User:Wolfkeeper/Notability

Notability, Verifiability, Reliable sources and lack of infinite regress
A not infrequent critique of notability is that it is circular.

Something is notable if it is verifiable. But something is verifiable only if it can be traced to a Reliable source.

The problem is how do you know it is a reliable source?

Reliable sources
It's clearly not enough for the source to claim that it is. That's trivial to do for anyone.

No, clearly the source really needs another notable, reliable source to say that it is reliable. .

But then to check that you would need another reliable source; and to prove that would need another and... basically the references form a directed graph in the general case and you would have to do an infinite regress over that graph wouldn't you to check for reliability?

No, it's not
One point is that you don't need to go an infinite number of steps back to find somebody you already know and trust.

But that's a bit ad hoc, and you might have to hunt a long time to find somebody like that.

Google already solved this problem
It turns out that Pagerank already searches through a undirected graph to find the notable articles. That's more or less how google works, when you type in keywords it (oversimplifying somewhat) simply displays the most 'notable' article that contains those keywords.