User:Harmil/Notability definition

I'm evolving a sense of notability from the various Wikipedia guidelines and my own sense of what the term means to an electronic encyclopedia. I'll outline it below, and then include sections for some thoughts on why notability should be considered.

Search egnines
A major search engine (say, Google) shows references to the subject that are not derivatives of Wikimedia sources. Here is an example search for "brain fart" on Google. Adding in contextual terms helps, so if someone said in their article, "Brain Fart is an expert system that finds failures in plumbing", then you could search more specifically. Make sure you check those answers and look at at least the first 10 or 20 for false positives. Refine your search using "-" before irrelevant terms.
 * 0 results - Probably means that the subject is a hoax or original research.
 * <200 hits - Probably indicates that the topic is either very new (a neologism, perhaps?) or is highly obscure (see below).
 * <1000 hits - Semi-notable. Could be a sub-culture or regional topic. Could be obscure (see blow)
 * <10,000 hits - Notable. Now it gets hard. WHY is it notable? Will it last? Will anyone care in a year? Hard questions.
 * More - Now you are into the range of no debate. Topics which get so much thought devoted to them are encyclopedic.

Obscurity
Let's say that you used a search engine and something comes up with 100 hits. What does that mean? Well, here's an example search which shows that, outside of Wikipedia, Polish plait gets about 100 hits. And yet, this is a topic of significant interest to certain historians.

It is important to remember that a search engine is not the perfect tool, and eventually you will find edge cases where it's insufficient. Consider:
 * How recently anyone was likely to discuss the topic
 * How important the topic was to its time
 * Is the topic one which would be discussed almost exclusively by computer illiterates (e.g. the finer points of mountain hiking as taught by the Sherpa.

Physical research
Some topics (such as the above) demand physical research. Start with the most general sources you can find. Work your way down to the most specific. Look for references to the terms, but also look for context, and the extent of research done later on. A newly discovered topic is probably not something that should show up first in Wikipedia.

Notability vs fringe beliefs and theories
It is often the case that a topic will be widely considered to be "obviously wrong". Cults are an obvious example, so let me just pick on one (with no malice at all, I assure you): the Moonies. Now, it is true that there is significant bias against their beliefs, and many people would argue that a concept that stems from their religion is innapropriate for Wikipedia. Others would not say so, but only on the basis of there being a religion involved, and would want to excluded other "cult-like" theories and beliefs if they were not explicitly religios.

The problem with this approach is that one of the contexts in which an encyclopedia is useful is understanding culture, and cultures are made up of many (often conflicting) sub-cultures. As such, it is important to record the beliefs of these sub-cultures and catalog them in as much detail as possible, while not explicitly giving in to a point of view.