User:Pablothepenguin/notability
The first Wikipedia Notability Council
[edit]I, Pablothepenguin, declare that in the name of Jimmy Wales and all those editors of Wikipedia, forgotten and unknown, the first council of notability shall be open.
What is wrong with the wp:notability policies?
[edit]I believe that the concept of "notability" is very vague and not easy to enforce. it may even be slightly arbitrary as well. I would like to propose that notability is succeeded by a much better system. For too long, editors have dismissed perfectly good information and articles, just because someone thought the information was too obscure. It seems that many people are affected by this issue.
All comments below this line
[edit]- Lots of things are arbitrary. Should someone go to jail for stealing a penny? Obviously not. Two pennies? Nope. Where do you draw the line? The simple answer is: you don't. You decide on a case-by-case basis what the punishment should be for each individual crime. The threshold for being formally punished for theft isn't £6.43 exactly and you don't go to jail for robbing someone of any specified amount of money.
It's like that with notability at Wikipedia. We don't want everything to be included, but we obviously need to include some stuff because otherwise what's the point of the site? WP:NOTABILITY is a good piece of common sense and while it can be controversial and arbitrary, Wikipedia doesn't have set rules anyway so it's fine if things are left up to the community to collectively decide things. Wikipedia is a serious encyclopedia; the Encyclopedia Britannica never included lists of every chess game ever recorded or quotes of everything ever said on Friends or complete lists of obstacles in every gameshow that's ever been created. If that's what you're suggesting Wikipedia do [i.e. include everything], I think it's a waste of server space and donations made to Wikimedia Foundation and, quite frankly, people's time. There are other venues if you don't like Wikipedia's restrictions on content. But this page is not going to overturn WP:N. — Bilorv(talk)(c)(e) 21:36, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
- If you are going to propose a 'much better system', please do so, by telling us what it is - because until you do, we cannot possibly express an opinion on whether it is better or not, and we clearly aren't going to abandon existing policy on the off-chance that you are right. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:22, 5 June 2015 (UTC)