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Superfluous

Isn't this redundant to WP:V and WP:NOT?--Serviam (talk) 19:43, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Clarification, although WP:V is to make sure we get the truth rather than an inclusion criteria, veirifiable infortmation is almost always notable, because it has recieved coverage in sources.--Serviam (talk) 19:56, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Which is not true. I can find verifiable sources on my house, but it doesn't mean it's notable. We're not a repository of all verifiable information. Sephiroth BCR (Converse) 20:01, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
I just mentioned we're not a repository of random information...I mentioned WP:NOT didn't I? See, superflous. And I really, really, doubt you'll find sources that meet WP:RS for an article on your your house. Also, many would argue that an article on your house is fine if you can add verifiable sources. Personally i prefer not to get involved there.--Serviam (talk) 20:07, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
WP:NOT does not halt me creating an article on my house, as WP:NOT#INFO applies primarily to the content of articles. And yes, I could find reliable sources on my house (ever gone house hunting?). Sephiroth BCR (Converse) 20:18, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Hmm. Wouldn't such an article though contain such content, by definition? (So it wouldn't be permissible per NOT either.) mike4ty4 (talk) 20:36, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
What makes it random? If I wanted to build an article on any home in the US, I could provide you with its street address, pictures of the home at different times, a series of owners names going back for a hundred years or more, geographic coordinates, a satellite image of the home, an appraised value chart for the value at every sale, etc. All public records, all contained in quite reliable sources, and not random by any stretch of the imagination. The main thing that prevents such articles are the notability guidelines.
Kww (talk) 20:46, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
There's always those who would ask that if you could create such an article, what would be wrong with keeping it? Why would you exclude articles that meet stuff like this? And don't say that wikipedia is not an indicriminate collection of information, because you've just argued that it doesn't keep them out.--Serviam (talk) 20:54, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
My answer would be that only notable things belong in an encyclopedia.
Kww (talk) 21:03, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
I suppose so.--Serviam (talk) 12:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Nothing is preventing you from creating an article like that. And there is nothing preventing anyone else from doing it either. That's because nobody is required to read any policies or guidelines before creating an article on Wikipedia. I suspect an article like that would currently be deleted, but it probably would have been deleted before any of the notability guidelines on Wikipedia were created as well. --Pixelface (talk) 03:13, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Of course it would stop you. It's not just content limiting, it limits the creation of articles as well, if an article is created that violates WP:NOT it get deleted. I've seen an article get deleted because it consisted of just a plot summary and a little intro that said who wrote the book and the name.--Serviam (talk) 20:42, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Also, I'm not even going to bother counting the number of articles that get deleted per WP:CRYSTAL...--Serviam (talk) 20:49, 1 July 2008 (UTC)
Thing is, WP:NOT is essentially a summation of various policies, guidelines and norms. There is certainly some redundancy (especially with WP:INDISCRIMINATE -- it even has a {{see}} note pointing here), but deprecating WP:N in favor of WP:NOT would surely result in a loss of clarity. — xDanielx T/C\R 09:46, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Ah yes, I see what you mean, wikipedia is not an indisccriminate collection of information, and this is what discrimates.--Serviam (talk) 12:02, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
unfortunately though, there is not much agreement of what "indiscriminate" means--some take it to mean any article about things that are not themselves individually notable--some even take it to mean any article that includes information about things they do not permanently think important. DGG (talk) 05:02, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
  • This is where WP:N comes in: if a topic is the subject of non-trivial real-world coverage from reliable secondary sources, then the information is notable and worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia. In this instance, WP:N and WP:NOT#INFO complement each other; without reliable secondary source, a simple statement of fact or a reguriation of fiction is just a collection of indiscriminate information. Only when a reliable secondary source (such as an academic or a journalist from a respected newspaper) sticks their neck out by writing commentary, analysis or critisism of the subject, only then is subject notable, and no longer indiscriminate. --Gavin Collins (talk) 08:06, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
Gavin, the ambiguities from this are the point of the whole discussion. On the one hand many things may have such references, and still not be notable, such as local politicians, and so we need special rules to deal with them. Many other things though clearly encyclopedia-worthy do not really have such references in a meaningful way, such as villages. And so we have special rules to deal with them. There are so many special rules, that in essence the crude definition of RSs is a matter of despair, when there's no other reasonable way of deciding. There still has to be enough sourcing to write an article, but that's another question. For most absolutely junky & non-notable fiction, it may be possible to find a home town newspaper and a library new books bulletin, which discuss it. Under your rules, if we can find them they stay in, and if not, then not. But that's a matter of chance in what Google indexes. Your argument deals with this by the added criteria of respected newspaper, and by requiring "commentary, analysis or criticism". But those are added criteria beyond the basic rule. Local newspapers can still be respectable, and an article in one discussing the plot alone is still coverage in a substantial manner. Your further requirement of an "academic or a journalist" ignores the people who actually write about fiction, who are critics and book reviewers. DGG (talk) 11:48, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Folk here seem too obsessed by the narrow issue of fiction. It is quite apparent that we have much material in Wikipedia which does not meet the ideas of notability stated above by editors like Gavin and Kww. I have participated in AFD for articles like a list of unnamed asteroids, a natural number, a hamlet of 3 households and the like. Such material usually seems quite indiscriminate and non-notable but it is invariably kept. This usually seems to be because it is respectable rather than because it is notable. We get all the angst about pop culture and fiction because it seems to lack this respectability. Anyway, my point is that if WP:N is changed to meet the high standards demanded of fiction then you may cause much trouble elsewhere. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:40, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
  • For related point relating to a current AFD, there seems to be a similar bias against commercial products like, in this case, a model of camcorder. I cite two good sources which demonstrate notability in the usual way and the delete voters are unmoved. It seems apparent that their idea of notability are different again - they seem to feel that we should only cover matters which are distinctive or special. I.e. we would have an article on the iPhone, say, but not on similar rival products. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:40, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
  • The AFD voters who espouse such common intuitions about notability are not represented here - we just have the usual suspects grinding their axes. That is the big problem with such policy debates and I notice that there is a proposition now to create a parliamentary legislature to control policy better. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:40, 4 July 2008 (UTC)
  • In answer to DGG, if articles about fiction do not provide analyis, context or criticism, then not only are they they are not worthy of inclusion under WP:N, but they also fail WP:NOT, since Wikipedia is more than a directory, or a collection of random stuff. I disagree with Colonel Warden that fiction gets special attention because there is a bias against popular culture. In theory, fiction is the one subject area where there is a huge quantity of reliable secondary sourced content from academia & journalism which is easily accessible and just waiting to be harvested, so it is the one subject area which enjoys an almost symbiotic relationship with GNG. In practise, it is also the one subject area which is most prone to non-notable content forks, as evidenced by the large number of articles about episodes, fictional characters, events & locations which are not notable outside the work of fiction of which they are a subset. However, I agree with him that fiction is not the only area where there is a tendancy to create content forks based on directories, maps, or primary content; that is why I have proposed we have a more detailed discussion, if not a policy or guideline, on the subject of presumed, inhertited or acknowledged notability so we can make sense of the anomolies in the subject specific guidelines.--Gavin Collins (talk) 11:02, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

The Futon Critic

I have a question. Would you guys say that The Futon Critic is reliable/notable. I am using two links, http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7279 and http://www.thefutoncritic.com/news.aspx?id=7318, for the series Moonlight, and they state the source websites, but I cannot find the original info. Can I use The Futon Critic as a source? Corn.u.co.pia ♥ Disc.us.sion 07:33, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

ask at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard DGG (talk) 11:34, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Cornucopia, can you be more specific. What exactly do you want to use as a source for what. First impression is that any Moonlight information to be found by clicking links is semi-reliable primary source material. It doesn't demonstate notability, and it is not the primary source for the primary source material it repeats (which doesn't make it secondary). You question "Is the futon Critic notable" is not, I think, the question you mean to ask, unless you want to write an arrticle on the Futon Critic. Sources themselves don't need to be notable, just reliable or maybe reputable/respectable (eg not a blog or a high school newspaper). --SmokeyJoe (talk) 12:28, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
OK. Thanks for the explanation. Corn.u.co.pia ♥ Disc.us.sion 13:46, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
C asks two different questions. To the notability question, editors may be interested in the reuslts at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The Futon Critic; the article was deleted as non-notable. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:43, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Constructing an RFC

We are at a point where there's no forward progress on any of the points raised in the last month; people have dug their trenches and settled in. At this point, the only thing to do is to take this to the next level and get an RFC ready. However, this is no ordinary RFC: this one needs to be broadcasted as wide as possible, and I'm thinking we want to get this to a watchlist noticy, among other pages, and run in the same approach that the C-Class assessment was handled - it's a !vote but going for minimal discussion (though not preventing any at all).

There are two main issues that all the above proposed points bring out; however, I would say we do not have to present them in these ways - we need simple questions with summary of the issues, so however these are poised doesn't matter, just as long as they are.

  1. The first point seems to me to hinge on exactly what purpose sub-notability guidelines serve. This is more than just the question of "Does one read NOTE as 'GNG and sub-guidelines', or 'GNG or subguidelines'. Are subguidelines useful - do they fill in holes left by the general cut of GNG, or are they rules upon rules and should only be created as needed? Or more to the point, are we to live and breathe by the GNG, and if so, why is it not policy?
  2. The second is basically, "Does NOTE apply to spinout articles per SS?", though I'm sure there's more that can be said. Basically, do p/gs like NOTE and PLOT apply to any grouping of words we designate as an "article", or is it to a topic that may have several articles beneath it? Are there issues with WP:UNDUE if there's more than a handful of articles resting on the laurels of notability of the parent topic?

I am not asking for people to answer these questions now, but instead, what unbiased, short, appropriate language would it take to put in a good RFC that is aimed for very wide level discussion. Maybe it's better to put these specifically in the light of fictional works, but it should be noted that how this resolves for fiction will also apply to any other area.

Getting answers to these two points, to me, resolves every dispute on this page at which we can tweak the language as needed, and filter those changes to FICT and other places. Mind you, if you feel there's a third (or more) distinct point that needs to be brought to wide-area agreement, that can be added, but lets try to keep the RFC as short and sweet in text language as possible just to avoid confusion. --MASEM 14:00, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

I think the sub-article question needs to be handled at a bigger level. Take WP:NOT#PLOT alone ... if we decree in WP:N that subarticles are OK, people could still take off after the plot-only subarticles, because WP:NOT isn't written in terms of subarticles. If we want to define a group of articles that are treated together as a whole, we need to define how that mechanism works, and then reference the mechanism in multiple policies. Not doing so is just going to lead to inconsistency and fights.
Kww (talk) 15:05, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I think a watchlist notification can address NOT, NOTE, and FICT. We definitely don't want to leave something out. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 15:24, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Peregrine's got it. This is The big question to resolve most of the issues in various guidelines and policies that have been floating about, not just restricted to NOTE. This may mean that we have to change V and NOR and a few others (eg, the language "If an article does not have third-party sources..." would be stricken if the GNG is not held up as absolute.), which is why this needs to be shouted for attention far and wide. --MASEM 15:37, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
  • We may disagree on what the desirable outcome is, Phil, but it's not an untrue assertion. Let's take the extreme case: in some large, aggregate articles, some of the small sub-articles consist of 100% plot summary (that way, any arguments about ratios disappear, so forget about them for now). We can modify WP:N to permit them to be treated as sub-articles, and thus pass the notability barrier, but they violate WP:NOT#PLOT by being only plot summaries, and WP:NOR by not relying on secondary sources. If you want your proposal to work at all, it has to be implemented in an integrated fashion. That way, even if WP:NOR and WP:NOT#PLOT still hold across the whole article, you will gain a lot of freedom to adjust the boundaries of articles and subarticles to meet your needs. I'm happy to see you attempt to modify only WP:N, because then you will certainly fail to achieve your goals. I don't think that you should be happy to go down a path that makes you certain to fail.
    Kww (talk) 21:06, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
  • WP:NOT#PLOT demands that we have concise plot summaries as part of our overall coverage. It in fact pointedly says "as part of larger coverage," not "as part of an article." Thus the flexibility needed is already there. As for NOR, NOR does not say that no sections can utilize primary sources. It says that our coverage must substantially use secondary sources. I agree. But cutting plot summary does not add the secondary sources we require - these are separate issues. Our plot summary should be as concise as possible while still being useful. Our secondary source material should be as thorough as possible. That is the ideal. But there is no conflict here either. Phil Sandifer (talk) 22:03, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I see WP:NOT being applied on a case by case basis. Even if somehow this leads to lists of episodes being considered notable under some circumstances, WP:NOT would insist that the summaries stay concise, and that the plot information is only a component of the larger coverage of the subject. Same thing with characters or locations. Keep in mind we're still on step one here: clarifying WP:N. Step 2 is then writing WP:FICT in a way that's compatible with WP:N. Only then do we run into the issues about WP:NOT. Randomran (talk) 17:39, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

My main concern is that the proposals are malformed. That doesn't bother me: I don't think we should pin down these proposals into perfect language, since that will need to be done incrementally. I think at this point we need to get the *spirit* of each proposal to a wider set of critics. But my concern is that they will be dismissed as too vague, when really this is only the first step and implementing the spirit of a proposal will take some work in of itself. I'm not sure I'm being clear, so let me sum it up: I want people to say they oppose or support a proposal because of its overall spirit and purpose, not because of its exact wording. Communicating that is important. Randomran (talk) 17:43, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Gavin has a point. This shouldn't be about TV episodes per se, it should be about notability subguidelines as well as other things that may have consensus, such as lists of episodes/characters, gold records, etc. Focusing on tv episodes isn't going to pass, and won't clarify anything but tv eps anyways. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 20:20, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
Randomran has the point that I was trying to get at: this is not to spell out specific language in any policy/guideline but instead to establish, overall, how we should be treating notability. Now, we could completely generalize it, but I think it is important to establish that much of this are points of contention between those that want coverage of fiction and those that don't, but be fully aware this isn't the only area that would be affected. As to address Gavin's concern, once it is established generally how notability should be treated, then we can determine how other policies or guidelines need to be changed: ideally none of them do but if the global consensus clearly says "we want plot-only articles" or that "the GNG is absolute" then we go and make the changes. This is a drastic impact on WP's future growth, so it is going to take more than this since RFC to figure this out. --MASEM 20:47, 5 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Randomran, Peregrine, and Masem as well. I think we should focus on a general framework before working out the exact details, and a proposal to test which way the wind is blowing would be a good start. From there, we can always work out the exact details later, but it certainly can't hurt to involve the community as a whole in a discussion which certainly impacts the community as a whole. Seraphimblade Talk to me 21:51, 5 July 2008 (UTC)

Notaility in English

There is a prolific inclusion of articles in Wikipedia which are coming from other language Wikis. Many subjects can never be verified from English sources and sources provided are often not in English. Are subjects of articles for which there are no English sources, notable for the English Wikipedia?--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 23:58, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

The rules for them are the same, but English refs are preferred. See WP:VUE - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 04:38, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
Sources need not be in english, but they must be verifiable. If you can have the source translated, then you can have it verified, and it is good enough. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 08:39, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree that this is an issue. If a topic has not been discussed at all in the English language then it is ipso facto not notable within the English-speaking community from which our readership comes. We should have a barrier of this sort to prevent this version of the project being used as a content-fork for other linguistic groups that often have strong POVs about their parochial issues. We also be wary of such sources being used to support linguistic invasion - seeking to change English usage to conform to the usage of other languages. I have seen many recent examples of this, such as at Taoism where it seemed that some foreign editors wanted to change the article's title into a Chinese ideogram. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:28, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
I don't think getting swamped is really a likely scenario here. We simply ask for notability (and for the articles to meet all other English Wikipedia policies and guidelines), not notability in the English-speaking world - a likely majority of en. editors and readers are not from English-speaking countries and there is no reason I can see why events and people and places with which they are directly familiar cannot be documented here. In addition, cooperation between admins on en. and a number of the other wikis is much more solid than many would realise, so we can get trusted and reliable admins from other projects to give us a neutral third opinion if we are concerned the wool is being pulled over, so to speak. Orderinchaos 19:01, 28 June 2008 (UTC)
yes, the only way in which it being the english WP matters is that there has to be people prepared to actually write the articles in acceptable English--not machine translation from the other WPedias--and to try to find additiopnal or replacement English sources if they do exist. DGG (talk) 02:34, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
I would love to see new guideline on foreign concepts that are not currently notable in English. I see articles like this a lot, and I wouldn't mind seeing some of them gone. --Voidvector (talk) 21:35, 2 July 2008 (UTC)
Two things. First, requiring a higher standard of notability for non-anglophone subjects is rolling out the red carpet for systematic bias. Second, many non-anglophone readers use the English Wikipedia instead of their local language Wikipedia because the English version is larger and more well-known. As far is I'm concerned, notability has nothing to do with geography or language. Sjakkalle (Check!) 09:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

RFC Draft: Masem's proposal

I have userspaced a draft of a possible RFC to address the two key issues above that I think will allow us to work on exacting the wording of specific guidelines from that. It can be found at User:Masem/NoteRFC, please edit freely (but remember, this is the RFC, so it needs to be neutral on the issue).

I'm not exactly sure if we want a typical discuss based RFC or more a straight up !vote like was done with.. I think the C-Class addition. I'm thinking the latter for easiest accounting of the process. --MASEM 14:00, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

  • I have added issues (1)&(2) to the draft. I feel that if WP:N has to be relaxed to accomodate more or different types of coverage, then the basis of inclusion and the interaction of revised WP:N on other guidelines and polies must also be taken into account in order to achieve that end. If someone proposes a change to WP:N, then this has to be worked through in totality; it is not sufficient to ask for more coverage, but not provide at least an outline about how this could be achieved in practical terms.--Gavin Collins (talk) 16:06, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I see what you're trying to do, but I want this RFC to pose a "yes, I agree" or "no, I disagree" question, and the questions you're asking are more appropriate for writing up a new NOTE than for this. I'm not saying this points are bad but if you could reword them so that the ultimate question is pretty much a yes/no answer, that would be much better. --MASEM 16:10, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I removed a huge POV statement but I also reworded, or tried to reword the argument. I'm not sure I understand the opposing argument. It didn't seem to me to be opposing but rather off to the side. Also, should we relegate this kiind of discussion to the RFC talk page? padillaH (review me)(help me) 16:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • No I think it should be discussed here, as I have an important objection. In answer to Masem, I see where you are coming from: a yes or no is clear, and easier to manage in terms of the process of an RFC. However, I think this is where all the other RFC's have failed: it is not realistic to vote for a solution that may not feasible, or has important repercussions that are not transparent. I think it is misleading to put forward an RFC that requires major change without a specific proposal to carry it out. If we ignore the specifics of the way in which you want to change WP:N and the interaction with other policies and guidelines, you are effectively asking the question "do you want change that pleases everyone?". The answer from everyone is "yes", becasue everyone wants better guidelines. However it is the specific detail of those changes would work that need to be worked out first, not just whether we desire change or not.--Gavin Collins (talk) 16:33, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, I wasn't very specific was I? I meant questions about the content of the RFC proposal. I can understand why you would post your particular issue here and not there. In response to your issue, I'm not sure what I see is a request to change anything. We've been throwing perceived consensus around for a few weeks now and it looks to me like Masem is trying to get a handle on what the actual consensus would be. Do other editors think it would be a good idea to inherit notability? I can honestly say I don't know enough editors to make that call. padillaH (review me)(help me) 16:47, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
I appreciate that you think I'm out of order but the fact remains that at least the implication that one side of the argument is good and the other side leads to "a reduction in the quality of articles and a lowering of Wikipedia's credibility." is horrendous POV pushing. You can't honestly think asking someone if they want to do what you ask or ruin WP is a valid question. I may have gotten the issue 1 wrong but, to be honest, I couldn't understand the bloody thing. How is "Criteria are too narrow" opposed by "criteria are not reliant on rules drawn up by experts"? I don't even know what point you are trying to represent. padillaH (review me)(help me) 16:47, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

It seems like a good start. We do want to be neutral, although I'm not sure if the current version is neutral or not, but I'm not real fond of the word "esoteric." I do think we should make this a straight up or down vote. When we get results from that, what to do can then be decided. We've discussed this for a year, and it's pretty much opinion, so we should just figure out what people's opinion is. I think if we start with how to fix things, we'll get a bunch more people stating similar arguments to the ones we've heard. After a while it will die down, and it will be the people on this page stating their same arguments again. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 22:45, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality we want to work on (we have an assumed position that the GNG is well and good, but which way we fall, strict or lax, is the question), but the only problem is that when it comes to the questions, we have to state them that makes one side a positive, and one side a negative, which may taint the results. This can be fixed by flipping a couple questions around, but lets see how it works out. --MASEM 23:10, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

I hate to be a drag, but I think we're going about this entirely the wrong way. These are very abstract and vague questions to anyone who hasn't been paying close attention to this discussion over the past month. What we have above are approximately 13 proposals, many of which can be grouped sensibly. They offer a solution that people can either accept or reject. These questions are so removed from an actual solution that I'm not even sure if people would understand the consequences of their answer. I think we gain a great deal of simplicity and clarity by just putting the proposals to a wide audience. The proposals aren't as clear as they could be, but they're better than the RFC I'm seeing here. Randomran (talk) 06:39, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

If you want other things included in the vote, I'm all ears. The one thing I want is that we do all the summarizing of the issues so that uninvolved editors can just vote, and not have to synthesize their opinions out of pages of discussion. I think an RfC vote, followed by an RfC vote on various proposals would be best. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 06:54, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I have to agree with Randomran, its no good putting abstract proposals forward without providing working solutions, otherwise the discussions will little more than hot air. We have to work towards a working solution, rather than a vague promise of guideline that will meet everybody's requirements. --Gavin Collins (talk) 08:37, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Demo of sub-articles

I've been working on this in my userspace, and it's in a shape where I think it's ready to show - User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes. It's a conversion of our articles on the TV show Heroes to take advantage of sub-articles, and nest them sensibly. I've only done four character and episode articles, but trimmed all of them down to a reasonable and concise level. I've removed all outbound links except for ones within the sub-article format. That leaves a few artifacts where there was any formatting in the double brackets, but it's not a big issue for the purposes of looking at it.

There are things we could do to improve the sub-article formatting at the top if we were to use templates instead of enabling the sub-article functionality in the mainspace (which would require some hacking of mediawiki to make work at all). But the basic idea is there, and I have to say, I like how it navigates the topic - it really does do a nice job of collapsing our far-flung coverage on the topic into a coherent, organized whole. Some of the improvement was because I took a hatchet to parts of the articles, but other improvement is because these articles are, for the first time, actually connected and working together to present the topic.

Have a look at it. I think it works. I think it's good coverage. I think we should make it happen. Phil Sandifer (talk) 00:50, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes/Episodes/Don't Look Back I like how that looks. Find others here. What do you do with the list of episodes pages? - Peregrine Fisher (talk)
Or find them linked off of User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes/Episodes - the ones that aren't redlinks are done. Phil Sandifer (talk) 01:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

(contribs) 01:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and you need to put a colon in fron of the image names. Non-free images are not allowed in userspace. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 01:21, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I thought I'd done that. Sigh. Phil Sandifer (talk) 01:29, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm amazed that you don't believe that WP:NOT#PLOT and WP:NOR need to be modified before User:Phil Sandifer/Heroes/Episodes/Don't Look Back would be acceptable. This is an example of exactly what I feared you were trying to do.
Kww (talk) 02:37, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
What's the problem with it, exactly? Phil Sandifer (talk) 02:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
If we devolop a consensus for pages like that, we'll just change any guidelines and policies accordingly. I can understand PLOT, but NOR, other than the parts of it that basically reiterate NOTE, doesn't prohibit this. Or were you one of the editors who thought one cannot summarize a work of fiction without committing OR? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 02:44, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
It doesn't even violate PLOT! (Though, to be fair, this was not one of the episodes I rewrote the summary for - it looked an OK length. I cut some other junk.) But it's a 45 minute episode with 7 distinct plot threads that is covered in 360 words. That's concise by any fair definition of the word. Phil Sandifer (talk) 02:49, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

To Peregrine: WP:NOR says that articles should rely on secondary sources. I don't see that as a reiteration of NOTE, but as a denigration of articles that rely on primary sources. The content of the summary is OK as a part of a larger article that is based on secondary sources, but, as a standalone article, there's no reasonable way to describe that summary as relying on secondary sources.
To Phil:I believe that WP:NOT#PLOT just needs a minor tweak for your sub-article concept, to explicitly state that the "larger coverage" can span multiple articles.
Kww (talk) 03:06, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
NOR can easily have the same tweak. Coverage of a topic should rely on secondary sources. Which, if you go out over the userspace demo I set up, you get plenty of real world, secondary sourced coverage. And, in fact, heavily trimmed summaries on several character and episode articles Compare Claire Bennet and Noah Bennet to the versions in my userspace. Compare Collision (Heroes), which goes scene by scene in a massive orgy of paragraphs to the rearranged, shortened, and by-thread summary I put in. I'm committed to cutting crap out of the project. Phil Sandifer (talk) 03:11, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Except that we need to be clear about what "rely" means in that context. Your setup is good for a short series, where 10 or 12 episodes of summary are relatively small compared to the analysis. Grow it to 60 copies of that episode (complete with 60 questionable fair-use images), and the primary sourcing starts to outweigh the secondary. Take it to Gunsmoke proportions, and the secondary sourcing is massively outweighed. We disagree on what "rely" means, and WP:NOR needs to be clarified not only in terms of subarticles, but what analysis is reasonable to determine whether the group of articles can be said to rely on secondary sourcing.
Your example is better than most, and actually pretty atypical, because there's a lot of secondary sourcing in the main article you've developed. Compare it to a more typical article, like Oh My Goddess!, and one or two such summaries would outweigh all the secondary sourcing.<br?>Kww (talk) 03:26, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Sure. But the "eat your vegetables before you have dessert" approach is fruitless. Yes, Oh My Goddess! would still be a problem. But I don't see why butchering the plot summaries is the right way to fix it. Phil Sandifer (talk) 03:31, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
As an aside, Oh My Goddess! is probably a poor example, as there are probably sufficient secondary sources to fulfill the "rely on" rule for the main article. They just aren't there at the moment. - 03:49, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
The nature of long-running television shows, though, is that you don't become long-running without attention. Secondary coverage should, generally speaking, remain commensurate with length. It's just harder to find, so we should assume that it will take time to be developed. Meanwhile, we hold the primary source material back to useful lengths as best we can, and remember that we're a work in progress. Phil Sandifer (talk) 03:59, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

(redent)The Gunsmoke example is an interesting one. It hasn't established notability at this point. There's probably 100's of books that discuss it, but waiting for people to read them (eat their veggies) before we can wrtie about it (dessert) would make us a poor encyclopedia for quite a while. Right now it wouldn't even warrant seperate pages for the TV and radio shows. Two editors (and sometimes me) have been working on 30 Rock lately. You can see the ep pages at List of 30 Rock episodes. With 30 Rock we've been eating our veggies before dessert, and it's making for some very nice pages. The problem is that there are probably less than 10 TV shows with the right editors to make that work (Lost, Dr. Who, Simpsons, Heroes is borderline, etc.). We need these changes until all the shows have the right kind of editors. Ideally, ten years from now when every Ivy League school has a class where freshman make wiki articles into FA, then we can cut what is truly not needed. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 04:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm still not excited about the use of dir-style subarticles; it "exposes" too much of WP's internals (from a software, OOP standpoint). However that does give me an idea that to achieve the same goal for any fictional element that does not have significant notability outside of its work (this includes both notable elements of the work and non-notable elements), maybe we require that such articles titles are always disambiguited even if it is the only article named that way (and of course, redirecting from the non-disamb title). So you'd have "The Constant (Lost episode)" as the visible article title; this requires no internal wiki changes either. However, either way, this also seems like needless duplication of what should be explicitly stated in the first sentence of the lead. --MASEM 04:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I think the dir style has advantages of note here - yes, the resulting article titles are a bit ugly, but the hierarchical structure of the article was very, very satisfying and useful in trying to curb Heroes coverage into a coherent whole. Phil Sandifer (talk) 04:55, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
<ec>I'm neutral on the directory style of the headings, tradition is against it, but if that's the only reason not to change it isn't really a reason. I like the way the articles are getting laid out, and this is mostly what I've been seeking to get to, better written articles, rather than the exclusion of material. In the past I may have used the wrong methods to get us there which has added to the mess we are now in. I think this should be the middle ground, that we concentrate on well written articles rather than arguing over whether such and such merits an article. Hiding T 10:40, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Did you miss two E&C arbcom cases that got to the point of Arbcom proposing topic bans on editors just to prevent them from talking about fictional articles? AFD's already have a problem of degenerating into "I like it"/"I don't like it" battles. Without standards to rely on, that's going to get worse.
Kww (talk) 12:05, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
We do a pretty job at AfD of deciding what should be kept in my opinion. Lots of stuff gets overwhelmingly delete or merge votes, it just isn't every non-notable article. Check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Fictional characters. We're working through things pretty well. The results I'm not fond of are when there's no consensus and an admin uses NOTE to delete. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 12:50, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
If this approach is taken, I think it's rather easy to set up objective guidelines for what to include as subarticles. For example, for TV shows, any nationally broadcast or syndicated show may have subarticles for each episode and each major character; minor characters should be grouped into reasonable lists. Editors should always use common sense and consider simple lists if there is just simply not enough to talk about for each element (the current scheme being used can use redirects to "loop" back on itself, so a minor character may have a "page" in this scheme but redirected to a list. I still have issues with the scheme itself (eg what do you do with truely GNG -notable elements? Do they come out of the loop?), but if it is clear that subarticles or some method of indicating hierarchy within a notable topic is the way to go, there's objective points we can make to prevent abuse. (btw, you may want to strip non-free images from userspace while you're working on this) --MASEM 13:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
In the case of truly GNG-notable elements, I think you still sub-article them. There's no reason why we wouldn't have redirects to sub-articles, and I think, in general, notability does not require us to have an article either. As for what gets a sub-article, to my mind, this was fairly intuitive. And when sections are organically growing it becomes, I think, easier at the time to decide whether to prune or spin off. It's slightly trickier in merging articles into the format, because you've already got a lot of information. I made some deep cuts to articles in the process of merging them. But again, I think once you have the information organized in a nested fashion a fair amount of stuff becomes intuitive. Phil Sandifer (talk) 13:56, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Did I miss the arb com cases? No. But I have a different opinion as to what caused them than you, it appears. I believe it was editors refusing to build consensus, but rather adopting an approach in which it was pretty much "my way or the highway" which caused the issues examined there. I'm unclear to what extent we have standards. We have a consensus mechanism for making decisions. Are you suggesting we ignore or disregard that? Hiding T 13:44, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I feel that life is best when everyone follows policy, and when they want to create articles that violate them, lobby to change policy before creation. Consensus should be used to change policy, not to ignore it. The approach used was to create thousands of episode articles, scream and cry when they were deleted or redirected, and point at the people attempting to enforce existing policies as being the villains.
Kww (talk) 16:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Indeed - the arbcom cases were heated because deletion was involved. By treating these as sections within an article where talk page discussion and consensus is what's needed to merge and remove I think the push for deletion becomes a lot less significant. In fact, I'd mostly be inclined not to send these to AfD at all for content disputes. We don't AfD sections of articles. These work best (from an organizational and clean-up-the-article standpoint) if they're treated exactly like sections of articles. Phil Sandifer (talk) 13:56, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Then how do you delete them?
Kww (talk) 16:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Cut them down to an appropriate size and merge them to their parent, then speedy or redirect the sub - this should be a no muss, no fuss business. The goal here is to treat a branched series of pages as much like a single article as possible. So a sub-article should be treated as an article section for all practical purposes. Deprecated ones should probably be speedy candidates, perhaps with a 48-72 hour grace period to make sure there's no edit war that speedying would be bad in. Phil Sandifer (talk) 17:04, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Phil's demo was a lot cooler to use than I expected. I found myself wishing the navigational breadcrumbs at the top were larger and more obvious. --Gmaxwell (talk) 13:33, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

If used outside the context of the sub-article mechanism, it should be possible to replace the functionality with standard template approaches. --MASEM 13:36, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • In answer to Masem's proposal, do I understand correctly that the criteria for inclusion is that sub-articles are allowed on any topic except where there is "simply not enough to talk about for each element". My understanding of this is that, so long as there are primary sources, you can have an article about any character, episode, location, scene, event, artifact or chapter for works of fiction. For example, for One Thousand and One Nights, we could have an article on all of the stories, characters , events and locations (and even different illustrations, editions and translations), so long as there is primary source content to write an article? --Gavin Collins (talk) 14:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
No, that's not what I said at all. I said that, if we accept subarticles or a variant thereof, then we can create objective guidelines that prevent every single sub-topic to be included, but allowing for "top level" coverage. For a TV show (again, stressing one that is nationally broadcasted or syndicated), every episode could be given its own article in this scheme, and every major character could as well; however, minor and reoccurring characters should still be grouped into lists, and one-time/cameo characters not mentioned save in context of their appearance in an episode. --MASEM 14:59, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • So how do you define top level coverage? Obviously One Thousand and One Nights has not been broadcast recently on US television. Are you suggesting some form of "notability" criteria for determining which elements of fiction get their own sub-article? How do you determine which characters are major (e.g. Sinbad) or minor? Please explain how this would work.--Gavin Collins (talk) 15:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't think a notability criteria is needed. If you're following good guidance on plot summaries, minor characters aren't going to get long enough to need individual sub-articles - it'll never progress beyond the list stage. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • In what sense do you mean "could" in this case? Theoretically we "could" have that now. Should we? Probably not. Certainly not for characters, events, and locations - after all, 1001 Nights is an anthology with little shared ground, so there's no real loss of information by working on a story by story level - unlike a massively long serialized work where you tend to have numerous plot threads that make summary more challenging. The publication history stuff is more intriguing. By and large, though, I think this is a mountain out of a molehill. For plot material, the overarching rule of thumb, as per WP:NOT#PLOT, is that it should be as concise as possible without sacrificing understanding. That is adequate reason to take a hatchet to any plot summary and try to cut it down to a more concise, readable level. Another plus of the branching structure is that it mitigates against redundancy. If we go in this direction, I think a key guideline is going to be against duplication of content. There should be a mini-lead in the parent article around the link to the sub-article, but one thing I tried to avoid in the Heroes demo was duplicating specific information in multiple articles. Even the character vs. episode articles, I tried to aggressively prune the character articles to only focus on the character's arc, and avoid going episode by episode. I think that worked very well - both in terms of minimizing primary source coverage, and in terms of comprehensiveness. An anti-redundancy guideline would be a powerful tool in reducing bloat here. Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:07, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • How can a branching structure mitigate against redundancy? If my understanding of branching structure is correct, it can loop around and around without duplication ad infinitum like a Mandlebrot fractal! Since a fictional topic can be atomised into almost unlimited number of sub-articles, how do you decide what is redundant or a content fork without inclusion criteria?--Gavin Collins (talk) 15:17, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Have a look at the demo - the articles are nested heirarchically. There's a main article on the series, which breaks down to character and episode list articles, which in turn break down to specific characters and episodes. So the structure isn't circular - in theory one should be able to reproduce a (very long) article by just nesting article text where it branches off. That, I think, is a key part of this structure - it's a way of condensing a long article, not a hypertext. Obviously we'd use hyper-textual links within, but these become quick jumps within a linear document - not a web. This is a vital guideline for any article organized with sub-articles - The overall sequence of articles must be able to be intuitively rearranged in a single, linear document. That rule is what makes this a solution to the problem instead of a semantic shift. Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:33, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Image use in plot-only articles

One glitch that will need to be pointed out is that sub-articles for plot summaries cannot have fair-use images. To use a fair-use image, you have to have analysis and commmentary. Plot summaries are neither.
Kww (talk) 03:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Right now, there's a push at WP:NFC to allow more NFC use in non-notable lists and the like, you may wish to participate there. --MASEM 04:02, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Thats not at all fair. There isn't a proposal there to relax any requirement for discussion. Don't scaremonger. It makes people who share your position look petty. (and as someone who is usually opposing the expansion of non-freely licensed work, it embarrasses me) --Gmaxwell (talk) 04:47, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
It wasn't meant to be scaremongering - it's just that Beta's recent actions have launched significant discussion to revamp NFC and those that normally don't follow both pages should be aware if we're connecting notability to images, there's active discussion there. --MASEM 04:52, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I am fine with this requirement. I think that "for identification purposes" images are usually bullshit. Phil Sandifer (talk) 04:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
I can't support any kind of blanket ban on non-free images like this. Either one has a good use rationale or they don't. -- Ned Scott 04:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

More things that are needed

The sub-articles structure at least seems to be generating interest, so I'll work on some general style guidelines for that to give an answer to the questions of how various pieces of stupidity will be prevented. Until then, though, I wanted to point out User:Phil Sandifer/Plot, which is a draft of a guideline on writing plot summaries that, hopefully, will be able to be pointed to when it's necessary to curb bad and overly verbose summarizers, and will hopefully teach people how to do better work. I'd love comments on it - would its advice, if implemented, help the problem? Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

May I suggest moving this discussion to WP:WAF - regardless if the subarticle idea goes through or not, this is 1) good advice and probably should be a WP-space essay and 2) not about notability specifically. --MASEM 15:43, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I'll mirror it there. But let's face it - at the moment, with FICT moribund, this is where the discussion on fiction notability, and, more specifically, plot summaries is going on, so it's worth having here too. :) Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
That's a really good page. Do you see any potential in merging it into Wikipedia:Plot summaries somehow? Hiding T 16:12, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I wouldn't merge - that would get a bit long. I'd just make a clear mention in Wikipedia:Plot summaries of the existence of a guide. I might remove the guide in Plot summaries, as I'm unimpressed by it. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:28, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

On pointless battles, Inclusion vs Deletion of the minutia of fiction

Reviewing the discussion here I see what appears to be a hopeless level of factionalism. There seem to be groups in favor of practicing a highly narrow standard of inclusion, and groups in favor of fairly broad standards of inclusion. Both sides have their share of impressive arguments, both have their share of fallacious arguments. Neither is so substantially larger or more compelling than the other that it has any hope of a decisive victory.

This isn't a new class of argument; indeed, it's gone on for many years. All rational participants with more than a trivial amount of experience with the projects should have no expectation of it ending anytime soon. Yet all continue to fight, because a failure to do so would be to concede ground to the other side. It's effectively a civil war and like so many others, it's poisoning us, sapping our resources, and distracting us from what we really need to accomplish.

In my view the reason that there is such energy and activity behind many of the modern fictional subjects is simply because a LOT of people are interested in these subjects (compare [3] to [4]). Some of us regard that situation as unfortunate, but it is not our job to criticize society nor within our power to change it. We need to work with what we have, and one of the things we have is an enormous number of people interested in these subjects, as well as a large number interested in writing about them.

I think we should be able to agree that many of the more-niche articles on fictional subjects are rubbish: there is no shortage of episode articles which consist of nothing but analysis-free plot blow-by-blows, and character articles which consist of nothing but marginally useful quotations. (Such problems are not limited to fiction, of course, but there seem to be more niche fiction articles than in other subjects.) Some people here hold the opinion that by their nature these articles will never merit quality encyclopedic coverage, but all should agree that many of them could be much, much better. With the level of interest in these subjects as great as it is, efforts to 'solve' their problems through deletion are certain to fail. Meanwhile, good contributors burn out over the disputes and new contributors model their behavior after the low quality articles.

We need to come to a compromise position if for no other reason than that it would allow us to focus our energy on the problems we can solve rather than wasting it on the ones we can't. In the threads above there was a proposal to treat the niche fiction articles as "sub-articles", accepted as notable by the notability of their parent under which a different, and generally more permissive, standard of inclusion would apply. I think this is a good proposal, since it would allow us to end the arguments by accepting the material, but keep the material orderly and confined so that it doesn't spread out across the whole project and reduce the project's maintainability overall.

I hope we can stand back and examine long view on this, and consider the most fruitful ways of using our time. --Gmaxwell (talk) 01:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

  • It's hard to recognize the people trying to seek real compromise. In an argument it doesn't matter if you have two stubborn sides or one stubborn side: the result is that nothing gets done. Having had the patience to follow this discussion closely for a full month, I can honestly say that I see progress. As a precisionist, I'd like to think that I can see the middle ground between deletionism and inclusionism. I sincerely don't care which specific articles we include or exclude so long as they meet a basic standard. The problem with the "subarticle" compromise is that there's no standard at all: virtually anything can piggyback on the notability of the larger topic. I see little difference between this and "everything is notable". But this is just my opinion, of course.
    While I appreciate each and every essay from someone who claims to have stepped back from the bickering and seen the middle ground, a compromise isn't going to come from one heroic person with one brilliant proposal or insight. It's going to come from a huge request for comment from a wide range of wikipedians on a wide range of proposals that are somewhere between inclusion and deletion, somewhere between strict and interpretive. I know it doesn't look like progress to you, but trust me when I say that this is a work in progress.
    We don't have elections or representatives. We have consensus-building and edit wars. For better or for worse, that's the process we have to work through. And for such a fundamentally important guideline, don't expect it to be resolved in a short discussion between a hand full of editors. That's why I have a 100% faith in the RFC. Even if it yields no consensus, that in itself will reveal the real problem: that our decision-making process needs to be fixed. And if it does yield a consensus about notability, that will be the first step towards unraveling this mess. Randomran (talk) 02:59, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Both good comments. This RfC will be interesting. It's a self selecting process, so it may not really be the final word, but it's a necessary step that hasn't been tried (or has it, anyon know?). If not enough people participate, then we won't really be able to use it. If we do get enough, then I think whatever the outcome is, it will be useful. Should we start crafting a page, or are we just going to make a section within NOTE's talk page or something? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 03:32, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Oh, and where are watchlist notifications talked about, or is does it just take getting an admin to edit some page? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs)
MediaWiki:Watchlist-details (you propose a discussion to add, but you want to make sure the discussion is clear and ready for wide discussion) --MASEM 03:46, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, we're not quite ready yet. But we're close. Let's work out a few logistics, and start putting together a centralized discussion page. Randomran (talk) 03:57, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Let's create a page and copy some stuff from here over. Anyone know of an RfC that would make a good template? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 04:05, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
Whomever opens the RFC should just copy my little essay over as a position. Thanks! --Gmaxwell (talk) 04:19, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • In answer to Gmaxwell , I disagree with his view that "there seem to be groups in favor of practicing a highly narrow standard of inclusion, and groups in favor of fairly broad standards of inclusion". For fictional topics, there is a huge quantity of coverage in reliable secodnary sources, not just from academics, but also in newpapers, and even magazines dedicated to reiviewing and analysising fictional topics, such that GNG cannot be classed as a narrow standard at all. The problem which his essay does not address, is, if you no longer base inclusion criteria for fiction on reliable secondary sources, then what do you use? Original research, questionable sources or an expert's point of view? I think he must make add his ideas to the proposals rather than presuming his opinion supercedes all others. --Gavin Collins (talk) 11:25, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Those are the only reasons used anyway, so there will be no change there. We will frame them through explaining our reasons, same as we did and do now. And people will discuss the options available and a consensus will form and that will be the editorial judgement you seek. That's the basis on which Wikipedia was founded. Hiding T 10:42, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Let's get rid of NPOV too, because after all, it's just the POV of the loudest shouters in the article, amirite? Puh-lease.
    Without an agreed topic of discussion (which is currently "Can we write an article based on the reliable third-party sources that exist out there?"), we go back to 2005's VFD debates, where it was a consensus of whether the people who showed up liked the topic or not. Let's not do that. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:43, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • The agreed topic of discussion is can we write a suitable entry in Wikipedia on this topic, in keeping with WP:V, WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. 2005 wasn't actually as bad as you make out. We had a lot less VFD's then than we do now. In 2008 we're pretty much stuck with whatever the closing admin decides, which is just as bad. I think all anyone wants is a level playing field. They don't want people just showing up and stating delete per WP:N and then the closing admin saying delete per WP:N. That does no-one any favours, and is also the way things were in 2005. Let's not pretend things have moved on. At least in 2005 we were prepared to wait until we were sure we had reached the right decision. In a community this size the pace of work is dictated by the slower half, not the faster half. The middle half tend to dictate the direction. Hiding T 08:45, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The problem is not that encyclopedias shouldn't be covering Princess Sally Acorn (a minor character from Sonic the Hedgehog licensed works). That article's existence does no harm to anyone. The problems arise when you try to write Princess Sally Acorn with respect to WP:V and WP:NOR (and WP:NOT#PLOT, to a lesser extent).

There's just nothing to say. When you get out the sharp scissors and cut away everything that isn't a list of things Sally saw/did, lists of episodes/issues, and the usual speculation/fanon/fanfic/bullshit, you aren't left with anything. At best, you're parroting a handful of childrens' guides to whatever series. There's so little information, so few facts, so little anything on such characters, that having an article serves only as a honeypot for the kind of nonsense that well-intentioned, ignorant-of-policy fans inevitably dump on such articles.

Leaving these articles alone says that Wikipedia's guidelines don't matter. They regularly stomp all over WP:V, WP:NOR, all sorts of parts of the MOS, and just generally set a bad example. This makes cleaning up other articles harder, because people point to them and say, "Why can't my article be an exception too?" Anyone who remembers the Pokémon test is familiar with this effect. Bad articles cannot be tolerated because they make it harder to make other articles better.

Deletion is the answer, but not the kind you think. The only way to fix these articles is to do so one-by-one, getting out the sharp scissors and cutting out everything that doesn't belong out of each article individually. Plot summary that isn't concise, speculation, trivia...all of that has to go. Once you've cut away everything that doesn't belong, you need to take what little is left and restructure it into the most efficient form. Sometimes this will mean omitting mention of the many minor characters or individual chapters/issues/episodes, or it may not.

WP:N, as it's written, is a massively useful tool for this kind of editing. Tightening it would make it easier to nuke and pave such articles, but nukes are not very precise tools. Loosening it would mean we'd have some series end up with all of [exceedingly large class] getting articles and we'd be back to Pokémon Test 2.0, making it extremely difficult to fix any articles. We have a compromise, right now, and as far as I can tell it has a plurality of support.

tl;dr version: Arguing here is useless, bad articles hurt Wikipedia, go fix articles the hard way, WP:N is a compromise and I like it. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 04:10, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

This is probably the best assessment I've yet seen of our treatment of fiction. It's why the number of Pokémon articles dropped twenty-fold; when you got down to it, there's very little to say that isn't "Here's a stats summary, an episode summary, some CCG minutiae, and look! Plushies!" Traditional notability (i.e. afd) had next-to-nothing to do with it; it was after WP:FAR that the decision to merge the lot occurred. Nifboy (talk) 07:13, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
The rewrite of FICT was this approach (representing what is currently done) and it got kicked down from either side. Sure, there were several in the middle ground that approved it, but the other half split between inclusionist/deletionists rejected it. As long as neither side considers a compromise, we have to struggle to find the consensus that will satisfy most. --MASEM 11:16, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
WP:FICT is two guidelines.
The first FICT was a guideline to encourage people to merge upward and not split downward, to consolidate fiction articles. It was a prescriptive version of the WP:CRUFT at the time, based on the way that some historic novel (wanna say Atlas Shrugged) was handled. The notability guidelines started coming along, so FICT was reformatted to be written in the same way as a notability guideline. No real practical changes.
When WP:N began to coalesce from the recurring theme of "coverage in reliable third-party sources" in the subject-specific notability guidelines, FICT, which never really was a notability guideline but rather a guide to structuring fiction article families, began to stand out more and more among the other notability guidelines due its conflating "notability" (specifically, the quality of being the subject of reliable third-party references) and importance (the quality of being important or prominent in some context). Notability had acquired a specific meaning on Wikipedia, different and more specific than the general English-language meaning.
So FICT got changed again, this time adding the general notability criterion, and life continued without much controversy.
...until people realized that episode articles and many compromise lists didn't meet WP:N. Oops. FICT descended into the mire it's in today.
Ultimately, FICT an antiquated tool. Guides to upmerging and not splitting appeared elsewhere in the meantime, and are indeed ingrained on many of the fiction Wikiprojects, especially the non-fandom-specific ones. WP:N hasn't gone anywhere, and attempts to make it apply to fiction in a more-strict or less-strict way have met furious opposition from the opposite camp, and, more tellingly, with little more than "meh, why bother?" from anyone else.
So, in the meantime, articles more or less get axed or saved at AFD based on WP:N, and cleaned up and merged based on the relative enthusiasm of the editors present. Life goes on. - A Man In Bl♟ck (conspire | past ops) 02:43, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Sub-articles in general

Historically, mainspace hasn't used sub-articles. Before implimenting them, this should get a much wider discussion than just WP:N. I recommend starting at one of the Village Pumps. Sub-articles are used in other spaces, sucha s Wikipedia: and User: and their related talk spaces. Personally, I like sub-articles but I think before they are implemented, we need 1) a good discussion to see if the existing consensus against them has changed, and 2) technical tools to manage them as a group. Renames of sub-articles can become problematic if someone doesn't move all of them. davidwr/(talk)/(contribs)/(e-mail) 15:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

At the moment, I lean towards not using the built-in sub-article system - as Greg has pointed out, the interface for them is sub-optimal. That said, they were not disabled due to a consensus against them - they were disabled because they were not in active use, and they caused problems for articles like OS/2. The latter issue is, for our purposes, the more significant one, as it would require edits to MediaWiki to make work. For that reason, I lean towards an informal sub-article system - still using the /notation, but using templates to handle the nesting links at the top instead of the built-in MediaWiki code. This lets us work on a better interface, and doesn't pose technical problems. The only potentially tricky bit would be figuring out a way to make sub-articles not get indexed when we count our total number of articles, as they probably should not be. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:03, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • The method by which Wikipedia establishes hierarchies is through the use of categories which support multiple taxonomies, so you don't have to have rigid one to many relationships. It seems that sub-articles are not a physically seperate type of article per se. Such articles could not be physically seperate from the rest of Wikipedia mainspace because there would always be the risk that someone might actually add substantial coverage from reliable secondary sources. I think what you are proposing in practical terms is a second class article-type used to cover non-notable subjects, for which we still have to develop a set of inclusion criteria. --Gavin Collins (talk) 20:41, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Yes. I am proposing implementing Wikipedia:Sub-articles to solve notability problems, or implementing an ad hoc system. The point is not to create a set of inclusion crtieria - it is to treat sub-articles as extensions of existing articles - expanded sections, if you will. Phil Sandifer (talk) 20:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Historical note: There was once some discussion (don't ask me where, I'm sure it's still around somewhere) to use a similar system to this to "namespace" articles, prior to the introduction of categories. For example, you might have an article "England" and "England/London". It was abandoned as unworkable (and eventually forgotten after we got categorisation) due to the non-uniqueness problem mentioned elsewhere (maybe London should be in "Cities/London" instead? And don't get me started on the political ramifications of whether it should be "Ulster/Belfast", or "Northern Ireland/Belfast", or "Ireland/Béal Feirste"). That said, your approach here might turn out to be workable, as it's less wide in scope, but I just wanted to mention this. I'll try to find the old discussions. --tiny plastic Grey Knight ⊖ 11:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Again, something I'm aware of in trying to craft a first stab at a guideline for this - one rule is that you don't start branching an article unless the sub-articles aren't going to have an equally valid claim to belong to a different branching structure. This will pose problems for a few works of fiction - Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are both independently notable shows, but share two major characters. But in this case you can probably just split those character articles with For information on the character after his time on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, see Angel/Characters/Angel or whatever. Or, if the character is independently notable, having him not get a sub-article. Phil Sandifer (talk) 14:13, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Here, of course, is where the problems or hierarchical classification arise. Splitting an article over two subarticles, in completely different hierarchies, seems to me worse than having overly long articles. Especially in a case like this, where the character had so many crossovers. However, as you mentioned, your subarticle approach doesn't necessitate that you use it. - Bilby (talk) 14:24, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Indeed - and I think here's a case where notability does have a useful role to play. If the multiply-owned topic is independently notable, it should probably have its own non-sub article, and the two articles (Buffy and Angel) would just both link to the same article. If establishing independent notability for the multiply-owned topic is difficult, better to split the article up so that there are two sub-articles, each focusing entirely on the topic's relevance to the parent topic - so one article on Angel in Buffy, the other on him in his own show. Phil Sandifer (talk) 14:31, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
It may be better overall, which I'm happy to accept, but I'm still a tad concerned with splitting up a character's details over two articles. Short of dropping notability altogether it is probably the only option, but from a usability perspective, having to read part of the details of a secondary character in one article, and the other part in another, seems like an ugly approach. But it is probably a moot point, as I'm assuming that the character isn't sufficiently notable for an article, and thus without subarticles either a) there would be no information about the character, or b) the character's details would have been split over two long articles, as opposed to two shorter subarticles. - Bilby (talk) 14:42, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Let's assume that we are going to make a subarticle page-like functionality (with the "Show name / Characters / Character Name" display ) replicated as a template at the top of the article as seems to be the benefit of doing subarticles. If we go this way, there is absolutely no harm that I can see that a common character like Angel (Buffy/Angel) or certain superheroes or the like cannot have two or more such templates. The actual physical location of the page should be where the character is best suited, redirs from other "heirarchies" to that page, but on that page itself it will look like a character appearing in multiple series. --MASEM 14:59, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
If we do it template-based, sure. My concern here is avoiding the messy explosion of categories. Demanding unique parentage polices this effectively. The question is how best to deal with a handful of marginal cases (comics characters in a shared universe will present occasional similar problems), and how best to deal with the fact that branching will surely be implemented elsewhere, so limiting our thought to fiction articles is problematic. I'll add a few sentences about the possibility of occasional exceptions, but noting that these should be rare, and no article should be child to more than two parent articles. Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:04, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
When your universe is "messy" as is most comic book ones, I think the situation here is to make sure there is a parent "franchise" article, so, say a villain that appears in mupliple series (more than a couple) would be primarily listed under "DC Comics / Characters / Recurring Villains / Mr. Evil Person" Now, this character may have a "home" series that he predominately appears in, so that should be listed in the primary "home" work and the series list but not every cameo or minor role-appearing work. (A more concrete example that I can vouch to would be something like "Q" from Star Trek, having appeared in 3 series, though "home" to TNG). --MASEM 15:12, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
There's something deeply unsatisfying, however, about having DC Comics/Characters/Heroes/Batman be our Batman article. But we're dealing here with the most extreme limit case we can find, and I suspect that WikiProject Comics, who are generally a pretty good WikiProject, can come up with good solutions here. Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:54, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
(ec) I fear that you may be understating the extent of the problem - I suspect that in the end, there will be many subarticles which can (and probably should) have multiple parents, especially once we branch out of fiction. But if I understand the situation correctly, it seems that there are four viable approaches to subarticles with multiple parents: a) don't allow subarticles (the current theoretical state of affairs); b) allow subarticles to exist as "normal" articles (the current state of affairs in practice, at least until someone notes that they exist and brings them to AfD); c) split the content of the topic over two or more subarticles; or d) put all the content in one subarticle, but have the various parent articles point to it (Masem's approach). I'm leaning towards d), but none seem optimal. - Bilby (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
No, I'm well aware of the problem. There's a reason that I've been slow about getting a draft of guidelines for this proposal - they're a pain in the ass to write. I've almost got something worth opening to public scrutiny, though. The main trick is being very careful to define what branching is for. Phil Sandifer (talk) 15:54, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I hope the draft has inclusion criteria. Using hierarchies with topics that are members of multiple categories seem hard regulate. One issue that still concerns me is how do you regulate content forks in a clear and subjective way? In this instance, I am not sure how the example of the three Terminator articles would be dealt with: Terminator (franchise), Terminator (character), and Terminator (character concept). If we don't have fair and easily understood rules, I am not sure how this proposal can work in practicle terms.--Gavin Collins (talk) 16:03, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • It doesn't have inclusion criteria as such. But I've linked it below - have a look. I think that, even if it doesn't give a how-to guide on the Terminator case, it at least constrains it such that sensible decisions have to be made. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:06, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • This could be the Achilles' heel of your proposal. One of the reasons why the proposal failed to allow non-notable lists of fictional elements such as television episodes and fictional characters (see FEAPOALT section) did not work is the criteria for inclusion: the overarching topic had to be "highly notable" (i.e the subject of extensive academic analysis - the inclusionsist hated this) and the lists themselves were required "not exceed the necessary depth of coverage for the main article's topic". It seems to me that these inclusion criteria were too arbitary, and could not be applied in practise - even Percy Snoodle who made the proposal could not give concrete examples of how these inclusion criteria (or more correctly exclusion criteria) could work in practise. What we need are a set of inclusion criteria to make this proposal work, otherwise, like Achilles, it is eventually going to get stopped in its tracks.--Gavin Collins (talk) 16:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Well, as an academic working in the field, I can tell you that an "extensive academic coverage" requirement is ridiculous. Nobody wants Calvin and Hobbes to be primarily based on [5]. Least of all me. But I take your point about the criteria for such lists. Still, I don't think it's a factor in the branching proposal as such. It seems to me a question at WP:WAF - something distinguishing what elements of a fictional work need to be part of the summary. I tried to address this below in my guidelines on how to write a summary. But yes - I agree that some caution against very minor characters need exclusion. Again, though, I question whether it's the inclusion criteria ("not exceed the necessary depth of coverage") that failed, or the editors. That is to say, do the people who add marginal trivia to fiction articles actually care what our policies are? Because if the problem is pathologically bad editors, we shouldn't cater our policies to stopping them - we should cater our policies towards creating good coverage, and then we should just actually be good about enforcing them. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:32, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I would think that it appropriate with subarticles as proposed that there's a point where you should not resolve a element into a subarticle, instead folding it into a larger list. Obvious case is of minor/recurring characters in most works which do not need more than a paragraph each; subarticles along these lines would be too short and likely where the advice of WP:SS steps in in avoiding the creation of many small articles. This stuff can be defined for cases of fiction; other areas likely need different advice. On the point of depth of coverage, it needs to be a common sense approach. Take a series like the Simpsons. The amount of notable information about the show in general will likely not grow or grow in very small amounts relative to the amount of information about the elements of the show (episodes, etc.) Each new episode would change the balance of out-of-universe to in-universe information but does that mean to bound that? No: if a show has two hundred episodes, it will take two hundred episode descriptions to describe them, obviously "weighing" down the real-world info but not the point of being indiscriminate. But this is why when it comes to characters, we should apply more restraint. Major characters need to be talked about as well as recurring minor characters, but those one-shot characters become indiscriminate and thus should not be covered. That's where undue balance comes into play. --MASEM 16:53, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I largely agree. But does the policy we have already weigh against that? Can it be made stronger? Does it need to be? Is this a policy problem, or a stupid people problem? Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:55, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

RFC Draft: Randomran's proposal

I've put together a badly written draft of a proposal I'd like to see. Some parts are tighter than others, but here it is:

The reason I like it is because it gets away from abstract questions and gets right down to business: here are a bunch of different compromises, which one(s) do you like? The only thing I might change (besides dropping the individual editors' names -- I've included those temporarily for clarity) are allowing the supporters of each proposal to rewrite them based on the discussion that's already ensued at this page, allowing them to be clarified and improved. I would also try to improve the wording and layout of the table of contents. Also, if someone wanted to withdraw or squash a proposal before we put it to the larger community, that could only make this more efficient. People hate reading a lot of detail.

I'm not saying it's perfect. But hopefully you can understand why I prefer it to Masem's. It may be possible for Masem's proposed RFC to incorporate what I like about this approach... I think it's more clear, less abstract, and easier to form an opinion on. Randomran (talk) 08:01, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

The problem I see with this is the fact this is aimed at an approach that a standard RFC is set up to present with significant discussion of the issues. In this case, ok, we aren't limiting discussion, but we don't want uninvolved but interested editors to wade through 100's of replies. We want to present as few issues as possible, and use that to gauge which of these proposals are ones we need to focus on (as only a small handful of editors have applied to figure this out); in the current fashion, for example, maybe none of the first four given ones achieve any consensus - which means we can't justify any changes to NOTE with respect to sub-articles. Now, maybe what can be done is in my version to describe certain effects that will occur based on these proposals should the various issues be accepted or rejected so that we can provide the general approach to these proposal and specific effects they have. --MASEM 11:42, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
So, basically, you think "User:Randomran/test" is too long? You're right. It is too long. But I think we can offer something as short as yours, while presenting a series of clear proposals. Let me offer some constructive criticisms of "User:Masem/NoteRFC". First, "Issue 1" and "Issue 2" are far too abstract and academic to get meaningful feedback from the average disinterested Wikipedian. Second, "Issue 3" and "Issue 4" are too open-ended. There are no concrete proposals, so people are misled into believing these are yes/no questions, pushing people towards inclusionism or deletionism. What I like about "User:Randomran/test" is that there are nuanced proposals in between yes/no, and it will allow wikipedians to look for middle ground themselves. Randomran (talk) 16:38, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
To clarify... I fear that leaving "Issue 3" and "Issue 4" as broad yes/no questions will just make people retrace the weeks of unproductive discussion that took place here and at WP:FICT. The proposals only started to come 2 weeks after it was clear that WP:FICT had stalled, and some of the better compromises took another 2 weeks of discussion in order for us to identify specific ways forward. With this smaller group of wikipedians, we've sketched out the landscape of this problem and found some potential middle ground. We should let the broader commnnity evaluate the middle ground we've discovered, rather than hoping they'll rediscover it themselves. We shouldn't throw away the concrete proposals for compromise that have been put forward. Without these proposals, we basically restart the same discussion over, except this time it will involve hundreds more editors, making it even harder to form a compromise. Randomran (talk) 16:48, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
I like this version, although I agree that it could be tightened. Although I think Masem's draft above also has good points, I'm afraid that in the end we won't be able to distill out if it a clear-cut consensus of what must be done. To gain a larger consensus, it will be necessary to get input from people who are wholly unaware of the background to this issue and the tremendous amount of words that have already been written on the topic. This may lead to knee-jerk !votes without having fully realized all the implications, it may lead to a rehashing of the millions of words already written on the subject (and if so it is going to scare off other commentors), and at the end there still won't be a good idea of what to do next. I think the RfC should offer specific proposals; whether those are the same ones in Randomran's version is debateable (although I think they are good proposals). Karanacs (talk) 16:58, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I think that Masem's approach will provoke discussion, but agree with Karanacs that a feasible solution may not emerge even if the discussion involves a long and heated debtate. Perhaps we need to take a step back, and form an RFC based on each of the above proposals as if each of them feasible and will obtain consensus support.
  • I think this will will keep people more focused, so the process will be more efficient and more likely to produce a real result. Sometimes a smaller group can accomplish what a larger group cannot. Our small group here has sketched out the landscape of compromises that might exist between inclusion/deletion. That's something that no large group can do. So let's give them the framework we've put together. A large group will only rehash everything we've done, but slower, and thus they won't have the patience to see the discussion through. If they start where we left off, we're more likely to arrive at a conclusion. Randomran (talk) 16:45, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I actually really prefer this proposal to masem's. I agree that leaving open-abstract questions will only delay and stall the decision making process. We need to clean up some of the language to make it more neutral for both sides and clearer, but other than that i think this is the way to go. -ΖαππερΝαππερ BabelAlexandria 00:50, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Meta-proposal to improve readability (step one)

I propose that we remove the last two proposals from User:Randomran/test. (3.3) WP:POSTPONE is an interesting proposal, but is off topic and should be considered on its own. And (3.2) User:Kevin Murray's proposal that reader interest can generate notability strikes me as unlikely to gain support, as per WP:INTERESTING.

(3.1) User:Peregrine Fisher's proposal is actually decent, and I might even support it myself. But I think it might be outside of the scope of the two main issues at hand. I'm more on the fence on this proposal, .

If we can trim back the last three proposals, we might be able to focus on the two main issues at hand. Thoughts? Randomran (talk) 01:18, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Seeing as I brought WP:POSTPONE up, I'd like to withdraw it. Technically User:Masem made the page, though. So I'd like to ask for his input before I remove it from the RFC. I'm sure we can put it to an audience at a later time, but currently I think it's a little off topic and would overwhelm the RFC process we're going for. Masem? Randomran (talk) 01:47, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to leave the proposals out of this RfC. The ideal way for this to go in my opinion is a straight up/down vote, to be followed by a second RfC if the GNG is deemed adjustable. I do think reversing parts 1 and 2 on User:Randomran/test would be better. We need an answer to that badly. My guess is that the results of the voting will be that the GNG is adjustable, but no one is going to agree on a good way to do it for fiction. I'll remove my proposal to get things started.
Also, section naming is going to be very influential. "Notability is always inherited by sub-articles" vs. say "Sub-articles are treated as sections of their parent articles" may yield different results. When I first browsed without reading and saw "Notability is always inherited by sub-articles," I thought it was something that was even more inclusionist that what I want (hard to do ;-)). After reading it, it's exactly what I'd like to have happen. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 02:33, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for helping to simplify the RFC. Once we axe a few excessive proposals, step two is re-organizing and cleaning up the remaining proposals. Step three will definitely be all about wording: you're 100% right that terminology can sway people one way or another, so it's important we come up with something consistent that all sides can agree to that is fair to all perspectives. We'll get there in time. Randomran (talk) 02:38, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Something that may make things even easier.
The wrestling wikiproject disourages its members from voting on their FAs. This is to lend respectability to their articles that do pass FA.
On the inclusionist side, I think we should not try for the most advantageous wording possible. We want something that, if it does have support, that support cannot be questioned. I think the deletionist side feels the same. Basically, I think we can work together well if we focus on bold statements of fact instead of sugar coating. Then, whichever way the voting goes, at least we have useful data. So maybe "Notability is always inherited by sub-articles" is the right wording. There's probably a better way to phrase it, but I like its boldness. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 03:00, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I think simplicity will probably be the most fair to all sides. But I think it's a good principle to let the "rival" side peel back some of the spin and phrase it in an honest way. Let's see if we can remove some of the excess proposals first, and then we can get to work on the wording. Randomran (talk) 03:15, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

negative BLPs held to a higher standard

Gavin reversion "WP:BIO is already prominently featured in the Template:Template:Notabilityguide)" misses the point that negative BLPs (not BIO) are a very serious issue, and the evidence is that this one specific issues is not linked sufficiently prominently. WP:BLP is already mentioned in the lead, but given the seriousness of the issue, and the fact that many newcomers may reasonably expect that complying with WP:N is sufficient for new articles, I believe it is appropriate to list it again at the bottom of the page. In short, for negative BLPs, WP:N is too weak and WP:BLP is the governing policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:19, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

They are a serious matter but that is explained in depth at WP:BIO. We don't need to summarise the subject specific guidelines in WP:N - its only a click away to read the whole thing in full. --Gavin Collins (talk) 09:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
Can you tell me what is explained at WP:BIO, and where? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 09:49, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • That's right, WP:BIO is weak on guidance with respect to BLPs, and so WP:BIO is not relevent to this. WP:N does contain lots of links, many less than half as important as this one. WP:N is a disambiguation page, if you read the top, and yet this meaningful, important and underappreciated link is not a disambiguation. WP:N is most definately a portal for newcomers. Who else could you think is written for? Perhaps a resource for AfD for quotes to explain things to misguided newcomers? Experienced wikipedians already know what WP:N says (often, what it means to say). WP:N exists as perhaps one of the most important guidance pages to newcomers because it is tied to whether their new page gets deleted. It is therefore, for many newcomers, one of the most important pages for familiarisation. Now, with regard to the example I cited, we have a newcomer adding new articles that are moderately well complying with WP:N, but are near-unanimously deleted basically because of WP:BLP. So why do you think that this page shouldn't provide a meaningful link?
  • WP:BLP is policy, not a guideline. WP:N implies that complying with WP:N justifies article inclusion. There are some articles for which WP:N is not sufficient, and where posting of those articles risks actual damage. WP:N as written fails to communicate that there is a special policy that overrides. If I can suggest links that we can remove, would this placate you? --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:51, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I think we should remove the entire WP:N#See also with the exception of the template Wikipedia policies and guidelines on the grounds that, if it directly related to WP:N, it will be mentioned in the body of guideline. Policies, guidelines that are once, twice or more removed from the guideline should also be deleted, in accordance with Linkfarm rule #1, while links personal essays should be removed in accordance with WP:NOTSOAPBOX. There is just no rationale in terms of direct relationship between WP:N and WP:BLP to justify indiscriminate link being added. Once we start adding lots of "guideline cruft", it makes this guideline longer without good reason.--Gavin Collins (talk) 12:46, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • It isn't guideline cruft. We want the actual body of guideline text to be short, sweet, and directly on point; however, to that end, certain arguments that have been iterated in the past obviously can't be included in the text. This doesn't mean they never occurred, and it makes complete sense from an historical perspective to understand how and why a guideline came about and various interpretations on it (as long as its not weighed down in one-sided in one direction POV interpretations). Linking to other relevant guidelines that may not be linked directly in the text but are relevant also make sense. As long as it's clear that the editor can understand the intent of the current guideline by reading everything up to "See Also", but not including it, there is no harm in including appropriate links here that an interested reader can pursue. --MASEM 13:20, 8 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Clearly there is harm, as cruft grows on cruft. We have to have some sort of criteria for writing guidelines, otherwise stuff will just get added at random. I would like to formally propose that this section is eliminated on the grounds that (a) all these links (some of them dubious) clutter the guideline, and (b) that there already exist various navigation and help templates for cross reference purposes.--Gavin Collins (talk) 10:30, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Guidelines on branching

I've got a first stab at a guideline for branching at User:Phil Sandifer/Branching. My goal with it is to try to prevent the rapid expansion and bloat that came with categories by specifically delineating what Branching is a tool to solve, and making it clear what it is and is not. This does not amount to inclusion criteria as such, but I think it will go a long way towards working as them in practice. But I'd love to hear comments at this point. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:07, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I like it in general. A few issues though. I'm not fond of the multiple subarticles idea. Not sure how to fix that, but I think Angel from Buffy should have just one page.
What is hypertext? These are links right?
Not sure if AfD should be discouraged. There needs to be some final way to decide things. If an AfD results in a "merge" consensus that's a good way to find out what a larger group of people thinks should happen. Maybe AfM?
Keep up the good work. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 17:25, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
To echo that good work comment ... even though it is pretty obvious that I disagree with what you are trying to do, I do appreciate the way you are going about it. Discussion and attempting to get policies modified to permit what you want to do is infinitely preferable to just doing it and daring others to delete it.
Kww (talk) 17:38, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
Yeah - the main thing I'm concerned about with AfD is that I think it lessens the degree to which it's possible to treat a branched article as a single unit. With Angel, I agree - he should have just one page. What about Anne (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)) though? She appeared in two episodes of Buffy, three of Angel. Not worthy of her own article. I have no problem, there, with putting her two Buffy appearances in a Buffy sub-article, and her three Angel in an Angel sub-article with a link between them. Neither sub-article needs a paragraph of text describing events from the other show. Again, that's basically a solution only for characters who clearly lack independent notability. But I'm willing to drop it if people really find it unsatisfying. Phil Sandifer (talk) 17:30, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree that w need to get away from the "article" emphasis. Conventional paper encyclopedia have varied over those with many short articles, and a relatively small number of long ones--think of the two parts of Brittanica. There is no good solution in paper, only the choice of which inconvenience: either requiring an index, or jumping back and forth. On the web of course there is. The problem here is reader expectations--that an article by itself is in some sense a signal of importance. This is echoed by the extra emphasis that pagerank gives to article titles, and the desire of people and organisations for an article about themselves. To pick an example: there is in principle no difference between having individual articles on all the characters of a fiction, and having the same information in one longer article. There is only the practical difficulty of dial-up connections--which still does make anything over 32 or 64 k disadvantageous for many users--and those users are perhaps our most important ones, with fewer alternative resources. But the real problem is content: though there is no essential difference between merged or unmerged articles with the same net content, there is a difference in principle between those with more content and less. For the major characters in a fiction, it's OK to have one large article with full information on them all, or the necessary number of short articles--but it is not OK to have one large article with one or two lines on each, or a group of short uninformative stubs.

In practice, this is the problem: the people who dislike individual articles on characters (or roads, or schools, or whatever) also dislike having the same material merged into larger articles--what they basically want is to have less material on these topics at all. As our structure is set up, this is best negotiated via afd discussions of individual articles, and if we can find alternatives to resolve questions of how much should be merged in an equally open fashion, that would be very good. What this will not however settle is the question of what degree of depth of coverage is encyclopedic. DGG (talk)

Wikipedia should not be a catalogue - case in point - State Roads and featured article about NY Route 32

I don't expect that this will change policy, but I felt a need to discuss this. Recently, an article on New York State Route 32 was named as a featured article. To me, this highlighted what Wikipedia is becoming and what it instead should be.

Wikipedia is NOT a catalogue of everything that exists in the world. If it were, every single person, notable or not, would have their own articles. Why does Wikipedia have an article about every single state road in America? These roads are simply not notable in and of themselves.

For some roads, such as US 1, US 66, the Autobahn, that are historically or culturally significant for some reason, they should have articles in Wikipedia. That's fine. But every single state road? What is notable about every single state road that they should all, every last one of them, be included in Wikipedia? Take the featured article on NY 32. I won't deny it - it's a well-written article, it's thorough and comprehensive. But what is notable about that road? Did Washington march along this route in the Revolutionary War? Was it part of the Underground Railroad? Did bootleggers smuggle 50% of all outlawed alcohol into New York City during Prohibition along this road? If not, then this road is just another state road, one of many, many thousands in this country (and I realize that Wikipedia is global, please forgive my chauvinism), all equally unimportant, and all, equally unworthy, unnotable, for inclusion in Wikipedia.

Even granting that there should be an article on every single state road in this country (which I do not grant, by the way), why is a turn-by-turn listing of every mile of the road included? How is that possibly notable, or possibly worthy for inclusion in an encyclopedia? Here's a quote from the "What Wikipedia is Not" page: "When you wonder what should or should not be in an article, ask yourself what a reader would expect to find under the same heading in an encyclopedia." No way someone would crack open an encyclopedia to look up NY Route 32, let alone a turn-by-turn analysis of every mile of it.

Here's a quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Notability is sometimes used as a synonym for verifiability, although others disagree. Notability to many is related to importance. Articles should be relevant to a reasonable number of people." Well, let me say that verifibility is not equivalent to notability. Notability is most definitely related to importance. And a complete catalogue of all the state roads in America is not important.

That article is hardly every mile. I rather glossed over some sections (like Saugerties to Route 23) that have little to describe to them.

Another quote from the "Wikipedia:Notability/Historical/Arguments" page: "Many editors also believe that it is a fair test of whether a subject has achieved sufficient external notice to ensure that it can be covered from a neutral point of view based on verifiable information from reliable sources, without straying into original research." If you look at the discussion section of NY 32, you will see that there is plenty of original research going on - "While driving up to the Catskills last weekend to go snowshoeing I kept my eyes open for a good spot for an image, and found one even better, here near Katsbaan." Even under Wikipedia's own guidelines, this plentitude of original research shows that NY 32 is not notable.

Huh? How is suggesting a good spot for a picture to illustrate an article (which I did eventually take), original research? In fact images are specifically exempt from the original-research policy. Daniel Case (talk) 17:58, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
Hi, Daniel. I am very new at this, and if images are specifically exempt as you say, then so be it. I don't have any objection to that, although it seems contradictory to the declaration that there be no original research. And let me put your mind at ease, just in case you're thinking about it - there will be no vandalism! I am a good citizen of Wikipedia. I am just interested in the discussion here. --Jgroub (talk) 01:22, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Wasn't on my mind. If you read that link carefully, you see how it explains the situations in which photographs do constitute original research (not many). If we had to rely purely on other people's images, we'd have very few free ones and much less. Daniel Case (talk) 02:55, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

At the very most, this article on NY 32 - just another state road - should be 3 paragraphs long, namely, the first 3 paragraphs of the article. At the very least, this article should be deleted entirely.

Otherwise the name of this website should be changed to WIKILOGUE. --Jgroub (talk) 15:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)Jgroub (talk)

I understand where you are coming from, but remember that people usually work on topics that interest them. Some people are interested by roads and other transportation, so they write articles on that. One of the things that makes Wikipedia unique is the diversity of articles on obscure (but notable) topics. --Phirazo 17:02, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
But what makes articles on every non-notable state road in the country notable, and especially in that level of detail? That just makes Wikipedia a repository for all information, which Wikipedia is specifically not supposed to be. --Jgroub (talk) 17:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)Jgroub (talk)
I really object to calling it non-notable. Route 32 is part of a snarled traffic system at a mall near its southern end, a bone of contention in the village of New Paltz over whether part of it should be made one-way, a major street along the Hudson in New York's state capital, the primary road access to a major rail junction, a key part of access to Catskill ski areas, as well as being among the ten longest state highways in a major state, longer than a number of its limited-access roads. Inherently notable as a designated, recognized and funded part of a major public transportation system.

Inherently non-notable, IMO, are county roads, as we decided in USRD a long time ago (other than lists of them in each county, or county roads that have some of notability independent of being county roads) and even long undesignated roads that don't have some other claim to fame (Clinton Road, Shades of Death Road, to claim two examples from my watchlist). But not every single road and street anywhere ... if we did have articles about that, then your complaint would make some sense. But we don't, so it doesn't.

I'm sure NY 32 is a bone of contention, just as plenty of roads are. But so are building projects, sewer projects, recycling projects. None of these are notable either, because they appeal to a local mindset. So there are questions in New Paltz over what to do with the road. Those should be discussed in NewPaltzipedia, and not in Wikipedia. These are extremely local issues, and not notable enough for an enclyclopedia of global scope. --Jgroub (talk) 01:22, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Please read User:Scott5114/Highway notability FAQ. Thanks. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 18:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I did, thanks for the info, and left the same comments there. All those FAQs told me was that the community has decided that country roads are not-notable, but state roads are. It's completely arbitrary. --Jgroub (talk) 01:22, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Arbitrary, yes, but sometimes it is necessary to make arbitrary rules that are also bright-line rules. Saying "state roads yes, county roads no" makes a clear distinction no one can argue about. If we set a cutoff point for road articles in terms of mileage or traffic volume, those would either depend on imprecisely-measured or -generated statistics or create "but what about?" arguments that we already have too many of already. Or both. By making it a jurisdictional issue, no one's going to argue the point on a specific road article.

I remember, by way of example, back when everyone and their brother was putting articles about their podcasts up and those of us who did newpage at the time could guarantee ourselves several new AfDs every night just on podcasts. I think we finally decided on some rule that the top 100 podcasts were notable. That led in part to the whole WeHateTech affair, which I can't even find anything on anymore (short version: two guys from Singapore complain that their tech podcast, WeHateTech, repeatedly gets deleted under a variety of names and that they will get the article on some way or another because their rivals at this Week in Tech had one, and those people were idiots to hear these guys talk about it (Twit had been kept because it featured contributors who were already notable)). At one point they conceded, OK, we're not one of the top 100 podcasts but we're among the top 100 tech podcasts, so shouldn't that count for something? Eventually it ended with them getting indefblocked (I don't think we troubled with a ban) for legal threats.

To me it shows why that sort of "top 100" criterion is never a good idea if it doesn't reflect some pre-existing conensus cutoff like the Top Forty or Hot Hundred for singles. I honestly have no problem with "state roads yes, county roads no", which makes perfect sense to me and frankly seems a lot less arbitrary than other criteria for roads (you should see how much tooth-gnashing the musical-artist notability standards create). Daniel Case (talk) 02:55, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm all for bright-line rules - I agree with you, I see your point, they make life much easier. I just think they drew the line at the wrong spot is all. They should have stopped with federal highways as being part of a nation's transportation infrastructure; a state's is hardly as important, IMO. But go the end of this section and see my comments there on what's going on in Manhattan. --Jgroub (talk) 03:16, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
I think that given the number of state road Featured articles, and the even larger amount of Good articles, it's clear that first, excellent, well-referenced articles can be made on state roads, and secondly, that it's far too late to change our minds on notability now: Far too much work has gone in, far too much high-quality content made.
To delete everything at this point, after the community as a whole has examined state road articles, and determined many of them as among the best articles on wikipedia, would only serve to alienate and drive off excellent contributors who made said featured content. And to what end? Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 19:48, 11 July 2008 (UTC)
I am not "really" suggesting that these articles be deleted, even though I am by posting here. I do not seriously believe that the "community" will suddenly side with me and delete everything. But to answer your question "to what end," the end would be to make Wikipedia more true to what it should be - an encyclopedia about notable topics. --Jgroub (talk) 01:22, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

(outdent) First, full disclosure: I did hear about this discussion off-wiki, although I was not asked to comment. This is a very odd complaint. Long ago Wikipedia reached a consensus about its notability guideline for highways. Mitchazenia has been perhaps the site's most diligent and productive editor in this area--he has contributed over five dozen good articles and is well on his way to bringing New York state highways up to featured topic status. Now an account with fewer than 50 edits in its history is arguing unilaterally for the deletion of all this hard work. Jgroub, early on you added trivia to articles. Some Wikipedians are strongly anti-trivia, and one of the replies to such people is If you don't like it, don't read it. Wikipedia has nearly two and a half million articles that have nothing to do with highways. You are welcome to read them and add to them. Perhaps bring a trivia article to good article candidacy. I encourage you to show consideraton for the hard work and dedication of editors who do productive work within the boundaries of longstanding guidelines. Respectfully, DurovaCharge! 20:05, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Forget about the messenger; it doesn't matter what I've done in terms of editing articles, and it also doesn't matter how much hard work has been put into the articles. It doesn't matter that these articles are good articles. If they are non-notable, they should be deleted. Stick to the topic at hand, not an "attack" on me - are articles about otherwise non-notable state roads notable? Discuss that question on its own merits. They are only notable due to executive fiat, due to an arbitrary decision that state roads are inherently notable, and county roads inherently are not. Why this dividing line? What is special about NY 32 that makes it notable? I have found nothing in the article, other than that, according to the FAQ on state roads cited above, it has been "assigned a number, state maintenance, and have shields put up [which makes it] pretty special." Sorry, but that doesn't cut it. If you can show me a historical or cultural aspect of this road (or any road) that makes it special, I'll bite. But there just isn't one here. And certainly not anything that makes this road deserving of the long-winded treatment it has received. --Jgroub (talk) 01:25, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
And by the way, you're probably right about "if I don't like it, don't read it." I'm sure there are plenty of other types of articles among the 2 million having nothing to do with state roads that I would also object to, but don't and won't, simply because I don't know they exist. However, this NY 32 article was a featured article of the day, and I always read all of those. Sort of like a self-improvement project, you know, some people have those 365-words-per-year calendars. This article was specifically thrust in my face. I object to this article's inclusion as the featured article, especially when there is nothing notable about the road itself. If only they had chosen another road, where something notable did take place, then I wouldn't be writing here! --Jgroub (talk) 01:40, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I see the concept of inherent notability being bandied about again, and will again strenuously object. Nothing, nothing at all, is inherently notable. Not a person, not a place, not a road, an asteroid, a star, nor a television episode. I would be extremely surprised if there weren't multiple sources on this road that discuss issues about this road directly and in detail, so the road probably is notable, but that's a result of the sources, not some inherent magic about roads.
Kww (talk) 21:08, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I think your argument supports my point. There is nothing inherently notable in state roads other than that someone by executive fiat has decided that they are inherently notable for the purposes of including them in Wikipedia, and by the same fiat, has decided that county roads are not. Why the dividing line there? Why not cut out state roads and leave only federal roads as inherently notable and worthy of inclusion? --Jgroub (talk) 01:22, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
You should note that Wikipedia has thousands of articles on little unincorporated settlements that don't have much hope of getting past stub status and whose only claim to notability is they were mentioned in a gazeetter or listed on a map somewhere. Most state roads get used by more people per day than the number of residents of these places. Plus, most of these places wouldn't make it into a traditional paper encyclopedia too. --Polaron | Talk 02:06, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Hi, Polaron. Well, you sent me here, and now you've followed me here! If every little village is included as being somehow notable, then you're right - county roads and town roads that get used by far more people in a day than live in these places should be included too. See where this gets us? But you're right; since most of these little places wouldn't make it into a traditional paper encyclopedia, they shouldn't really be here either, should they? When you say that the reason they're listed as articles is because they were mentioned in a gazeteer somehwere, that is exactly my point. Including every hamlet and burg with 421 or 63 people is not notable. That makes Wikipedia into a catalogue, a gazeteer, an index, and NOT AN ENCYCLOPEDIA.

Where do we draw the line? We may as well devolve down into county and town roads (if there is such a thing as town roads) based on their level of usage. I see someone has already listed an article for the street I live on - 79th Street (Manhattan) - and that street is only about a mile long. At least the article is mercifully short. But where does it all end? With all of us having our own articles in Wikipedia? I won 1st prize in the LIFA debate in 1982. I also won a verdict for a client of $450,000 in 2002. My name is listed in connection with a number appeals (some of them winners!), in the printed and bound permanent volumes of caselaw in New York State. Is all of that notable enough? Should I have an article? I'm not trying to be an egotist here, but tell me why I shouldn't. --Jgroub (talk) 02:23, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Jgroub, no one is attacking you. Mitchazenia is a prolific content contributor and he really isn't obligated to interrupt that work in order to rejustify work that has already passed review at this site's highest levels of article quality, but he has been kind enough to answer your questions. If you have more I recommend you research them yourself at the appropriate discussion archives. Then, if your concerns remain, you might open a new discussion and seek a new consensus. It is unlikely that the change in consensus you seek would actually form, though, because normally people who argue in favor of tightening notability standards do so in relation to topics that are mostly non-expandable stubs or that lack adequate sourcing. Neither problem exists with the family of articles that has gained your attention. Respectfully, DurovaCharge! 02:25, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Durova, I am made of sterner stuff to be able to not take it personally when someone says that because I have fewer than 50 posts, what I'm saying is somehow less important. That's why I put "attack" in quotes. And I am not trying to attack Mitch, either. I am not saying that the work that he (or Daniel Case) has done is not of good quality. If you look through what I have written, both here and at the NY 32 article itself, I have repeatedly said that it is. It is the notability of the work that I question.

I am very new to all of this - if there has been an extensive discussion about why the line has been drawn to include state roads and exclude county roads, then please help a guy out and point me to it, because I don't know where in the archives to look or even how to search.

As for the criteria of removability being that an article, or family of articles, be non-expandable stubs or lack adequate sourcing, I'm sure I could write an article about 78th Street in Manhattan (one removed from the article on 79th Street) that would do the trick on both scores. But 78th Street is just another street in Manhattan. Non-stubbiness and enough sources cannot be alone be the standard for notability. --Jgroub (talk) 02:36, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I understand there are several registered historical places located on 78th st. — CharlotteWebb 02:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Charlotte, don't you see where this leads us? You are arguing in favor of listing every street in America, nay the world, because there will be something notable to be found about it! That is ridiculous!

And looking a little more closely, I see that there is an article on Manhattan streets, 1-14. Here's the effervescent entry on 13th Street: "13th Street is almost the southernmost numbered street to cover the entire width of Manhattan without changing directions, but diverts briefly northward as it meets 8th Avenue." ALMOST! SO CLOSE! Hey, I almost won the Golf Championship in 8th grade; do I rate a mention? There is nothing notable about these streets that they deserve to be listed! Where does it stop? --Jgroub (talk) 03:07, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Like I've said before, If you have enough verifiable information to write a [featured article] about something, the question of "notability" is moot (and ideally unasked). Sorry. — CharlotteWebb 02:56, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Whoa, there. You've got the logic backwards. The writers of NY 32 didn't write a featured article, thereby making it notable. They wrote an article that was chosen to be a featured article. There is an enormous difference. For some reason, the powers that be that chose NY 32 to be a featured article decided it was notable instead of deleting it. It is this distinction that I disagree with. --Jgroub (talk) 03:07, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
No. Nobody decided that anything was "notable". Decisions were made based on the quality of the article, not the nature of the subject, as is proper. — CharlotteWebb 03:24, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
What?!? This is the notability page! How can whether an article is notable or not, not matter? It is the very basis for editing! You have to have control over what goes into an encyclopedia, or it becomes a catalogue, an index, and a gazeteer. In which case we should create Wikilogue, Wikidex, and Wikiteer for such information. That is not the purpose of an encyclopedia. --Jgroub (talk) 03:33, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
"Notability" is not the basis of editing. The basis of editing is to provide readers with free access to the sum of all human knowledge, which should according to policy be verifiable, unbiased, and freely licensed. Anything beyond that is a matter of personal taste.
One inevitable downside of forking is duplication of effort, as there will always be a significant overlap in coverage, no matter how many hairs are split trying to decide what goes where. If you think you could make this actually work, let me know. — CharlotteWebb 11:46, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
And wouldn'cha know it, just as I threaten to write an article on 78th Street, lo and behold, I see that someone has already written an article on that "notable" thoroughfare, 85th Street (Manhattan), whose only real claim to "notability" is that out of the hundreds of buildings on it, it happens to have the apartment building shown in the opening credits of The Jeffersons on it. Well, whoopdedoo there Edith. We are rapidly headed toward every block in Manhattan having its own article. --Jgroub (talk) 03:16, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Edith Bunker would happy with that, as would I. — CharlotteWebb 03:24, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
WHY?!? Why have an article on every street in Manhattan? Queens would be next, and don't get me started about 71st Street, 71st Avenue, and 71st Road. --Jgroub (talk) 03:33, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
This only becomes a problem in the absence of sources supporting the content. Aside from that, you can choose not to read it. — CharlotteWebb 11:46, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) If you feel a street article doesn't meet the general notability standards, you can take it to Articles for Deletion. --Phirazo 04:03, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
Absolutely not my point at all; this should not be done individually, on a street by street basis. My point is a raising of the bar as a whole to get away from purely local concerns - namely, state routes - to more important, i.e., notable, ones, such as national roadways. My point is not only shouldn't there be an entry for 78th Street, but there shouldn't be on for 79th Street, or NY 32, or anything else, unless it is notable in and of itself - it has something that is notable about it. What is notable about state roads, other than that a decision has been made on high by the powers that be that casts state roads as being notable, while county roads are not. Although, yes, it is a bright line rule, and, I would argue, a good in and of itself, I would raise the bar and make that bright line rule a level higher at national roads. Can someone explain to me why the bar was set at the state level instead of at the national level? --Jgroub (talk) 19:37, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
The only way that existing road articles of questionable notability would be deleted is one at a time; a single vote here or a massive AfD wouldn't do it. Besides, I don't see any consensus here to change the current notability standards for roads. --Phirazo 03:49, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Believe it or not, we do have articles about county roads [6] [7]. — CharlotteWebb 11:46, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Oh, I believe it all right, having seen articles about the streets of Manhattan here. --Jgroub (talk) 18:30, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
You might say "I've found the bar and I'm going to raise it", but at the going rate I'd say you have a handful of air and no idea what you're talking about. — CharlotteWebb 11:46, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for your unasked-for opinion of my state of knowledge. Nice personal attack. As people have suggested to me on this page, if you don't like what I'm writing here, DON'T READ IT. No one has you chained to the Notability talk page. You are free to go away, and not come back. Fly, fly little starling. Your pointing to articles about County Roads only helps my argument. You seem to be of the opinion that if an article has support and appropriate references, that makes it notable. You have it ass-backwards. It does not work that way, and even though it's obvious that that is exactly the way it has been working, that is what needs to be changed. See below. --Jgroub (talk) 15:12, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
You seem to be of the opinion that if an article has support and appropriate references, that makes it notable. ← No, we've been over this already. Nothing anybody does makes anything "notable". Stop putting words in my mouth. P.S. what I meant above is There is no "bar". — CharlotteWebb 15:52, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, you have got to be kidding me. No way is someone going to come up and question the existence of over ten thousand state route articles. Yeah, I've got a heavily biased view, seeing as I write these articles myself. But Wikipedia's been around for what, six years now? If they've stayed around for this long (with new ones being added every day), I strongly doubt they will get deleted now. The notability issue is ludicrous. They are official routes and every route has a story behind them (when I say story, I mean history, stuff like that). NY 32 being a Good Article, then a Featured Article, then featured on the main page... If you do want to put up 12 FAs, 2 FLs, 8 A-class articles, 118 GAs (which most of them are New York state routes I must admit), 882 B-class articles, and all the way down to 6103 stubs (which you seem to prefer) up for AfD, go right ahead. This is Wikipedia, where anything goes. I must commend your effort to change consensus. While I do disagree with your point of view, everyone is entitled to their opinion, let's all remember that. CL — 06:08, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

CL, you are misinterpreting what I'm trying to accomplish here. I am not really trying to change the consensus. Look at this page - no one has taken my side of the argument, not one person. I hold no illusions that as you've said, 10,000 articles are going to get deleted. What I am trying to accomplish is a discussion on making Wikipedia be what it is supposed to be - an encyclopedia - and not a catalogue of every road in every country all over the world. And that is fast what this is becoming. As you yourself say, "they are official routes and every route has a story behind them (when I say story, I mean history, stuff like that). Sure, if a road has a history, it is notable, and should be included. But every state road? Just because it is an official route? That leads us to the path of county roads and lower being included as well. Wikipedia will have 10 million articles, and they will all be about roads. Is this where we want to be? --Jgroub (talk) 18:30, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
So far, even though I've raised this a number of times, NO ONE HAS ANSWERED THE SIMPLE QUESTION OF WHY THE DIVIDING LINE HAS BEEN SET AT STATE ROADS BEING NOTABLE, AND COUNTY ROADS NOT. Yes, there is a bright-line rule, which I agree is nice, but it hardly explains why the bar was set so low. I hold that there is nothing more notable about state roads than county roads to warrant their inclusion as a class in Wikipedia. Someone please deal with that question. So far, your silence has been deafening. --Jgroub (talk) 15:12, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I've taken as close to your side as anyone could. I agree that no road is notable by virtue of its name and numbering status. I will go even further than you seem to: any attempt to declare a road inherently notable by its class is invalid, as all articles in Wikipedia must, without exception meet the general notability guidelines and be supported by multiple independent sources directly and in detail. However, the articles you object to have met the general notability guideline ... they are sourced, and with sources that satisfy WP:RS. If you identify articles that are not sourced, I'll be more than happy to help eliminate them. Eliminating well-sourced articles is generally impossible and undesirable.
Kww (talk) 15:19, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks Kww, and I agree with you in your first statement, that grouping a road, or anything, by a class and claiming its notability on that basis is flawed - my point exactly. But then, you seem to get into a bit of circular reasoning, which I've seen from others on this page as well - that the article that I'm referring to, or any article, for that matter, is notable precisely because it is sourced with good sources. Mind you, I know you didn't actually say this, but that seems to be the implication, both from you, Charlotte, and others on this page. Charlotte, right below, says verifiability of an article is key, and that notability isn't as absolutely pivotal. I hold that notability trumps verifiability everytime.

All this having been said, and said repeatedly, leads me to believe that Wikipedia should no longer be considered an encyclopedia. It should be considered a catalogue of all human knowledge, and thus should be renamed accordingly to WIKILOGUE. --Jgroub (talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

Eliminating well-sourced articles is generally impossible and undesirable. ← If this is your actual experience, it is prima facie evidence that "notability" isn't as absolutely pivotal as others have argued. Verifiability is key. — CharlotteWebb 15:52, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
????? Multiple, independent sources examining the topic directly and in detail is the notability standard, and what I mean by well sourced. If an article doesn't depend on multiple, independent sources, we shouldn't have it, even if the contents are 100% verifiable.
Kww (talk) 17:00, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
But kww, here you are saying exactly what I thought you were almost saying above: Verifiability leads to notability. You have the cart before the horse. --Jgroub (talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Not really. The plots of television episodes are verifiable, but are generally not examined directly and in detail by independent sources. Most details of my biography are verifiable, but my life has not been examined directly and in detail by independent sources. Same for a myriad of things: square footages and sales histories of nearly every home in the US, the locations of many small towns. I could probably verify the location of every 7-11 in the world, which would not justify an article listing it. It's the fact that multiple independent sources thought the topic was sufficiently important to write a detailed analysis of it that indicates that it is notable. Verifiability can be satisfied by passing mentions in atlases, censuses, indexes, and databases: notability can not.
Kww (talk) 23:17, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I would put forth the idea that out of millions and millions of roads, the fact that the body politic of a state has declared a road important enough to be maintained through statewide funding shows its notabillity. The vast majority of US roads are maintained by local municipal governments, and state deisgnation is significant in and of itself. It parallels the notability concept for politicians in that only members of a state leguislature or higher are usually considered inherently notable. The same applies to legislative bodies - state legislatures are inherently notable, but municpal councils or county boards may not be. It seems to me that the standard for roads is the same as many other subjects, and just as appropriate. Jim Miller (talk) 15:41, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Jim, this has been bandied back and forth repeatedly on this page alone. In effect, what you're saying is that it's important because it's important. Also, in reading the arguments in AfD, specifically, the arguments you're not supposed to use, one of them is, "Well, since that has been kept in, this must be kept in as well," referring to your argument/analogy about state legislatures. I would draw a distinction that while state legislatures themselves are notable, membership in them is not, and expanding notability to include state legislators was a mistake as well. --Jgroub (talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
That is exactly what I am saying. Wikipedia is not paper and we are not doomed to replicate the ivory tower arrogance that editors of traditional paper works demonstrate in equating perceived importance with notability. We get to dump the lofty preconceptions and write what an encyclopedia should be - a collection of those things that may be important to the reader. It is why we work on the basis that notability is not temporary, because we have the ability to preserve things that would otherwise be sacrificed to the limitations of space that do not apply here. Since there are no limits, we don't have to decide if any one thing is less, more, or just as important as any other subject. We only need to decide if an article can be written and we never have to ask if it should. If it can, it should. If it is factual, neutral and thorough, it should be here. The notability guideline fails because it seeks to place subjective critia where none are needed. We shouldn't be making any judgements on whether something is important enough to be here, just if it can be here and meet the minimum requirements to maintain the stadrds set forth in WP:5P. Everything is important to somebody, and everything is just as trivial to someone else. The existance of an article on any subject certainly does no harm to articles on other subjects, so I don't see the need to "raise the bar" on what it is we write about here. Jim Miller (talk) 18:59, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
"Inherent notability" is a dubious concept and rigid application of it will only result in keeping unverifiable content which is "above the bar" and deleting verifiable (and indeed, verified) content which is "below the bar". Human knowledge is for better or worse not orthogonal. — CharlotteWebb 15:52, 13 July 2008 (UTC)


I disagree. Inherent notability, in this case, refers to the fact that the subject is easily verifiable (as verifiablilty can be achieved through primary sources) but may not yet be sourced with sufficient secondary sources to pass the requirements of this guideline. The bright line ensures that verifiable (even if not yet verified) content remains. Notability is subjective as well as relative, and a definition of some level of inherent notability is necessary to avoid exactly what you point out as a potential problem above. In fact, what I see as one of the great problems with the entire notability guideline is its reliance on secondary sources, as neither journalists nor academics necessarily have the same perspective as the average reader of an encyclopedia to ensure that what the average reader considers "notable" and may be seeking is actually here in a useful format. A state road in the US will always be verifiable, and it needs a way to get past this guideline just because it is possible that nobody in our limited pool of defined secondary sources has deigned a subject worthy to spend their time writing about it. Jim Miller (talk) 16:16, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
I think "inherently" is the problematic term here. It seems to me more accurate to say that certain topics are obviously notable, in that it is obvious that sources could be found. Raising deletion discussions over such topics is poor practice, and should be discouraged. Phil Sandifer (talk) 16:33, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Again, you are defining notability by verifiability, just as others on this page have done. --Jgroub (talk) 18:27, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
It's been like that for quite a while now. Plus, notability is not the same as importance, significance, or popularity, to name a few terms. --O (谈 • висчвын) 19:07, 13 July 2008 (GMT)

Articles under USRD (WP U.S. Roads) & NYSR (WP NY State Routes) jurisdiction are slowly being cleaned up, and will eventually be of good standards. This has gone on too far, and what is the point of continuing an unnecessary discussion.Mitch32(UP) 18:37, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

This argument is seems to be going in circles. I would argue that there needs to be a line on U.S. roads that aren't otherwise famous (for example, 5th Avenue and Michigan Avenue), and state routes seem to be as good a dividing line as any. --Phirazo 20:05, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
Well, since the consensus obviously agrees with you, I respectfully disagree, but yield. --Jgroub (talk) 02:12, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Semantic problems with "wikitalk"

In the 4 plus years that I've been active at Wikipedia, I've noticed many discussions (read: arguments) about terms that have definitions unique to Wikipedia. For example, I have a little background in structured consensus decision making in the outside world, and the definition of "consensus" varies from that realm to the Wikipedia realm, and both are different from the common vernacular usage. The same thing is true with "Verifiability", "Notability", "Encyclopedic", and many other terms bandied about. Often, the disagreements that come up in discussions relate to the different meanings that people bring to these terms. When I see disagreements about these terms, I try to look at them practically, and weigh them against the overall goal of the project to be a "collection of all human knowledge". There are practical reasons for our policies and guidelines, and our use of terms like "verifiability" and "notability" are related to these practicalities. For me, they all tie together and become an over-arching concern about keeping the project manageable. At the core is keeping everything verifiable. Notability, I think, has become one way of determining what is verifiable and what isn't. If you can write an article about virtually anything so that the facts can be verified with notable sources, then you have a valid Wikipedia article.

The above discussion points out the logical disconnect in our policy. I think Jgroub has a valid point in asking why a state road would be notable and a rural one would not. However, to my way of looking at it, it isn't that we need to delete more articles and have stricter, more exclusionary policies. No, on the contrary, I think that the discussion points out that our "notability guidelines" and discussions about "what Wikipedia is not" are backwards. They have created artificial limitations on what articles may exist. I see nothing wrong with Wikipedia having, within it, a gazetteer of most of the places in the world, even if many of them are just short stubs. I also see nothing wrong about having short articles about people who have only briefly been in the news. As long as the articles have verifiable citations from notable sources, what is the problem? An obscure place may someday be the location of a major news event. When it does, we can be a good source of information for people who want to know about the place. Similarly, an obscure person may become the focus of world attention for some reason. So what is the problem with keeping all well sourced articles from notable sources, even if the subject is obscure?

There seems to be two definitions of "Encyclopedic". One pertains to being found in print versions of the encyclopedia (which we are making obsolete). The other pertains to all subjects and all knowledge. Wikipedia is most definitely "not" paper -- everyone would agree with this. So why do so many people think we need to have limitations on subject matter that are similar to paper encyclopedia? -- ☑ SamuelWantman 06:07, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I consider myself a wild eyed inclusionist. Although I agree with your points, the counterpoint is that we make our own rules and we have a limited number of dedicated editors compared to our articles. The first point means that you have to convince enought editors to follow your path. That part is something that I try and do. Basically widen our notabiltiy guldelines to include what we want (which is a lot). The second point is why we cant make a guideline that just includes everything verifiable. We have to grow at a certain rate, otherwise it gets away from us. Although I fight the "deletionists" tooth and nail, both sides are needed so that we don't grow too fast. Take heart in the fact that our total article count is always increasing. Also, work to make our guidelines accepting of certain types of articles that are verifiable. Roads and fiction articles come to mind, though there's many others. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 06:17, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
There's a bit of irony in what you say. We delete articles because we can't maintain all of them, and by doing so discourage the newbies who have written them to stay around and maintain their creations. -- ☑ SamuelWantman 07:08, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
I guess there is some irony. I think that various deletion campaigns have driven away many (1,000s?) of editors, although there's no way to track it. Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Episodes and characters 2 is the case that (sort of) stopped it, although it was probably too late (should have been figured out in 1 case, note 2). Whatever you do, make your opinion heard on as many policy and guideline pages as possible. One inclusionist editor who frequently replies here and on the other policy/guideline pages can save a thousand articles, or they can reference one AfD article at a time. I used to add refs to individual AfD'd pages, but it just isn't efficient. - Peregrine Fisher (talk) (contribs) 07:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the shout out. You have spoken to one of my points, about the logical disconnect between verifiability and notability. --Jgroub (talk) 22:27, 14 July 2008 (UTC)
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