Wikipedia talk:Notability/Historical/Importance

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There was a poll on a similar policy at Wikipedia talk:Fame and importance.

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[edit] Merge wikipedia:trivia into this guideline proposal?

[edit] Jimbo's comment

Jimbo claims that: " 'fame' and 'importance' are not the right words to use, they are merely rough approximations to what we're really interested in, which is verifiability and NPOV. . . Consider an obscure scientific concept, 'Qubit Field Theory' -- 24 hits on google. I'd say that not more than a few thousand people in the world have heard of it, and not more than a few dozen understand it. (I certainly don't.) It is not famous and it is arguably not important, but I think that no one would serious question that it is valid material for an encyclopedia. What is it that makes this encyclopedic? It is that it is information which is verifiable and which can be easily presented in an NPOV fashion. (Though perhaps only as a stub, of course, since it's very complicated and not many people would know how to express it clearly in layperson's terms.)"

Yeah, I read that comment by Jimbo, justifying his vote in Wikipedia talk:Fame and importance, more than a year ago. On the other hand I also read the wikipedia:NPOV tutorial several times, and in the "Space and balance" section of that guideline explaining how NPOV needs to be applied, undeniably one needs an understanding of "importance" and "interesting" to make sense out of the description how NPOV is meant to work in practice.
(Happily enough one doesn't need an understanding of the "fame" concept to interpret that NPOV guideline, but I'm getting off topic)
For both "importance" and "interesting" I think something clarifying these all-in-all intuitive concepts would be more than welcome, since these concepts are used to explain the practical implementation of NPOV.
But maybe I'm rather looking for sort of a philosophical clarification of these concepts, how they're understood in the context of the implementation of NPOV - rather than a fixed rule.
I tried wikipedia:coherence as a sort umbrella for such type of non-rule, philosophical guidelines (or whatever it should be called), but that idea was pushed away after a few weeks (see wikipedia talk:coherence).
Anyhow, here we are: wikipedia:importance is linked from the "space and balance" section of the "NPOV tutorial", and it bothers me that it leads to something that has an eternal "proposed" status.
Yeah, maybe we should ask Jimbo again how he thinks about this, or what direction he thinks might be best to proceed...
I'm all ears!
--Francis Schonken 00:42, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
I've filled the Qubit Field Theory article in a bit, so Jimbo's comment isn't valid now. Clinkophonist 20:06, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Important to me!

The concept of importance only has meaning from a particular point of view. What is important to me is not what is important to you. What is important to middle class americans is not what is important to poor africans. What is important to a student of pop-culture in japan is not what is important to a nuclear physicist. The three content policies: Wikipedia:No original research, Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Neutral point of view provide all the tools we need to exclude material that doesn't belong, especially when combined with the guidelines on Wikipedia:Reliable sources and Wikipedia:Cite sources. No more rulecruft, especially not rulecruft that attempts to impose a particular point of view! Trollderella 23:09, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

And defining which type of source is more reliable than another one would not be POV? To use some of your examples: in the present wikipedia system the "poor african" (who hasn't got the financial sources to get anything printed or otherwise published in English) would definitely be described as a "less reliable" source than a "middle class American" who writes a POV letter to his newspaper, printed in a few tenthousand copies the next day. And that reliability is topped in an incomparable degree by the reliability of the nuclear scientist who's interviewed on TV regarding nuclear fallout of Chernobyl. I can agree that that's how wikipedia works. But I'm getting sick of those living in the illusion than by such proceedings all "POV" has been avoided... Implicitly a distinction has been made between what is "important" and what isn't: only the word "importance" has been avoided, which is just cowardice compared to trying to find an honest answer to how "importance" is understood in wikipedia context. --Francis Schonken 00:42, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
NPOV is an aspiration. We attempt to be neutral on the value we ascribe to verifiable information. For this reason we do not judge whether an article on a Buffy episode is more important than a scientific theory. We look for reliable sources within each field of study, and write the best article we can on each. The issue here is that a group of people want to use concepts of 'importance' to exclude material that does not fit with their pov. Trollderella 01:02, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • Please provide some evidence for this allegation of abuse of the term "importance"? Radiant_>|< 18:25, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
I didn't say the 'term' importance. Look on AFD for anyone voting 'nn'. When pressed, they often say that notability is the same as importance. You yourself have piped 'notability' to 'importance'. Trollderella 21:56, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • You didn't answer my question. You said "The issue here is that a group of people want to use concepts of 'importance' to exclude material that does not fit with their pov." Please provide evidence of this group of people. Radiant_>|< 23:01, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, everyone who wants to delete 'non-notable' schools, for a start. Their point of view is that schools are not suitable, they want to use concepts of notability or importance to try to justify their pov. Trollderella 23:07, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • That's not evidence, that's your assumption of what those people are thinking. You may well be wrong about that, try asking them first. Do not jump to conclusions. Radiant_>|< 23:10, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
Oh come on. He enterered the bank with a ski mask on, a gun, and a bag with 'swag' written on it. That's not evidence that he was going to rob it, that's your assumption of what that person is thinking. We may well be wrong about that, we should ask him first. Do not jump to conclusions! Trollderella 23:15, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
  • False analogy, Appeal to ridicule. People who want to delete NN schools do not think that schools are not encyclo, they think that some schools are not encyclo. The concepts of notability and importance are real and found in any dictionary. They are subjective, everybody knows that. But denying their existence is not going to make them go away. Radiant_>|< 00:18, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
    • Nice misrepresentation! I said that they want to use concepts of importance to advance their pov. Not that I want to deny that there is a concept called importance, simply that it can only ever be a POV, and so should not be used for inclusion criteria. Trollderella 01:09, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
      • Well, that's the thing. Any inclusion criterion we use will be to some extent subjective. That's why we form consensus on them, to make them NPOV or at least CPOV. But saying that something can never be fully objective is no reason for rejecting it out of hand. Radiant_>|< 01:37, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
      • Wikipedia is not infinite. It's clear the line should be drawn somewhere. For numbers, it's exceedingly subjective to decide exactly where the line should be drawn, but that doesn't negate the fact that we should draw the line somewhere. --Interiot 01:49, 30 November 2005 (UTC)


Wrangling aside, there's a serious point here. I've been trying to write verifiable articles about various African topics and have had real problems. Often I know something personally, but can't get hold of published sources. The ratio of paper/web/TV content to head of population (how would one measure that?!) is orders of magnitude greater in countries like the US than, say, Botswana. Botswana is a wealthy, modernising African country with doctors, lawyers, artists - and one national TV station, opened 2000. I couldn't even find out how many hours a day it broadcasts. Zimbabwe? The newspaper websites, if they have them, don't have working archive searches. I know the Herald article I need exists, because I've seen it referenced in an online American academic paper. I just can't get at it. And that's before I get onto freedom of the press and recording of dissenting opinion.

I don't have a magic bullet to solve this. Yes, we must strive for NPOV. But we must simultaneously recognise that the act of publishing is itself POV. All we can do is keep this continually in mind. JackyR 18:26, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not just historical

This thing is of more than historical interest, apart from reflecting my philosophy it is also references in active proposals like notability. Kappa 00:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Kappa (apart that that doesn't imply the present version necessarily reflects my philosophy).
Whether a guideline proposal is receiving attention and/or being discussed doesn't always follow exclusively from activity on the project page and it's talk page, e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia%3ATrivia&diff=32589713&oldid=32493195 (concluding, a week ago, the merge suggestion above);
Also, there might be other reasons for keeping guidelines in "proposed" status over a longer period of time, the recent discussion at Wikipedia_talk:Trivia#Categorisation_in_.22Wikipedia_notability_criteria.22.3F specifically included wikipedia:importance.
Further, the NPOV tutorial relies on this text, for a good understanding of the "Space and balance" section (wikipedia:NPOV tutorial#Space and balance) - unless the NPOV tutorial be rewritten (which I wouldn't think the better idea), I oppose to mark the "importance" guideline as anything below "proposed". --Francis Schonken 12:50, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
Converting into essay, suppose that would work better than this stupid revert war, on an actively used page. --Francis Schonken 09:01, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with Francis (or anyone else) using this page for a new/renovated essay or proposal based on the historical text. - Haukur 10:46, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

  • Essay sounds good to me. And maybe {{historical}} needs a bit of rewording, to make clear it does not mean {{rejected}}. My objection to calling this a "proposal" is that several editors, myself included, use Category:Wikipedia proposals to find out what is currently being discussed. Hence I recently purged that cat of several items that were not currently being discussed. Radiant_>|< 17:54, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Victoria Francés

I can't really see why this article is lacking in importance: it could be a stub, but I'm really not sure. Any opinions on this? Greatgavini 12:25, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Notability (people) - if Victoria Francés meets one (or more) of the mentioned criteria, it wouldn't be too difficult to demonstrate that, I suppose? --Francis Schonken 08:17, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. Right, OK, here we go...
  • Google Test- Gives over 3 million results, even with an accent on the e, although admittedly most are in Spanish. But that shouldn't make any difference (should it?)
  • The subject's work is on sale on the American, British, German, French and Japanese versions of Amazon. Additionally, most newsagents here (in Northern Ireland) stock her work so I assume this is the case in many other places. Sounds like at least a 5000 person audience to me.
  • Has own site Nothing special, I know, but adds a bit to her notability.

Is this sufficient evidence? If so, how can I get rid of the tag without getting my user page wiped by an administrator? (*LOL* Long story - well, at least it didn't happen on the English Wikipedia...:-) ) Greatgavini 19:58, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Importance criteria

"There is evidence that a reasonable number of people are, were or might be concurrently interested in the subject (eg. it is at least well-known in a community)."

What is a "reasonable number of people" and what is a "community"? Schizombie 05:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

"Discussion on the article's talk page establishes its importance."

Does this mean the mere presence of discussion on a talk page establishes importance (I'm not sure that's a good idea), or that something within the discussion establishes the importance according to one of the other criteria (which would make this rule redundant)?Schizombie 05:23, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

"An article is "important" enough to be included in Wikipedia if [...] It is an expansion (longer than a stub) upon an established subject."

I'm not at all sure what this means. A new article relating to (and thus an expansion upon) the topic of an existing article (established subject)? Schizombie 22:11, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree, this proposal isn't very well defined. —Centrx→talk • 20:16, 24 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Does importance have to be policy?

I disagree with importance (or notability) being a Wikipedia policy. To a certain extent, we should include as much as possible. There's a point that people shouldnt get obsessive (e.g. giving everybody a Wikipedia rticle about them), but that should not be a required wikipedia policy. It seeems like Importance and Notabily were made to prevent niche topics. But Wikipedia is a great place fo find "the combined sum of all human knowledge", and I have personally learned so much from Wikipedia that I couldn't have learned anywehre else without intense research. ccool2ax 13:10, 5 April 2006 (UTC) (Also,is there a proposed "combined sum of all humna knowledge" guideline?) (I know the edit says it was made by a Clinton School, but I forgot to log on.)

Forgive my newcomer-ness in that previous post. I believe that saying that something needs to be important to be included in a limitless, non-paper encyclopædia is ridiculous. Original research protects Wikipedia from including an article about everything. -- Chris Ccool2ax contrib. 19:40, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Encyclop(a)edic?

Looking at Jimbo's comments above I wonder why we have Encyclopaedic (and Encyclopedic, for that matter) redirecting to Importance rather than vice-versa or than trying to have an actual article about what Encyclopaedic means in Wikipedia terms. I've just put a note on someone's talk page suggesting that their (clearly non-serious) additions to other pages be changed to make more serious points, and I wanted to refer to a nice definition of Encyclopaedic. But there wasn't one. This is a pity. Yes, I know it's woolly - but we could at least have an essay on the subject or something. Couldn't we? --JennyRad 22:06, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

"[...] an actual article about what Encyclopaedic means in Wikipedia terms" - the one that comes closest currently, I suppose, is the policy page Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. I think a lot of the type of redirects you mention are redirecting here for historical reasons: i.e. wikipedia "importance" was the hook used two or three years (or longer) ago, long before WP:NOT made it to official policy.
That has changed. So, I'll have a look at all the redirects to the "importance" page, and re-redirect according to what I think most appropriate currently. I'm far from the ultimate authority on this, so: feel free to improve, or discuss in appropriate places.
Apart from WP:NOT, there's also the following I sort of use as a line of thought on this:
  1. There's the concept of "importance"
  2. There's the concept of "being interesting"
That these concepts, in wikipedia context, are not seen as identical can be seen, for example, from the second paragraph of wikipedia:NPOV tutorial#Space and balance, that clearly gives a different meaning to both.
These two concepts can however be taken together, and then one gets something that currently in the wikipedia community is usually termed notability, with a separate page devoted to it, wikipedia:notability, and a series of notability guidelines giving practical notability criteria for per topic;
Things that are "not important" while "being interesting" are treated on the page wikipedia:trivia ("trivia" being defined as interesting info, that is not important)
Likewise wikipedia:importance and the pages redirecting to it, should regard the topic of "importance", without the topic of "being interesting" mixed into it IMHO, so that's an idea I keep in mind when I try to sort out these redirects.
Just for completeness: there's also wikipedia:relevance, which is yet another umbrella concept grouping "importance" and "being interesting", but the term "relevance" is, currently, nearly not used in the everyday language of the wikipedia community. A long time ago I made Wikipedia:Relevance a sort of dab page (and not a redirect to wikipedia:notability or WP:NOT which could have been other options). For me that's still OK. I have no idea how others think about this. Anyway I see no reason to promote the use of "relevance" as a terminology replacing "notability". --Francis Schonken 09:59, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
PS: "informative"/"uninformative" is another related concept having connotations of "importance" and "being interesting", these type of redirects I re-redirect to WP:NOT also. --Francis Schonken 10:11, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This is no use at all

This is so vague that whether any article meets it can be debated endlessly, with those who would support the article saying it does and those who don't saying it doesn't. It's nothing but another point to raise in a dispute. I particularly deprecate the reference to stubs as worthless. Stubbing is completely out of control. Tens of thousands of perfectly good articles are labelled as stubs, whereas so far as I can see the concept was originally intended to apply to articles so inadequate as to be almost useless in their present form. Most of the articles in Encyclopedia Britannica would probably be labelled as stubs in Wikipedia. Does that mean they are permanently worthless and "unimportant" and should be removed from the next edition? Golfcam 12:45, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Policy, guidelines, and human bias

Although even policy is prone to human bias and subjectivity, it is much more clear-cut and more able to come upon a consensus than is "importance" or "notability". By attempting to make this a guideline or policy is a bad idea because it will create more bitter debates, and hinder the progress of wikipedia - even moreso than does currently the large number of people that already delete articles based on how important it is to *them*. Fresheneesz 07:39, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think there will be that many bitter debates about it, and the policy is designed to help the progress of Wikipedia by solidly establishing what remains and what would be a waste to have around. —Centrx→talk • 20:15, 24 June 2006 (UTC)
I doubt that policy quantifying a subjective concept like "importance" can be solid. Bitter debates will rage between people who hold true to this policy, people who disagree with it, and people who think you're actually speaking english when you say "importance" - not WP policy. Fresheneesz 03:31, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

The debates are about what is sufficiently important or notable or significant or encyclopedic. There is fairly widespread agreement that there exists some lower limit, however difficult to define, below which a topic is not sufficient to be in Wikipedia. —Centrx→talk • 02:36, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

But the "however difficult to define" part is crucial. Importance is entirely subjective, that is, in the mind of the individual observer. For an example of an argument about importance where agreement seems difficult to achieve, see Talk:Cognitive therapy#Treating depression with CBA and the subsequent section. I'm concerned that if WP:IMP is given the status of a guideline, some people will see it as endorsement to make wholesale deletions of material which isn't important to them, but is important to other communities. -- JimR 11:39, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I personally do not think the importance criteria should become official policy. It is an overly vague concept and does not appear to me to further the main goals of Wikipedia being an online encylopedia. Moreover, the dual criteria of NPOV and verifiability from outside sources mutally eliminate most of the "unimportant" articles, because articles that are only important to a handful of people will often be either biased toward the subject and/or not have published references available to cite. So eliminating unreferencable and unverifiable material and biased material likewise eliminates much of the material the importance criteria hopes to cover. Likewise for the no original research criteria, which by definition means research that isn't verified from cited references.

So my vote is that the importance criteria not be used as official policy, but instead focus be maintained on making sure articles are verifiable and objective and contain no original research. Those criteria will as a side effect automaticlaly maintain a minimal standard of importance as well. Dugwiki 17:15, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

My conclusion is the same (as Dugwiki's), but for different reasons – at least if by "eliminating" she (he?) means "deleting the article". Vagueness of the concept has nothing to do with it. Even if everyone agrees that a certain topic is unimportant to everybody except a handful of people, I can think of no good reason to exclude that topic from Wikipedia.
In particular, I don't think it really matters if only a few persons (or even just one) ever contribute to the article. So what if an article is biased? Almost anything worth writing, is biased – at least at the outset! Even though I try to be objective, anything I say may be (unconsciously) biased, and then I don't mind at all when others help me set things straight.
Users of Wikipedia (and of any other kind of informational articles) need to learn that one needs to check and evaluate the article's sources and references to varying degrees depending on what use one is going to make of the information.
I find it rather naïve to think that Wikipedia shall ever reach a state where all articles can be considered totally reliable, with no need to check their history and verifyability. Consequently, as long as users know that Wikipedia is not absolutely infallible or authoritative, I find that there is in fact no harm in having an unlimited number of so-called nn articles.
--Verdlanco\talk 07:56, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
In which case you are advocating not merely that Importance would be bad policy but that NPOV and Verifiability are bad policy as well, and that Wikipedia be an anarchy. —Centrx→talk • 01:42, 18 July 2006 (UTC)