User talk:Mike Cline/Imagining a new way to look at the question of Notability

Comments
I think this aligns with how I see that we really should be asking ourselves first and foremost "What *should* be in Wikipedia" as opposed to the question "What *shouldn't* be in Wikipedia and how to show that something does merit inclusion". There are definitely certain classes of articles that I would expect to be in WP as an article which I've sure I've listed before, things like all countries, world leaders, chemical elements, etc. etc. These classes must be globally acknowledged by consensus and cannot be built around a local wikiproject one, though certainly a Wikiproject can suggest to the global consensus to consider such cases. Note that these should be broad classes without major criteria, that is, unlike SNGs which say "a topic of Class C is allowable but only if they did X and Y and Z"; these inclusion metrics should simply be "a topic of Class C should have an article regardless of anything else".

Ideally, a new article should be evaluated in this order (after checking for hoaxes, Copyvio's, etc.)
 * 1) Does it fall immediately into these Inclusion Classes?  Then it gets an article and should not be deleted.
 * 2) Does it pass any SNG? Then it gets an article, but if there is little else beyond meeting the SNG, it may end up being deleted in the long term
 * 3) Does it pass the GNG?  Then it gets an article, but deletion is still possible if the notability is not shown to be good.
 * 4) Otherwise, consider grouping into a larger topic.

Note that in this scheme, the GNG is the failsafe, as opposed to how it is presently treated as the top-level inclusion metric.

We have two competing mentalities here: one of deletionism by hard notability following, and one that is more inclusive and that stub articles that never have a chance to grow are ok. The middle point that I think works for most of the problem areas (locations, sports figures, etc.) is lists and tables, which are clearly ok as a result of the RFC. A list of 100 small towns in a region with redirects to that list is better than 100 stubby articles that likely cannot expand, and yet still provides the capability to be expanded. --M ASEM (t) 16:39, 11 November 2010 (UTC)