User talk:Stalwart111/Notability in context

Comments

Our interaction on Feathers of Knysna led me here, and I enjoyed reading your essay. One of the first things that strikes me is that this approach may be in direct conflict with one of the Five pillars of Wikipedia, in that the project is an Encyclopedia--that is, a compendium of information and not a venue to publish original research or personal experiences. I understand that in some cases, finding reliable sources may be difficult for a random person plunked in front of google, but if a subject is notable, those sources must exist somewhere. In the case of Feathers of Knysna (where you agreed to keep the notability template), I would have to imagine that a town of population 75000 surely has a newspaper. In your hypothetical case of Noo'on, surely an anthropologist has published a journal article on the place. It is also likely that since it is a tourist destination, some newspaper somewhere would have mentioned it at some point. It stands to argue that if the Wikipedia community is unwilling to put forth the effort to find these sources, then perhaps the subject is not ready for an encyclopedia.

And remember that notability of an article does not equate to notability of a subject. The notability tag sends notice to the community that significant work is required on the piece in order to maintain the encyclopedic nature of the project. Notability in context gets especially tricky when an article is about a commercial venture (like Feathers of Knysna), when it is likely that the original poster of the piece has a conflict of interest and wrote article in order to publicize their company.

There is also the tricky question of whose job it is to determine context. An editor comes across a piece that is not referenced with a single reliable source. They are then tasked with making a judgment call on the likelihood of the existence of information published on the subject. But Wikipedia is a world-wide, multi-cultural community, and an editor in Thailand brings contextual judgments far different from an editor in Egypt. The neat way that we get to avoid this tricky grey area is to insist that an editor proves that someone independent of the subject has as some point in time done appropriate research on the subject and made it available through a reliable source, thus justifying its inclusion in an encyclopedia. Steamroller Assault (talk) 22:45, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments; much appreciated. Your comments about the five pillars are basically how the essay came about in the first place. You are certainly not the first to suggest that changes to the concept of notability would be problematic to the basis of Wikipedia's collective goals. I should point out, though, that I am in no way seeking significant amendment to any guidelines, including the concept of notability and it's implementation.

My essay is an attempt to tackle the requirement for 'multiple' sources in a cultural, historical or geographical context where multiple sources simply do not exist.

In some cases, articles are being tagged as not-notable because there is only one piece of written material in existence which can be referenced.

It has been said many times before, that notability isn't what is holding Wikipedia from expansion and I agree. But equally, a lack of editors cannot be the only reason that only the upper levels of African politics are covered but half of my local councilors (aldermen) here in Australia are considered notable enough for an article in their own right.

I've seen nothing to convince me that it's not because an African politician may represent a near-illiterate constituency that speak a range of dialects in an area with one newspaper while my local politician represents a constituency with a near 97% literacy rate and a swathe of local print media to reference.

My concern is that proximity to Western culture is becoming a more significant indicator of notability than a measured analysis of the realistic volume of information available about a given subject. In my humble opinion, the only realistic measure is a range of considerations relating to context.

That said, bias in favour of Western countries (the concept of Wikipedia as an Encyclopedia of the Western World) may have just as much to do with a lack of English speaking Wiki contributors as is does with a lack of Wiki-approved sources.

There's a second part to the example in my essay and that's the question about why no-one local had written about Noo'on before the son of Western tourists did.

Stalwart111 (talk) 08:28, 27 November 2009 (UTC)