User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/notability

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 * Wikipedia talk:Notability

I spent most of my first year on the wikipedia working on non-controversial topics, like maritime history. For my second year and a half I have been doing a lot of work on the wikipedia's coverage of material related to terrorism.

Initially a lot of my contributions were challenged by other wikipedians who had concerns over POV. A significant fraction of these challenges were based on misunderstandings, where my correspondents were not fully informed over the record that was verifiable from authoritative sources. Other challenges could have been avoided it I had changed my phrasing to avoid triggering a false perception that my contributions embodied a biased POV.

I think that I have, by and large, learned to avoid the phrasing that triggered the false perceptions of a biased POV. I stopped getting serious challenges over bias.

But I started getting challenges over the "notability" of the material I was adding.

My perception was that at least some of these challenges over "notability" were from people who would have liked to remove the material on grounds of bias -- except I have been scrupulous to avoid bias, or even the perception of bias.

It has been my experience that some wikipedia contributors would like to suppress the wikipedia's coverage of material which they think reflects poorly on the USA, or the Bush administration.

I have a real problem with this, because notability is far too subjective.

Consider the Guantanamo captives, as a case in point. There are regular challengers who assert that none of the Guantanamo captives are notable, or that the allegations against them are not notable.

Wikipedians who take the descriptions of Bush administration spokesmen, or Department of Defense spokesmen, at face value, are those most likely to argue that the allegations against the Guantanamo captives, or the captives themselves, are "not notable". IMO this is a deeply unfortunate example of the wikipedia's systemic bias. The decision as to whether material should be removed from the wikipedia should not rely on unreliable interpretation

IMO it would be far better if we relied on WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:VER, which are official wikipedia policies, than relying on guidelines based on notability.

Notability is simply not a reliable yardstick for determining the value of a contribution, because it is far too subjective. IMO the whole idea of deleting contributions based on the subjective judgement that it is not notable is an idea that should be deprecate

Cheers! Geo Swan 03:19, 3 May 2007 (UTC)