User:Actualcpscm/Thoughts

Why notability?
Notability, be it WP:GNG or any of the SNGs, is not an arbitrary hurdle. It's an extension of the V, NPOV, and OR policies. The pertinent question is:

Do we have enough coverage in good sources to write an article that complies with WP:V; WP:NPOV, and WP:OR, and that goes beyond "Foo exists."?

The purpose of the notability guidelines, of the very concept of notability, is to ensure that Wikipedia contains only articles that can theoretically be policy-compliant. Articles that fail to meet the thresholds of WP:N aren't deleted because of anything inherent to the subject; they're deleted because they can never be in line with some of the most important principles of Wikipedia. Notability is a means to an end, that end being to uphold the above-mentioned principles and policies.

In my opinion, the policy-based interpretation of notability makes it much easier to apply notability guidelines, particularly GNG. When you know what the thing's purpose is, it's much easier to understand the rest of it.

On WP:TNT
I don't like WP:TNT. Parts of the community refer to it quite frequently, and I respect the place that the essay has in the community, but I don't see a need for it. Here's why.

Deletion is often treated like some dramatic act of destruction, but it's more like putting the page history in a locked box. The people who wrote the contents still remember them, and the discussions about those contents are remembered too (if not preserved, for example at AfD). While only some editors can unlock the box and peek inside, everyone can see that there's a box there. Deletion is a way to hide a page's entire history from public view, similarly to revision deletion, with some additional effects. It doesn't, as the essay suggests, affect the "associations and social history" of the page, unless someone's sneaky about recreating it after it was deleted.

Taken directly from the nutshell summary of WP:TNT: For pages that are beyond fixing, it may be better to start from scratch. This is intended as an argument for deletion, but there is no plausible case where it is not preferable to blank (and keep the history accessible) that isn't covered by other procedures and policies. To illustrate, let's look at why a page may be beyond fixing.


 * Extensive copyright violations If all historical revisions of a page are exclusively copyvio, it can and should be deleted under CSD G12. If only some revisions are copyvio, or only parts of the page content, it's preferable (and perfectly policy-compliant) to revision-delete the affected revisions and keep the unaffected content.


 * Widespread NPOV violations – There is only one scenario where the community has agreed that an entire page history should be "buried in the sand" due to NPOV concerns, and that's when all of it is exclusively promotional; see CSD G11. Otherwise, why not blank and start from scratch? The community has not agreed that promotional revisions should be hidden from page histories in all cases. Why not just stub the article and rewrite it in a better way?

The essay stipulates a "TNT tipping point": If the article's content is useless (including all the versions in history). Setting aside the cases covered by CSD G11 and G12, this is never the case. Even a history of very bad, unencylopedic revisions is better than a locked box buried in the sand. Maybe those revisions include obscure but usable sources. Or good content. Even if not, what's the need to blow it up?

The point I'm trying to get to is that TNT argues that deletion is sometimes necessary for cleanup. The cases where that's true are covered by speedy deletion every other scenario is better handled by reducing the article to a stub, or even just [Subject] is a [thing]. That's better than deletion; it's less discouraging for new editors, it preserves accessible edit histories (which is desirable by principle, transparency is held in high regard), and it may be useful to go back and see if there are some useful bits and pieces in that really bad version someone wanted to lock away.

Workflows
I wrote an essay about editing with a conflict of interest, but some thoughts from there apply quite broadly. The general summary is that A is a bad workflow, and B is a good workflow. That doesn't mean that A will always produce bad content, or that B will always produce good content. However, it's a lot easier to write good content with workflow B. A direct consequence of this is that being a subject-matter expert might not be that good. It's sometimes necessary for understanding sources, but knowing a lot about a topic does not necessarily mean an editor will write better content about it. The more someone already knows, the more risk there is to accidentally compromise WP:OR or WP:V.