User:Michig/Notability is bunk

Notability, Notability, Notability...we are slaves to Notability

The GNG often sucks

So how did we get the stage where this project's artificial concept of 'notability' has become an overriding concern, one pursued with almost religious fervour and doctrinaire adherence by some editors?

We must have inclusion criteria, or we would have a completely uncontrolled mess, but when did we lose the ability to judge whether a topic is suitable for inclusion in this encyclopedia without slavishly following flawed guidelines?

Subjects are 'allowed' to have articles if they are 'notable', and a complex set of rules have evolved (largely through the efforts of those seeking to exclude content) to determine whether a given subject is notable. The most flawed of these, or possibly just the most misinterpreted and abused is the General Notability Guideline, the central tenet of the Notability faith, which states that (in general) unless several other people have written about a subject in some depth in reliable sources then we can't write about them either. Slavish and inflexible adherence to this guideline is bad for this project. So why is that? Well, suppose that a subject that is important enough and of enough interest to readers that common sense would indicate that it should be covered by a wide-ranging and comprehensive encyclopedia, but we cannot find coverage that is 'significant' enough, or enough examples of such coverage - should we then exclude that subject from our encyclopedia? Absolutely not, although an alarming number of editors would disagree. Certainly the existence of a wealth of detailed coverage will mean that we can write a better article, but a short, factual article with content verifiable via the above mentioned reliable sources is of benefit to this encyclopedia whether or not our artificial concept of 'notability' is satisfied.

Sense has prevailed in some cases, with subject-specific notability guidelines having been developed which indicate when subjects are considered 'encyclopedic' enough to be included, irrespective of whether the GNG doctrine is satisfied, but these are regularly attacked, and some see these as only temporary indicators of 'notability' with an expectation that the GNG will be satisfied before long.

So what should be the crux of our inclusion criteria? It seems obvious:

• To have an article here, a subject should have encyclopedic relevance.
• That relevance should be verifiable by reference to sources that we trust

And that's it. Our subject-specific guidelines generally deal with criteria for encyclopedic relevance. Famous people, towns, villages, commercially-released films, albums by important musicans, etc., etc. are of encyclopedic relevance. We do not need to find multiple examples of in-depth coverage to know that a Prime Minster from the 1930s or an album by David Bowie are of encyclopedic relevance. So why do so many people come across articles that are to any sane mind of encyclopedic relevance, but try to get them deleted because a limited internet search engine does not present them with easy evidence that their notability doctrine is satisfied?