, stuff like that). NY 32 being a Good Article, then a Featured Article, then featured on the main page... If you do want to put up 12 FAs, 2 FLs, 8 A-class articles, 118 GAs (which most of them are New York state routes I must admit), 882 B-class articles, and all the way down to 6103 stubs (which you seem to prefer) up for AfD, go right ahead. This is Wikipedia, where anything goes. I must commend your effort to change consensus. While I do disagree with your point of view, everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all remember that. C L — 06:08, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
All this having been said, and said repeatedly, leads me to believe that Wikipedia should no longer be considered an encyclopedia. It should be considered a catalogue of all human knowledge, and thus should be renamed accordingly to WIKILOGUE. -- Jgroub ( talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Articles under USRD (WP U.S. Roads) & NYSR (WP NY State Routes) jurisdiction are slowly being cleaned up, and will eventually be of good standards. This has gone on too far, and what is the point of continuing an unnecessary discussion.Mitch32( UP) 18:37, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
In the 4 plus years that I've been active at Wikipedia, I've noticed many discussions (read: arguments) about terms that have definitions unique to Wikipedia. For example, I have a little background in structured consensus decision making in the outside world, and the definition of "consensus" varies from that realm to the Wikipedia realm, and both are different from the common vernacular usage. The same thing is true with "Verifiability", "Notability", "Encyclopedic", and many other terms bandied about. Often, the disagreements that come up in discussions relate to the different meanings that people bring to these terms. When I see disagreements about these terms, I try to look at them practically, and weigh them against the overall goal of the project to be a "collection of all human knowledge". There are practical reasons for our policies and guidelines, and our use of terms like "verifiability" and "notability" are related to these practicalities. For me, they all tie together and become an over-arching concern about keeping the project manageable. At the core is keeping everything verifiable. Notability, I think, has become one way of determining what is verifiable and what isn't. If you can write an article about virtually anything so that the facts can be verified with notable sources, then you have a valid Wikipedia article.
The above discussion points out the logical disconnect in our policy. I think Jgroub has a valid point in asking why a state road would be notable and a rural one would not. However, to my way of looking at it, it isn't that we need to delete more articles and have stricter, more exclusionary policies. No, on the contrary, I think that the discussion points out that our "notability guidelines" and discussions about "what Wikipedia is not" are backwards. They have created artificial limitations on what articles may exist. I see nothing wrong with Wikipedia having, within it, a gazetteer of most of the places in the world, even if many of them are just short stubs. I also see nothing wrong about having short articles about people who have only briefly been in the news. As long as the articles have verifiable citations from notable sources, what is the problem? An obscure place may someday be the location of a major news event. When it does, we can be a good source of information for people who want to know about the place. Similarly, an obscure person may become the focus of world attention for some reason. So what is the problem with keeping all well sourced articles from notable sources, even if the subject is obscure?
There seems to be two definitions of "Encyclopedic". One pertains to being found in print versions of the encyclopedia (which we are making obsolete). The other pertains to all subjects and all knowledge. Wikipedia is most definitely "not" paper -- everyone would agree with this. So why do so many people think we need to have limitations on subject matter that are similar to paper encyclopedia? -- ☑ SamuelWantman 06:07, 14 July 2008 (UTC)