User:Tisane/The problem with notability

Notability is perhaps the most dubious of Wikipedia's policies. There are some articles, such as Barack Obama, that clearly meet the criteria for inclusion because there is plenty of coverage of the topic in reliable sources (see the general notability guideline). Many other topics fall into a grey area for which the determination of whether it is or isn't notable is a matter of opinion.

For such "grey area" topics, the deletion debates can consume a lot of time and effort, in some cases greater than the amount that went into the article itself. Some editors become disgusted with the outcome and leave the project. Not surprising, considering the amount of work that may be poured into an article only to have it deleted.

The Wikipedia namespace is full of essays (e.g. WP:DEMOLISH, WP:BUILDER, WP:CHANCE, WP:REALPROBLEM, etc. to name just one amusing series) arguing back and forth about when it is or isn't a good idea to delete an article. Almost all of those issues would go away if we didn't have a notability policy. It's probably a tradeoff worth making.

Many people have pointed out these drawbacks to the notability policy. I do not labor under the delusion that bringing them up again will achieve progress toward a change of the policy. The inclusionists fought hard for many years, but ultimately lost. And now it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to change the policy because, as Larry Sanger noted, "Like all open communities online, Wikipedia's community is self-selecting, and its policies have determined who stays and who leaves (or is driven away). For this reason, online communities tend to become rather conservative in their attitudes toward their own systems, and Wikipedia is certainly no different."

Choosing to be something typically also involves a decision not to be something else. Wikipedia chose to be a compendium of information deemed notable by consensuses of editors and verifiable by reliable sources, to the exclusion of all other information. This is not necessarily a bad thing. All websites exclude something from their coverage. Microsoft's website does not sell unicycles, for instance. But this does not mean that unicycle sellers have no place to ply their trade, or that unicycle buyers have no place to get one. It just means that they have to go to a different website for it.

The solution is to create a new online community that is willing to include and collaborate on articles that Wikipedia deems non-notable. Indeed, we often tell people that if they want to promote their article, they should take it to Wikia or a similar site. The problem with this solution thus far has been that such wikis have failed to sufficiently integrate, and cross-link to, information on Wikipedia. Interwiki linking is available, but it does not have the same existence-detection and -indication via red/blue coloration functionality as wikilinks. There also is no mechanism as of yet for detecting what Wikipedia pages link to an article on a remote wiki, or of consolidating listings of Wikipedia articles in a particular category into category displays on a remote wiki. Such technical issues will need to be resolved in order to provide a completely satisfactory solution.