User:Ventifax/metasandbox

I reject the paradigm of prescriptive notability as it's being defined & applied.
Well, not the basic paradigm that encyclopedias are supposed to be about something worth publishing an article about. But "notable" is inevitably a relative term, & I find that I'm adding pages which are seen as non-notable by others, so I need to explain why I have a different threshold.

I see now that I may have to reject the idea of "notability" excluding "original research," if that means an subject can't be added unless someone else thought it worthwhile enough to write extensively about it. The point of an encyclopedia is not simply to organize a reiteration of information otherwise available online. The point is to be informative. And let's be honest, here. There is an awful lot on Wikipedia which is not, in the grand scheme of things, all that noteworthy or important. But it is informative. And what is worth knowing is not to be determined by the number of words someone else has written on it. Now, I have thought since I joined Wikipedia that when it came to things I might develop myself, such as if I invented a chess variant or illustrated a book, that I had plenty of other online outlets to publicize them. On this site, the NPOV was better served by others editing the main pages on such subjects. But when I "research" something for Wikipedia by reading periodicals & other websites, that's not the same sort of thing as someone doing lab research. Obviously anything new I create or discover can be better publicized than on a wikisite where it can be trashed by random passers-by. But when I'm trying to contribute constructively to a wikisite, it is frustrating that, because I am generally in the Main section editing & discussing entries, my work can be undermined by those more active in the political meta-wiki behind the scenes.

More urgently, I must object to the approach that seems to be developing in the wikiculture of keeping longer pages over stubs on subjects of equivalent notability. I have repeatedly added stub pages on persons who were mildly interesting, footnotes in pop culture, with the expectation that other editors could flesh them out. And it worked for a while. But now I find calls for some of those pages to be deleted, & "notability" given as the reason. Yet I felt the stubs were useful, especially when they were referenced other places in Wikipedia, & you could go to a page on this person, see where else he was referenced, & maybe have an offsite link for more information. My page on the artist H. M. Baker is a mere stub. It may never be more than that. There is very little published information, at least in English, about this person. But the stub is a start. If it's deleted, then someone like me will come along & start it again.

Ah, while drafting this, I see someone else has intervened on behalf of H. M. Baker, contending that simply having drawn The Black Pearl (comic book) makes him notable.