User:SMcCandlish/Notability and Deletion policy
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This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it. |
Notability and Deletion policy
- Note: My views on this topic have changed radically in the last 18 months; as a result, this version is a substantial overhaul of the early-mid 2006 original.
Wikipedia's capacity to catalogue everything we collectively know is effectively unlimited, so the more extreme "exclusivist"/"exclusionist" and "deletionist" views don't make much sense to me. I can't even guess how many times I've see some person or place or thing or concept mentioned in an article, wanted to know more on that topic, and found that not only was there no wikilink on the term, there wasn't any article to point one at, and then later found out that there had been one, but that it got AfD'd on highly suspect "non-notable" grounds, often with a so-called consensus of 2–5 editors. The situation is improving a little, but AfD has basically turned into an obsessive bloodsport for many (try this: observe the 10 or so most-active AfD participants over some significant span of time, such as a week. Next check this list of editors' edit contributions.)
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[edit] Cleaning up the mess
I had historically been very skeptical and vocally critical of "notabilty" concepts of various sorts in Wikipedia, period, because of how poorly they were constructed, especially as to their level of personal-preference interpretability. What alarmed me about the NN ("not notable") meme, aside from the fact that it did not actually represent the consensus its proponents claimed until its vast improvements in late 2006 onward, was and to an extent still remains the frequency with which NN is misunderstood and [ab]used, often without any other rationale (and fervently but incorrectly believed to be Wikipedia Policy when it is actually just a guideline and related subject-specific guidelines), in the AfD process of deleting articles.
Wikipedia:Notability (WP:N) was very nearly "owned" when I arrived, had been blatantly editwarred into alleged guideline status, was subject to sudden archiving of still-active discussions, was dominated by a small handful of boosters of the then-current version of the document's language, and was otherwise simply not very reflective of Wikiculture at all.
Through a lot of stress and just dogged insistence, my flagging of WP:N as a {{Disputedpolicy}} and my unwavering arguments with regard to its flaws and problems at that time, in Wikipedia talk:Notability, mostly in November and December 2006, have had a marked impact on improving WP:N. The guideline (no longer disputed that I'm aware of) has come a long way toward being objective, clear and far less prone to subjective abuse. Notably (no pun intended) these improvements did not start happening until the Disputedpolicy tag attracted notice and drew more people into the debate. Suddenly WP:N could not be be micromanaged any longer, ongoing debates could not be swept under the rug, and the document was radically overhauled very quickly. I think a major lesson can be learned from this.
[edit] Yet AfD abuse remains
However, despite December 2006 - February 2007 improvements in the guideline's wording, scope, intent and raison d'etre, problems with WP:N's application in AfD remain, largely stemming from the imprecise, subjective and radically changing nature of the "notability" concept in Wikipedia from 2004-2006. The idea veered wildly from "importance" to "fame" to "actionability" (huh?!) and various other concepts before settling down to the more objective criteria we now have (as of early 2007), namely that an article subject needs to be attestable by multiple, independent, reliable sources (the primary notability criterion, or PNC). Meanwhile many Wikipedians had already latched on to one or more of the older, flawed conceptions of notability, and are still using them in AfD as we speak, blissfully unaware that the PNC exists at all, much less that it has replaced the old "famousness", "popularity", and "importance" kinds of notability concepts.
I agree that most (though by no means all) of the articles successfully AfD'd probably did need to be either removed or improved drastically (and I nominate articles for deletion myself, and have lost an article to that process, without putting up a fight about it since the article did in fact have a lot of problems). But it ought to be for valid reasons! There are some useful essays out there about the nature of notability and what not to say in AfD, but they simply don't go far enough.
[edit] A proposed solution
I think it is going to take a concerted campaign, perhaps with some inline warning templates for use in response to malformed "NN" "!votes" in AfD, to change this: Tag them with a warning that they will not be counted as anything but neutral comments (however "Strong" or "Speedy" they may be), unless an actionable reason is given. And the initial proponent of the AfD can also proactively warn against misuse of NN, when creating the AfD. Additional templates could also be used to gently correct other abuses; most !voters using "speedy" don't seem to know what it actually means in the Deletion Policy context, and many also make highly PoV "I've never heard of this" arguments or bald assertions of non-notability which are clearly really "I don't like it" statements in disguise, and yet others demand actions that defy piles of precedent, such as deleting school articles instead of merging them with school district ones. AfD chatter could probably be greatly reduced by use of standardized "broken argument" tags in lieu of re-re-re-explaining the same issues time and again in long-winded "Comment" posts.
[edit] AfD has other problems, though
Invalid "me too, but I don't really understand policy at all" !votes are not the only AfD issue. A serious one is admins closing debates as delete when there is a "consensus" of only a tiny handful of editors. I see this all the time, and have successfully returned articles to AfD via the Deletion Review process in a couple of egregious cases. Three !votes after a week that say "Delete", or even "Strong, speedy delete" for that matter (which is silly; if the AfD really was a candiate for speedy deletion, it would most likely already have been speedy-tagged and an admin would have already deleted it) does not make a consensus on Wikipedia. Grossly insufficient input like that is evidenciary simply of the fact that the article either has no active editors or that they are on wikibreak or something. This doesn't even start to get into a broader issue, that of deleting articles that should instead be fixed (e.g., by the addition of another reference or two to satisfy the PNC; NPOV edits to fix a bias problem; etc.) That's a different discussion for a different time, as is the case of punitive or simply careless deletions (e.g. the sometimes premature closing of an AfD as delete immediately after it has been merge-tagged, such that the merge is thwarted, and admin begging or Deletion Review has to be invoked to get at the salvageable content. Admins: Look at articles again before deleting them, please.
[edit] Loose ends, and a way out
Another lingering problem is that WP:N is as much a guideline on what makes an article worth keeping as it is a deletion tool, but the subject-specific notability criteria enumerated at WP:DEL (which by their incorporation into WP:DEL actually have the force of Policy, a nasty loophole!) and the larger collection of such guidelines and would-be guidelines that WP:DEL does not mention at all, are almost uniformly both largely exclusionary ("delete-me" guides) and highly subjectively prescriptive as to details, regardless of the PNC. Thus, the topical notability guidelines (many of which greatly predate WP:N) are mostly in direct conflict with WP:N. Wording twiddles have been made to WP:N to try to skirt this problem, but they are really simply hiding the issue rather than solving it (as of February 9, 2007; future edits may be more productive).
I am personally in the process of trying to create a subject-specific notability guideline, for cue sports, that does not have such a conflict. We'll see how that experiment goes. It relies (to the extent that it has been properly constructed so far) entirely on WP:N and long-standing policies/guidelines, and then gives some non-AfD-actionable advice to editors about what sorts of articles are and are not likely to survive AfD on WP:N, WP:V, etc. grounds. I.e., the fact that it says that local tournament players are not likely to be notable cannot be used as an AfD argument in favor of deletion; if editors of the player's article can satisfy WP:N's PNC, then the player is self-evidently notable. An almost silly example, since it is highly unlikely that any local league player could in fact satisfy the PNC, but if it happens then it does in fact happen, and extreme deletionist whining in contravention of WP:N should be ignored with equally extreme prejudice by AfD-closing admins. I hope that this guideline-to-be can serve as a model for what to do with the rest of the subject-specific notability criteria, when it is better-developed.
There are also other loose ends. For example, there is also a content guideline against use of neologisms, which is a de facto notability guideline of sorts. WP:NOT and WP:NFT are also in part basically variants of notability guidelines in certain ways, and their interplay needs to be factored in and smoothed out.
