Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Notability

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[edit] Notability progress

What is {{Notability progress}} describing? --Chris Griswold (☎☓) 03:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

It looks like the total number of articles in Category:Wikipedia articles with topics of unclear importance at the bottom, and the number from each month above. —Centrx→talk • 09:05, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion as a last resort

Could you make it clear that deletion should only be attempted if merging or rewriting won't work? At least, that's what I think. Try to fix it before you delete it. There is too many people who delete 'cruft' without ever considering other options. If this project makes an organized effort to save such articles (within policy) I'd be happy to see it grow. - 131.211.210.10 09:02, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

I fixed the How to Help section in order to make sure deletion is used as a last resort. Thanks for the suggestion. Diez2 18:22, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
It may be good to put something in about always looking for a WikiProject that covers the article in question. Putting a note on that project's talk page will many times get multiple interested people to start helping. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:23, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not a bad idea

I think this project could be a positive force. I used to tackle the unclear importance category more often a few months ago (but I can't promise I'll be that active) and it was often difficult to maintain standards that I felt were supported by the community. In any case, I don't know how much publicity the project has been given but it should be announced at least on the talk pages of all the notability guidelines and probably at various places of the Village Pump. This project cannot succeed if it is not open to criticism and remains a small group of deletion-friendly editors. I tend to be fairly deletion oriented and supportive of notability as a content filter but everyone knows that the consensus on that idea is a bit shaky. Pascal.Tesson 06:03, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

But note that "unclear importance" or "does not assert importance" isn't the same thing as "notability" as defined by WP:N; they're not even related. I'm not sure you were saying otherwise; you may have just been saying "I used to do similar cleanup work on another type of common article problem." — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:12, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
But they are related de facto since all notability tags place articles in this cleanup category. If you have ever worked on clean up of those categories, you know that you get a whole bunch of articles which should have been speedy-deleted from the get-go and many articles which are clear prod candidates. Of course you also get things that were tagged incorrectly by people who think "I never heard of that guy, must not be notable" but all in all they are not the majority. Interestingly, the more difficult articles to handle are often those that were really tagged with {{importance}}. In any case, the notability guidelines are definitely relevant when you work on this backlog. Pascal.Tesson 01:30, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Then the tags need to be fixed (which was one of the suggested tasks of the broader WikiProject Notability I discussed below, I would note. :-) I agree with your assessment of the tagged articles; my point was that the template situation is a mess. It looks to me like they have not been updated since a very long time back in the notability debate/process, and do not reflect current ideas and consensus about notability (and definitely will not reflect the even more clear notability consensus that emerges over probably the coming month or three.) I.e., there's plenty more work to do than fixing articles flagged with this template! — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:18, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Scope too narrow

I'd already proposed WikiProject Notability about two weeks ago (see Wikipedia talk:Notability archives) and was actually going to go through the WikiProject Council "official" proposal process in a few days, with a much broader mandate (basically, all things notability, from archiving and indexing the internal debates and proposal ideas with regard to the topic, to bringing the subject-specific NN guidelines into WP:N, to cleanup work like the present WP:WPNN proposes, to patrolling AfD for bogus "NN - I haven't heard of this before" arguments, to creating new cleanup tags and other templates relating to NN, etc., etc., etc.) So now what? Do we broaden this WikiProject and make its cleanup activities a Task Force, or make it separate and more specifically named, like "WikiProject Notability cleanup"? — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 23:12, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, correct me if I'm wrong, but your original idea for that project was mostly designed to work on the guidelines and to limiting what you feel is the abuse of notability. In fact, am I misrepresenting your position if I say that you believe that notability should not be used at all? It's sort of an akward combination to have one half of the project doing cleanup based on guidelines that the other half of the project is trying to delete (and I say that with the utmost respect for your opinion). Pascal.Tesson 01:37, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Yes, you would be misinterpreting me, sorely. I think you have been only half-following the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability. Short synopsis: I was opposed to WP:N's wording and to it conflicting with WP:DEL-"blessed" subject-specific notability guidelines; I proposed a WikiProject to attempt to work on establishing consensus on what "notability" really means and how it should operate, because no progress was then being made at Wikipedia talk:Notability; I later re-proposed the idea of WikiProject Notability, twice (with increasingly broad ideas for it); and since the debate began have rescinded my opposition to WP:N (as opposed to WP:DEL, which I've supported all along) because consensus looks like it may actually be reachable in Wikipedia talk:Notability after all and problems with WP:N's wording are being addressed. To get back to the point, I think WikiProject Notability is too broad a name for a one-purpose WikiProject devoted to cleanup work on articles flagged with a particular template, is all. I have never once in the entire debate suggested that WP:N should be deleted, and have defended it at least three times from that suggestion by others, over the last few weeks. I've already outlined above a few of the things I think should be under the rubric of a broader WikiProject Notability. And yes, abuse of WP:N in AfD is one them; even WP:N's probably second-strongest supporter, GTBacchus, has been posting examples of such abuse, and the most current topic of debate on the talk page relates to this problem (more specifically to specious arguments of the form "this subject was notable last week but isn't any more", as if multiple, independent, reliable sources just "go away"). Just an example. Educating wikipedians about the proper use of WP:N in AfD, and even what "NN" really means, is going to take coordinated, committed effort, which is why I bring it up again as an example of WikiProject multi-focus. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:03, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
PS: Just to be really clear: I'm not opposing in any way the purpose of this group; I'm simply suggesting either: a) that WP:WPNN be broadened and its present work become a Task Force (or at least a subproject area and major to-do list item), or b) That it be renamed to something more specific (WikiProject Notability cleanup?) so that a more general WikiProject Notabililty parent project can use this "spot" in the namespace. I think the former is vastly preferable, obviously. That is, I see the purpose of the current project being a task or activity or area of focus of a much broader collection of notability to-do's. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 02:14, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I stand corrected, apologies. I have indeed only been half-following (more like not following actually) the debate at WP:N since it has started producing a 100kb of discussions every day. I just don't have the energy to get into these endless debates and frankly, I think you should propose a one-week moratorium on that talk page until everyone just chills and starts listening again. But I digress... In any case, I think you do have a point that the name of this project might suggest it has other ambitions than taking care of this backlog but I don't think that redefining its mission is the way to go. Pascal.Tesson 04:57, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
As you wish. PS, re: the debate: I think it was ultimately productive. WP:N isn't WP:OWNed any longer, and more than basically the two people over and over again get to have their input on its text, so progress was made. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 06:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
Sooooooooo, what is your proposal? Is it to change the focus of the project? Or just to widen the focus by also adding a force to get consensus on proper notability guidelines? Diez2 01:35, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Importance per project

I do see, that there are many articles that have either an {{importance}} or {{notability}} tag. In my feeling, there is a small, though distinct difference between the feeling that these two tags convey:

  • the importance tag is for articles, that are probably important enough, but do not state why they are important. They may indeed be non-notable, and hence are in the non-notability category
  • the notability tag is for articles where people have serious questions whether or not articles are notable, and these probably should be deleted, if noone has added importance within some time.

Now lately there is a lot of work removing the articles that have been tagged since June 2006 (people removing them, people changing them, people suggesting to delete). I can fully understand that for the notability tags, I do have some trouble with the removal of the articles in the importance tags. In my opinion, that should be done by people who are working in a project affiliated to that article. Only they are able to assess whether a certain article is important enough.

I have earlier suggested (not in this project, but to someone changing/removing importance tags) to create importance tags per discipline (I believe there is a music-importance-tag?), but another solution was adopted, tagging them per period (which is already a big step forward). Now I am going to resuggest the other suggestion, is it a good plan to tag articles with the importance tag per project, or are there other solutions for this problem? --Dirk Beetstra T C 15:36, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Importance and notability generally mean the same thing (pertaining to Wikipedia). Also, the individual projects do not set their own guidelines in deciding importance. You can find those guidelines at WP:NN. Diez2 20:01, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
The two tags certainly have a different text in the tag, and I indeed concur that they should both result in categorisation in NN. Also, I am not suggesting that there should be different guidelines per project, they should be the same all over, I am saying that the right people should be consulted before deciding on notability. --Dirk Beetstra T C 20:11, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
Something tagged with {{importance}} may very well be notable enough for Wikipedia, and there may be no doubt about it, but nevertheless an article might need information about importance. Is "Mozart" "among the most enduringly popular of European composers" or is he some obscure eighteenth century composer no one really ever listens to any more, even though he might be notable enough for an article and there might be substantial reliable sources, etc. In that sense, {{importance}} is like {{context}} or other cleanup tags, whereas {{notability}} specifically refers to Wikipedia guidelines on "notability". —Centrx→talk • 22:04, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

I will try and clarify my point here. In my opinion a {{importance}} is not the same as a {{notability}}. The former states:

This article lacks information on the notability (importance) of the subject matter.

The latter:

An editor has expressed a concern that the subject of the article does not satisfy the notability guideline or one of the following guidelines for inclusion on Wikipedia.

Note that the first template addresses the lack of information, while the latter is concerning the subject. I know that many people are treating these as the same, but they simply are not. They both should be categorising in the same category, because a lack of information may mean that the subject is not suitable for inclusion. Whereas articles carrying the notability template may simply be deleted, I again stress, before considering removing the importance template, or considering removing an article carrying the importance tag, please consider contacting an appropriate wikiproject (see e.g. stub-sort or other tagging on the article), if that assessment fails, indeed, consider changing importance into notability, and consider deletion when noone contests after a couple of weeks.

I know there is a backlog, but removing templates does not remove a backlog of articles which may not be notable, or lack the information that tells why they are notable, they only hide that fact, and readers who stumble onto that article will ask questions why wikipedia has that article, now people know that that concern has been addressed, and that work is (hopefully) being done on that (I have removed four importance tags of articles in the last month that did gain importance information after tagging, three (?) articles have been improved and have had their templates removed as well. But unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done, and there is only so much certain wikiprojects can handle in a certain amount of time. --Dirk Beetstra T C 11:10, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Importance is not notability

There seem to be some problems with {{importance}} and {{notability}}. Wikipedia:Notability explains that the two terms are different. Subjects must have some sort of importance and notability to be included. The distinction is usually blurred, but not always. A failure to assert importance is a criterion for speedy deletion. A failure to assert notability is not.

I'm a little concerned about the use of {{importance}} — in nearly all cases, this template is being used in situations where notability is being questioned, not importance. Unimportant subjects don't last too long on Wikipedia — these are the types of things that make you say "wtf is this crap? who cares!" when browsing the new pages. Anything that is even somewhat significant/important (these are near synonyms) should be tagged with {{notability}}.

Sometime in the future, I'll probably bring this up on the Village Pump while proposing a new Wikipedia:Importance page. For now, I'm proposing that {{importance}} be redirected to {{notability}}. --- RockMFR 01:30, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Upon further reading, it seems this is a fairly historical point of contention... hmmm... well, maybe I'll finally get around to doing something important in policy matters, heh heh. --- RockMFR 01:43, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
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