User:Glades12/Notability is temporary
 | This is an essay on notability. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
This essay provides two reasons why notability is indeed temporary by Wikipedia's definition.
Source disappearance
[edit]All pieces of media, no matter their medium or reliability, will be lost at some point in the future, making what they now support unverifiable. Print media gradually embrittles (mostly due to acid decay and environmental factors), offline electronic media stops working even if used carefully, and websites regularly go offline due to usurpation and/or the disappearance of their hosters.
To take it more extremely, even if we manage to save all our library/archival contents from the Sun's expansion as a red giant, there's no certainly possible way to stop the heat death of the universe from finally destroying any place where they will be stored after that. (Granted, Wikipedia and any remaining humans will also cease to exist, so the last point doesn't matter.)
Outdated information
[edit]Age matters when it comes to reliability. A peer-reviewed journal or encyclopedia article from 1860 on racial biology would have been reliable at that time, but almost universally unacceptable to use today. Breaking news articles often seem reliable for a short time after their publication, but tend to be proven wrong later by other journalists who can thoroughly investigate what really happened and whether the first journalists made any errors in haste. This means that subjects are only notable as long as new reliable sources are being written about them.
Conclusion
[edit]My conclusion is that notability is far narrower than one would think. I recommend against citing this essay in deletion discussions however, because it goes straight against the majority view and most now-notable topics will probably remain that for the foreseeable future.