User talk:Czarkoff/essays/Businesses are rarely notable

Notability is a subjective idea

The whole idea of notability is a troublesome one. What is notable to one person may not be notable to another. "One man's notability is another man's trivia". For example, someone in Iraq or Syria being shot at and seeing others killed by bullets would perhaps find the destruction of such weapons notable but Newton's laws of motion (which may help to explain how a bullet could kill a person) would not be their foremost consideration - self preservation comes first - whereas a university student of physics may find the laws of motion very notable indeed. In other words notability is a subjective term; it is for individuals to decide what is notable to themselves. In particular, if someone on Wikipedia decides that a subject has notability it may be that someone else could read an article about the same subject and be totally unimpressed by it and thus regard it as not notable.

For myself I believe that all articles that promote businesses are to be deprecated and should be deleted but sometimes it is very difficult to do this, especially when the protesters against the proposed deletion may have a vested interest in keeping the article alive, being themselves a part of the business, therefore believing that the existence of the article would in some way benefit the business and in turn benefit themselves.

Furthermore, is an article about a football team in the lower divisions of the English football league notable to most people? I think not, but it would surely be notable to the supporters of that team. Again, notability is a matter for the individual. Indeed, if Wikipedia were to take this view that could be the key to its self destruction. Jodosma (talk) 03:50, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Sure, establishing notability is troublesome, subjective process. What is worse, both deletion discussions and articles for creation normally involve far too few editors, so the end result of such discussion is nothing more then local consensus with project-wide enforcement. Effectively I wrote this essay to promote several more or less objective (as in measurable) criteria for this particular sort of discussions. — Dmitrij D. Czarkoff (talk•track) 08:20, 17 June 2014 (UTC)