Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2010/Editorials

Notability Guidelines

A major problem here is that Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Notability guide does not enjoy the status of a guideline. Therefore, in the eyes of many editors, military history articles in general do not have a status comparable to entertainment or sports. Even pornography has an official notability guide! Some editors have gone so far as to suggest that all military history articles should be deleted as the notability guidelines imply that the wikipedia should be about sports and entertainment. (Invariably this falls under WP:IDONTLIKEIT.) I've had to defend Douglas MacArthur even though he meets the first six criteria of WP:MILPEOPLE! In any AfD the Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Notability guide always get the short shift, even by MILHIST editors, so you are always down to re-establishing notability from first principles from WP:BIO or WP:GNG. Sometimes our Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Notability guide is worse than no guide at all, because editors take its lack of official standing as a consensus that such articles are inherently non-notable. Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:08, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure exactly how it got downgraded... the rumor was that a minority was so upset about one of the criterions that they bitched until the whole set was cast down, but I haven't seen any of the discussion on it myself. In any case, the vast majority of discussions I've seen at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Military‎ usually only interest members of WPMILHIST, whom regard the "essay" favorably and cite it frequently.

But I regard the assumption by editors that the essay is worth nothing to be a rather rude. There is a consensus amongst knowledgable editors, but politics came into play. It also smacks of lawyering to say "well, I'm going to ignore the wisdom of your point and attack the essay you cited instead because it's not Gospel". It's a damn good metric, and anyone would be a fool to ignore it. bahamut0013^words_deeds 19:02, 16 December 2010 (UTC)