Wikipedia’s Notability Policy: What Is It and Why It Must Go | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia’s Notability Policy: What Is It and Why It Must Go

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I wish Wikipedia had a parallel - amateur Wikki, where "deprecated" articles go. If your official search yields nothing, or you dont find what you search for there - the deprecated article is shown at the end of the link.

Edit: Also, they could allow for a more specific random wikipedia page. My startpage is random Wikipedia, and its polluted with boring towns and country, and unimportant Persons, while i crave for engineering feats

I don't understand what the author imagines Wikipedia purpose to be

As far as I can tell, the change the author wants is to make wikipedia the source of truth itself, and write articles on anyone so long as they produced some kind of media; but since I guess referring to other sources of writing on the creator is unreliable (unless they're cis white rich men?), I'm not sure what source wiki editors are supposed to refer to, beyond their own knowledge

And if you try to relax the notability criteria for biographies of living people, you run squarely into another problem: those articles are inherently sensitive. If you don't require that facts be tracable to reliable sources, libel and self-promotion start to leak in very quickly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

> If the Notability criteria is abolished, it can be replaced by a Cultural Contribution criteria, where inclusion is based on contribution to the total culture of humanity

I really can't see why that would ever be better than "three in depth links". It seems extremely subjective. How do you even accurately define and measure that description?

> But as we previously discussed, this policy actually has severe social justice implications

This to me seems at the heart of the authors discontent. Unfortunately even online encyclopedias aren't safe from social justice pressures in this day and age.

>This to me seems at the heart of the authors discontent. Unfortunately even online encyclopedias aren't safe from social justice pressures in this day and age.

Rightly so. If I find it easier to get information about pokemon than about a female scientist who's made significant contributions to her field there's a problem.

If you can't find 3 outside sources about that scientist, is that Wikipedia's fault? I don't think the bar is very high. It seems to me the issue is not Wikipedia. Wikipedia reflects society, it doesn't represent it.

I feel like the biggest problem with the notability policy is that it basically disallows articles on anything niche. There's a game[0] which has several tens of thousands of users and a lively community, yet wikipedia refuses any article to be written about it.

[0]http://powdertoy.co.uk/

In other words, she wants Wikipedia to become Tv Tropes:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Administrivia/ThereIsN...

I guess that could work, though it could get out of control real quick.

> TaraElla is a singer-songwriter, author and blogger

For the moment she doesn't have a page on Wikipedia.

She does have an account on Wikipedia, but it also looks as though she hasn't been active on the site since 2014. So it seems rather presumptuous for her to be making grand statements about Wikipedia policy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Taraella

Why not at least make wiki-b-sides and add a big warning to the b-site pages?

Is review the bottleneck? Or why can't the lamppost in front of my window not have its own page?

No one reads the warnings on Wikipedia pages. Having pages that aren't considered officially maintained is messy and would probably lead to people seeing Wikipedia as having lower-quality articles overall.

Take a different domain, invert the colors

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