User:Hrafn/Not and Notability

A personal essay on WP:NOTABILITY and what Wikipedia is WP:NOT.

We have all our personal enthusiasms — some obscure band, artist, author, or the like that we think are the 'bee's knees', or some teacher, professor, church elder, or the like who had a profound influence on us. Should we write an article about them? Probably not. "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information" and should not include articles that are little more than:

• bibliographies;
• discographies; or
• resumes
• etc ...

...even if the individual elements of these lists can be reliably sourced to bare mentions in reliable sources. This is why WP:NOTE requires that the reliable sources include "significant coverage" that "address[es] the subject directly in detail". Also "not all coverage in reliable sources constitutes evidence of notability for the purposes of article creation; for example, directories and databases, advertisements, announcements columns, and minor news stories are all examples of coverage that may not actually support notability when examined, despite their existence as reliable sources."

Given the size of the internet (let alone the world-wide print media) virtually any topic, no matter how obscure, will probably have some enthusiasts writing about it. This is why WP:NOTE states "Works produced by the subject, or those with a strong connection to them, are unlikely to be strong evidence of interest by the world at large."

As I said at the start, we all have our personal enthusiasms. And that leads us to an inflated view of the subject's importance to "the world at large." I'm sorry, but most likely I don't share your enthusiasms (just as you most likely don't share mine). That does not mean that I am "biased" against them, just that my attitude to them is approximately the same as the vast majority of wikipedia readers and editors. This means that we require an intersubjective criteria for establishing notability. Wikipedia's criteria is "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" (with slight modification for certain specifics).

If I am editing and/or advocating deletion of the article about your pet enthusiasm, it does not mean that I "hate" it, but rather that I am skeptical about the sourcing and/or notability of it. If this topic were so potentially-objectionable that I hated it, it would be highly likely that others more closely involved would "hate it" more and have written about it, probably at quite tedious length — thus creating sources. The enemy of notability, and primary cause of deletion, is not "hatred" but rather apathy — that "the world at large" quite simply doesn't care enough about your pet topic to have given it any "detailed" coverage. The chances are excellent that I likewise am apathetic about the topic — but that does not rule out the possibility that an aggressively tendentious defence of the article hasn't evoked an equally aggressive advocacy against it.

Such topics should be deleted, but often they're not. XfDs are basically a crap-shoot. They are generally determined by the collective consensus of the prejudged opinions of partisans and the ill-informed knee-jerk 'gut' views of outsiders (generally without perusing the cited sources), usually without even an attempt to determine how the article in question fits the applicable notability criteria. I even once saw a closing admin close an AfD against the (lack of) consensus, based in part on what university the topic went to. Is there a better way? Most probably not. This appears to be an issue that needs to be solved through education, not structural change (which is one of the reasons I'm ranting at you, the reader unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon this essay).