Wikipedia is not about "correct" or "true", it's about "verifiable".
This leads to some distortions and a lot of frustration. It might be why WP has a problem keeping technical editors around.
This leads to some distortions and a lot of frustration. It might be why WP has a problem keeping technical editors around.
In the actual definition of notability, it is made clear that the policy is purely about verifiability: something is notable when we can say more than a couple verifiable things about it. However, because the policy is named notability, the AFD (articles for deletion) threads very often contain systematic mention of how noteworthy an effect is "within the [whatever] community".
I never really followed up on it, but I wanted to see whether I could game the system in the reverse way. Coming from a physics background, in college I wrote up some drafts about a fake physics concept, including some thought into using @cornell.edu emails to create a fake arxiv.org LaTeX article or two. The idea was to combine this with links to 404'ed pages, some fake blog articles across the Internet authored by me, and some
The actual concept was going to be something like "Tenacity (science)" which was going to explain that NASA researchers had discovered some unexplained and hard-to-causally-model (but extremely predictable) force which makes orbital rocketry more energy-expensive than "the calculations" would give you. Models would be proposed requiring, say, Kerr metric general relativity solutions to Earth's gravity (hence trying to determine whether the core of the Earth was actually a spinning black hole) or strange drag forces going like v^1.5 or v^3 or something. The joke was that the actual genesis of the phrase was a 2005 Homestar Runner cartoon where a character named Strong Bad is sitting in a foil-lines cardboard box pretending that he is involved in a space program. "Got to... escape... Earth's... tenacity..." he says as if straining under a heavy weight.
Someone is doing things very wrong then, because I've seen a lot of over-specialized but completely verifiable information get removed from Wikipedia. The reasoning was entirely based on noteworthiness.