User talk:Brews ohare/WP:Notability (Descriptive articles)

Reason for this guideline

This draft guideline links to a number of articles on shaky ground from a notability standpoint. Some of these possibly could be "fixed" to escape violation of WP:Notability, but I'd say there really is no real concern that these articles are not notable. These articles, on the other hand, are descriptive in nature, and so have no need to use secondary sources. This guideline would put their presence on WP on firmer ground.

Would a secondary source establish notability for this kind of article?. A secondary sources citing the descriptive information of these articles would refer to the same primary sources, and use this information only as background for the real purpose of the secondary source, for example, to make comparisons, evaluations, or so forth. The notability of the background information is therefore established only to this degree: the information is useful for some kinds of discussion.

If that is the real basis for notability, one way to handle it here would be under the section Criteria to suggest notability can be established by suggesting example discussions, debates, comparisons, evaluations where this information could play a role. It would not be necessary to describe such deliberations, only to establish their existence. Brews ohare (talk) 20:55, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

What are you trying to accomplish with this

Comment by Blueboar

Brews, The point of the SSG's is to clarify notability of topics within a broad subject area. Examples... WP:Notability (music) is the SSG for articles about music and musicians... WP:Notability (organizations and companies) is the SSG for articles about organizations, companies and their activities... WP:Notability (academics) is the SSG for articles about scholars and people who are notable in the academic world.

By extension, your proposed guideline would logically be the SSG for articles about Descriptive articles. Can you see the problem here? You are trying to create a subject-specific guideline for something that isn't a subject area.

I realize that you think "Descriptive articles" should be exempt from the requirement to have at least one secondary source, but this isn't the way to fix that. Blueboar (talk) 21:13, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Blueboar: Descriptive articles can be about many subjects, so they do not fit into exemptions by subject; however, they do seem to fit into exemptions by nature. So I guess we could expand exemption guidelines to be more general? Brews ohare (talk) 00:41, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

OK... I am confused... our article on the Federal government of the United States currently cites multiple secondary sources. So I don't see how it is an example of what Brews is talking about. Blueboar (talk) 14:02, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Blueboar: At present, there are many sources in the reference section. Of these, 99% are primary sources: technical journal articles, government documents, and a newspaper article on a specific event. There is one secondary source: Wood, Gordon S. (1998). The creation of the American Republic. That hardly provides notability and hardly covers the content of this article, which is the structure of the government.

So I dispute your claim that the article includes "multiple secondary sources".

But, apart from any dispute we may have over this point, this is meant only as an example, and the description of the problem with Notability couched in terms of this example should be perfectly clear in general terms, whether or not this specific example fits the bill. Brews ohare (talk) 14:45, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

I suspect that Federal government of the United States is acceptable for reasons unrelated to the use of secondary sources, and that is what I am driving at. Brews ohare (talk) 16:46, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Ahhhhh.... I now see part of the reason why we are not communicating well. There is confusion over the definition of "Primary Source". Wikipedia primarily based its definition on the humanities... and in the humanities sources such as journal articles and newspaper articles are usually considered Secondary sources. Does this resolve some of your concern? Blueboar (talk) 17:44, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Blueboar: You have raised another issue, it seems. For example, WP:Secondary says:

"a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research"

That seems to suggest the research papers are primary sources. The article Primary source says:

"In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called original source or evidence) is an artifact, a document, a recording, or other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions are used in library science, and other areas of scholarship."

The purpose in requiring secondary sources, as I understand it, is to provide objectivity. Admitting journal articles as primary sources is a can of worms: there are a lot of assertions in journal articles that are hardly objective and are not accepted by the larger community of scholars. Newspapers are even worse, and have a very short shelf life when it comes to providing assessment, and books and journal articles become dated as well.

So it appears that primary source is one more area where WP acts like Humpty Dumpty:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”

I am taking Humpty Dumpty out of context: he was a mathematician, and of course he could define his words as he wished inside of his axiomatic constructions. But that is not the WP environment.

There is nothing straightforward on WP, I guess. Brews ohare (talk) 15:54, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Comment by Mike Cline

Brews, before you even think about trying to establish a notability guideline for Descriptive Articles you really need to work on articulating what a Descriptive Article is. Your words and examples just don't cut it.

We write encyclopedic articles on notable subjects. We create a tertiary source out of primary and secondary sources. In the process of writing an encyclopedic article, we describe the subject of the article in words that reflect how the sources describe it.

If there is a class of article that is "descriptive" then there must be a class of article that is "non-descriptive". We have one class of article: encyclopedic.

I teach WP regularly as a Campus Ambassador and I would be hard pressed to try to explain to anyone what this sentence means: A descriptive article is one that includes no opinion, evaluation, comparison, or interpretation of the material it contains, but is restricted to nothing more than guidance to identify the content of primary sources. Potential examples are guidance to governmental agencies including the governing legislation and present and previous officers, guidance to legal documents governing significant issues, and so forth. All guidance is of the form of aiding identification of the relevant sources, not an appraisal of them.

WP articles are encyclopedic and written for readers. They provide no guidance to anyone. The Federal government of the United States article is encyclopedic prose that describes what sources say about the U.S. government. What guidance is being provided by this article? If you think you have something here, you really need to work on the definition first, because in my view now it doesn't make any sense. And trust me, if you can't convince a bunch of experienced editors as to your meaning, then 136,000 active editors won't have a clue. --Mike Cline (talk) 22:34, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Mike: Maybe the idea can be clarified by example, and perhaps you can help to express the idea better. Let's look at Federal government of the United States for example. What is this article about? I'd say it is an outline of the structure that has the same relation to its subject that a map of a hiking trail has to the trail: that is, it wanders along and indicates items of interest along the way (the primary sources that it identifies). It's a tour guide.

A substantial article on the government would go much further than this, and of course would need secondary sources. It would explain how the branches of government were conceived to work together, how they actually work together, how the original society in which they were designed has changed and how well it is served by the older concepts, what problems have arisen and how the structure has aided or failed in response, what the structure had to do with the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, Iraq, and gay marriage.

In other words, there is a huge gap between saying "The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. " and going on to flesh out these bare bones, and provide a real article that describes this structure in various contexts along with its dynamics.

The present Federal government of the United States is able to use only primary sources to support anything it says, and nobody would suggest they are not adequate. A real article on the government would have to use secondary sources and even then would be embroiled forever in challenges about history, undue weight, original research and all the other clamor that surrounds any topic with more than 100 readers.

Mike, I am sure you can see the difference here. You also can recognize that the requirement of notability for the present Federal government of the United States is a totally different concept and deals with totally different issues than the application of notability to the more ambitious article I have compared it with. I am not saying that is what the present policy says, I am saying that is the facts of the matter.

Fitting WP:Notability to handle these different situations differently is what this guideline is intended to deal with. Maybe you can help? Brews ohare (talk) 00:41, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Brews, looking at your edit history, more specifically your article creation, I am going to make the wild assumption that you have a background in some aspect of science, engineering or math and the scientific method. If that is true, then I will follow with the assumption that you think about things scientifically, in absolute, black and white terms. There’s nothing judgmental about that. Unfortunately, WP functions as a social, cultural, more touchy-feely collaborative environment than a more rigid scientific method type environment. You’ve been around almost as long as I have, and the notability idea as we now enjoy it was well established when we both joined WP in 2007. The first step here is that you have to accept that that is the environment we operate in. So, how to move forward from here? If I believed in the idea of a descriptive article that differed significantly from the encyclopedic articles we now create and have established inclusions standards for (i.e. notability), I would first search for that unique example to make my case. That example would have to have two characteristics:

• First, whatever the subject of the article was, it couldn’t be considered notable under the current standard. In other words, if the subject received significant discussion in at least two reliable sources, it couldn’t fall into your descriptive article category.
• Second, it would need to be a subject that the community agreed overwhelmingly warranted a WP article.

If you can find examples like that and then begin to articulate what makes them different from the normal “encyclopedic article”, then the community can consider what the inclusion criteria should be. If it isn’t notability then what? But that question can only follow a clear articulation of this new class of article.--Mike Cline (talk) 14:12, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Mike: You have me pegged. I'd say the main difference between the scientific/engineering background and WP is that WP is a battleground like recess in first grade, while science/engineering focuses on the job, not on skirmish and ego trips. I exempt yourself from any criticism on this account; I'm just venting.

Personally, I find that this example is pretty good. It has one secondary source, Wood, Gordon S. (1998): The creation of the American Republic. The rest are primary sources: government documents, technical journal articles, and a newspaper article on a very specific topic supporting one statement. However, that is not the point.

What is the point? The point is that you can imagine the article Federal government of the United States written to use only primary sources, call this "Version 1". Would that article be acceptable on WP? I'd guess so: its content would be pretty much what it is now. Supposing for the moment that is a viable statement, you might argue that nonetheless it also could be written using some secondary sources, call this "Version 2". So suddenly Version 2 becomes notable, with no change in content whatsoever.

The only role of the secondary sources is to quote a few of the very same primary sources employed in Version 1. Version 2 is notable simply because a few of the primary sources of Version 1 show up in a secondary source, even though that primary material was only incidental background material setting the stage for what the secondary sources really were about.

Would that be your stance? Brews ohare (talk) 15:07, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

If that is your stance, just how does notability work for cases like this: do we require some percentage of the primary sources crop up in secondary sources? If I find a secondary source that says "X is an important subject" can I expect a WP article on X is notable, and proceed using only primary sources for the rest of the article? How about a secondary source that says only "Information about X can be found on website x"? Does the mere mention of X in a secondary source make X notable? And so forth.

I suspect that Federal government of the United States is found to be notable for reasons unrelated to the use of secondary sources, and that is what I am driving at. Brews ohare (talk) 15:57, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Brews, I understand what you are trying to do, but wires are crossed in a couple of ways. One is this statement: I suspect that Federal government of the United States is found to be notable for reasons unrelated to the use of secondary sources. That’s actually not possible in the WP universe because “Notability=Inclusion Criteria=two Secondary Sources". WP defines what notability is. In that parallel universal we call the real world, notability means something different and is much more liberally interpreted. Notable may be a poor choice of word for inclusion criteria because of its ambiguity in the real world, but in the WP universe its meaning is clear. So you can’t say the US government article is notable for reasons other than what the definition of notable means. The color Yellow is well-defined as a spectrum of wavelength of light according to the physics of light. In our universe that is an absolute. In another universe, things may be different, but in ours, we can’t arbitrary say Yellow is Yellow because of something beyond the physics of light.

Now, where does that leave us? First, I think you’ve been focusing on designing the repeatable experiment (process) without first nailing down the hypothesis. In simple terms, your hypothesis can be summarized in this question: Is there or should there be additional inclusion criteria for WP articles other than notability? That’s a difficult question that the community must answer. Focus on the hypothesis first and forget about what notability means out there in the parallel universe we call the real world. --Mike Cline (talk) 17:06, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

I could rephrase my sentence to fit your language. Instead of: I suspect that Federal government of the United States is found to be notable for reasons unrelated to the use of secondary sources, how about: I suspect that Federal government of the United States would escape WP:Notability even if it used no secondary sources.

So your question captures the point: Is there or should there be additional inclusion criteria for WP articles other than notability? In the case of Federal government of the United States it may scrape by WP:Notability because it has one secondary source, but I'd say that is a dubious call, and this article is obviously acceptable even if WP:Notability is not satisfied.

In sum, Federal government of the United States is a likely indicator that in fact there are already inclusion criteria at work on WP that are not explicitly acknowledged.

Mike, how should this impact the proposed text? Brews ohare (talk) 17:32, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Brews, you've still got the wires crossed bit. (and you are making a common mistake that many editors make related to WP inclusion criteria) WP Notability does not require that an article have secondary sources listed in the article. WP Notability requires that the subject of an article has received significant coverage in two reliable secondary sources. Conceivably, WP editors could create a list of subjects that the community agreed was notable without there ever being an article created on the subjects. It might be useful for you to review many of the discussions that occur at AfD and within the Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron project. A typical scenario which happens with regularity is this. Some editor believes something is not-notable and nominates it for deletion (CSD, PROD or AfD). Many times the thought that something is non-notable occurs because there are no secondary sources in the article demonstrating notability. But along comes interested editors who either show others that indeed their are at least two sources, many times actually adding the sources to the article. Bingo, the subject is notable. NOT, it was always notable, it just hadn't defended itself well enough for its inclusion not to be challenged. So focus on different inclusion criteria, not how that criteria is supported when inclusion might be challenged. --Mike Cline (talk) 17:51, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Mike: I see there are some (what I would call) fine points, namely, without the secondary sources, the article might be notable anyway, because secondary sources could be found if one is motivated to look hard. I find it easy to imagine Federal government of the United States written with only primary sources, and you point out that it is notable anyway because secondary sources could be found. Of course, I am interested in proposing acceptability whether or not secondary sources could be found.

I am left a bit unimpressed by the "could be found" argument, because the value of the article in no way depends upon these "secondary" sources, which are relevant only to the extent that they parrot the primary sources they have been introduced to replace.

I don't think you disagree with these remarks, but are saying that this artificial situation can be fixed by introducing different criteria.

Another question remains, however. Supposing these criteria can be formulated, how does one defend against the claim that WP:Notability is not satisfied? I suppose that one could modify WP:Notability to say (for instance) that it does not apply to several types of pages: (i) Disambiguation pages, (ii) Outlines (like Outline of chemistry) and (iii) Tour guides to primary sources satisfying certain criteria (which are yet to be formulated here).

Sound right? Brews ohare (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

I have attempted to propose new criteria for inclusion. As a first step, I have limited these criteria to what I have termed "descriptive articles", those limited to a "tour guide" to primary sources on particular topics, without evaluation, or interpretation, or viewpoints. What is a gray area at this point is how to identify appropriate topics so as to avoid "uninteresting compilations". To me, that appears to be the crux of the matter.

Would you agree? Brews ohare (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Mike, I have made a number of revisions of the page, and would appreciate some commentary. Thank you in advance. Brews ohare (talk) 19:33, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Comment by Masem

Federal government of the United States is not a special type of article. It is not navigational or of a similar type that is normally exempt from content guidelines. While it is possible it can be completely sourced to primary works, it should be very obvious that the topic of the US government structure is notable by coverage in multiple secondary sources which are included in the article. There's no exemption that needs to be made here. --MASEM (t) 13:09, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Masem: At present, there are many sources in the reference section. Of these, 99% are primary sources: technical journal articles, government documents, and a newspaper article on a specific event. There is one secondary source: Wood, Gordon S. (1998). The creation of the American Republic. That hardly provides notability and hardly covers the content of this article, which is the structure of the government.

So I dispute your claim that the article includes "multiple secondary sources".

But, apart from any dispute we may have over this point, this is meant only as an example, and the description of the problem with Notability couched in terms of this example should be perfectly clear in general terms, whether or not this specific example fits the bill. Brews ohare (talk) 14:45, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

I suspect that Federal government of the United States is acceptable for reasons unrelated to the use of secondary sources, and that is what I am driving at. Brews ohare (talk) 16:47, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

But it clearly is notable per WP:GNG, so there is no need for a new guideline to justify inclusion. Same with Nevada Republican caucuses, 2012, which also draws on coverage from independent, secondary sources (you're going to have to accept that for our purposes scholarly and newspaper articles can function as secondary sources). Calgary—Fish Creek and United States District Court for the District of Idaho are more like directory entries, and in the absence of secondary source coverage existing both could be currently targeted for merging or deletion.

Your "descriptive articles" proposal appears to be arguing for the almanac function of Wikipedia to be extended beyond named settlements, geographical entities such as rivers, and high schools (all currently presumed to be notable even in the absence of secondary sources due to long-standing outcomes of debates) to other articles such as political or legislative bodies and districts. How do you define which articles can be sufficiently described by only primary sources and which deserve deletion? "Interesting" is too vague. Fences&Windows 21:03, 22 February 2012 (UTC)