User:Devious Viper/Notability
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From Wikitruth
Contents |
[edit] Notability: The Country Club run by the Caddies
Notability is the primary reason Wikipedians use to delete and destroy content. You'll often see deletion "discussions" begun by a poster who writes "NN, D". This bare statement means "Not notable, delete". Yes, there are nerds sad enough to think talking like this is cool.
What does "notable" mean? Well, clearly it means different things to different people. The entire field of manga is not notable for me. All I know about manga is that there once was a cartoon with the words "neon" and "evangelion" in it. I can't even remember the rest of the title. And I know it's Japanese. That's it. So far as I'm concerned, manga is not notable. A world without manga would be no poorer from my POV.
So let's delete all those non-notable manga articles, right?
Wait a minute! Some sorry geeks think manga is the only thing worth living for. For them, there can never be too much manga. If there were a million articles on everything else in this world and a million on manga, they'd consider the encyclopaedia to have too much worldcruft and not enough stuff on evangelions.
Some of the geeks like to rely on google for their research. I know nothing about Bulgarian weightlifters, says geek. So he googles Enoch Abolokov. "Only 70 hits," cries geek, "NN, D."
[edit] The Web is Not the World
People who spend too much time on the interwebnet fall foul of a fallacy that we might call W=W. They believe the Web covers the same territory as the World, that it maps onto it. So if the Web isn't talking about you, you don't exist. People google their own names and when they turn up only a couple of hits, they assume that they have no importance. But here's the thing. You might live in a town of 10,000 people. Say you are a teacher at the town's high school. Each of those 10,000 people might know you, respect you, love you even. To them, you are highly notable, a person who would be missed were you to disappear. Yet your name garners only a couple of google hits. No one ever talks about you online. Most people in your town have lives that don't permit setting up websites to talk about people on. Some other guy might write a blog (or draw manga). He never goes outside his bedroom, so no one who lives in his suburb knows who he is. No one except his mother loves him and she has her moments of doubt. The blogger or manga artist has a small following of, say, 5000 people. But those 5000 people are mostly youngsters with no attachments (and perhaps no jobs), who can spend a lot of time online. They spend some of that time in forums discussing manga or in the comment sections of blogs. This person has 3000 google hits.
Which is more notable? How are we judging it? One has been noted by more people, the other by more people who make more noise about it. One has been noted on a limited geographical scale but has a huge impact on that scale, the other on a broader scale (although in points, it should be noted) but with much less impact. (Who'd miss a minor manga artist or a blogger?)
[edit] The Pertinent Question
The question that rarely gets answered is "why care if things you don't think are 'notable' are covered in the encyclopaedia?" or, more concisely, "what's it to you?" The answer is often couched in terms of quality: an encyclopaedia with more "cruft" is of lower quality. The discussion goes right to the heart of what Wikipedia is for. For some, it is aiming at the lofty heights of being a work that contains "the sum of all human knowledge" (including, we might point out, the founder, King Jimbo). For others, it is aiming at being a decent encyclopaedia written by nerds. (Others, of course, don't care. They're only there for the powertripping and fighting.) Because the former is actually the stated aim of Wikipedia, the "pro-quality" nerds end up arguing that minor manga characters are not part of "all human knowledge". There is probably an interesting discussion to be had on what actually is part of human knowledge, but you won't have it on Wikipedia. Those who adhere to the "quality" perspective think "all human knowledge" includes only what they themselves would be interested in knowing and only grudgingly allow things they find exotic to remain in their encyclopaedia.
[edit] The Untenable Answer
The reason any of this conflict even happens at all is because of the unfortunate and unavoidable situation that occasionally people just add random crap to fuck with everybody else. This was especially true when Wikipedia allowed anonymous users to create new articles (and even Wikipedia disallows that now). Folks would well and truly make crap up, i.e. entirely invent a figure or subject out of wholecloth, right there at the keyboard in the editing window. Wikipedia's developers recognized that there needed to be the ability to remove this stuff. The problem was, just like everything else on Wikipedia, they tried to program it so that almost anybody could nominate something for deletion. And then anyone could discuss it. And then everybody who discussed it who came up with the decision to remove the article, even if their reasons were stupid, would naturally insist that the deletion happen and be overseen by nobody.
In other words, the Notability Debate is built into the Wikipedia code. It is now officially part of the culture to hand everyone a torch and go "let us know if somethin' needs burnin'".
And when you do that, my friend, people are going to find a lot that "needs burnin'".
And that's notable.
