Wikipedia:Ability to be described
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This Wikipedia page is currently inactive and is retained primarily for historical interest. Per Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines: "A historical page is any proposal for which consensus is unclear, where discussion has died out for whatever reason." If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you should seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
A subject's ability to be described in an encyclopedia article while following policy is very important, as if an article is doomed to be a stub without breaking our policies on original research and verifiability, it should not exist on Wikipedia.
Articles are often debated on WP:AFD; these articles are often very short. If an article can become long and well-written within current policy, reasons for not keeping it are minuscule.
Contents |
[edit] Importance of fundamental policies
Wikipedia's three fundamental policies govern everything that appears on Wikipedia's main namespace. If we allow pages to break these guidelines, it hurts Wikipedia by making us less credible and reliable. On the contrary, keeping anything that follows these policies to the letter can't possibly hurt the encyclopedia.
Notability attempted to recognize this issue by not allowing non-notable content due to the fact that they often break the three key poilcies. However, notability as a criterion for inclusion is not based on those key policies. This page aims at keeping or deleting articles depending on whether or not the article, at the present time, can become an article while following policy to the letter.
This way, subjects that would be deleted as non-notable get a chance if they are verifiable enough to have an article written about theim.
[edit] Merging
If an article's subject is too short of an article, and there is a related article or set of articles (which may themselves be short), merging the articles is a great solution. If the article does not have any related topics already covered, then that is further evidence that a page is not for Wikipedia.
[edit] Examples
[edit] Needler in Halo:Combat Evolved
Here's an example of something clearly notable, being a notoriously underpowered gun in an insanely popular game. However, writing an article past stub-length of this weapon is nigh impossible without breaking policies. After describing the gun's characteristics and citing a few fansites with its underpoweredness, there's little left to say.
