Talk:Ordinaire (wine bar)

Question
I am just curious -- why is there an article about this place? It sounds very nice, but it's a very nice five-year-old business. Is it of sufficient note to be on wikipedia? 128.112.16.81 (talk) 19:21, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Agree. This article is about a single small business of no particular note. SamC (talk) 19:32, 30 April 2018 (UTC)


 * I've grouped these concerns together to address them at the same time. Yes, Ordinaire meets the general notability standards of Wikipedia. It has been covered in-depth several times in reliable secondary sources, including a wide range of local (San Francisco Bay Area) news outlets, and has been noted in national food & wine publications and even a full-length book about wine by an established wine critic.


 * I think part of your impressions may be based on the fact that it's rare to see a Wikipedia article of this length about a restaurant or bar. While writing the article, I looked for examples of existing high-quality articles (Good or Featured Articles) to use for comparison, as I always do when approaching a new topic on the site. I was surprised to find that restaurants and bars in general are not as widely covered as they should be on Wikipedia, and the restaurant/bar articles that do exist are rarely in-depth treatments. The Food & Drink Wikiproject currently has 43 Featured Articles, and of those only two (Cracker Barrel and Sci-Fi Dine-In Theater Restaurant) are restaurants. There are currently no Featured Articles about wine (there are, including this one) and no Featured Articles about a bar, although there are a fair number of articles about bars.


 * To be sure, Ordinaire is not among the most notable bars or restaurants in the world. Note that I've listed it as "Low-Importance" in each of the WikiProject templates at the top of the talk page. WikiProject importance rankings are only for internal purposes, but I'm definitely not arguing that Ordinaire is a central topic in the realms of wine, food & drink, or the state of California. In the East Bay area alone, Chez Panisse is an example of a much more famous restaurant. The natural wine article is less in-depth than this one is, even though Ordinaire is in some sense a subordinate topic to that article. There are also much more general issues with Wikipedia's coverage of topics: for example, science and math topics have disproportionately low coverage compared to their significance, and the site's coverage of notable women and women's topics is also disproportionately low.


 * But just because other topics may be more notable does not mean that Wikipedia is required to cover each and every one of those topics to the utmost before editors can cover other "low(er)-importance" topics. One of the best ways for Wikipedia to productively expand is to have articles that can serve as models for others to adapt and learn from. I'm interested in this business, so I chose to use my time to write about it in-depth. I hope others write about other topics of interest to them in as much depth, whether those are notable topics from their own locales or topics of greater importance. Now, others can use my article as a model when they write about bars and restaurants more notable than Ordinaire. —BLZ · talk 21:07, 30 April 2018 (UTC)