User:Seraphimblade/sandbox2/3

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

My essay on what notability should be and represent. This is not policy or guideline, and I do not intend to propose it as such right now, but may someday with modifications. Initially started as a response to User:Trialsanderrors/On notability, but after growing, I decided to write my own rather than spamming talk pages with long comments. I do that enough anyway.

Regardless of any other consideration, an article subject should have enough material available to write a comprehensive^[1] article at some point. Stubs should be acceptable only so long as it is a case of "has not been expanded yet", not "can never be expanded, no more material is available."

The number of unexpandable stubs or substubs we have at any time is just going to make more people think that these should be written and are acceptable. Further, they clog up categories (such as "x-stub" and "All articles lacking sources"), draining time and attention away from articles which really could be expanded into good ones. This spiraling problem leads to (and has led to!) an almost uncontrollable mess, especially as more articles on unsuitable subjects flood in daily. Our time would be better spent improving the massive numbers of current articles needing cleanup and sourcing than creating yet more of a mess with articles on obscure and unsourceable topics, just to say we "created an article".

Part of the "hard work" of writing an article is determining if your subject is a suitable one and has sufficient sourcing. If insufficient source material is available, you didn't do that work. In that case, it was your choice and yours alone to do something which had no future, and to fail to check if it did.

While it is wonderful that WP:BITE is one of our core policies, it is critical to remember that it is not the only core policy! When a new editor makes an error, we should make our corrections to him or her as gentle as possible, but we should make the corrections. If the new user is POV pushing, we should say "Look, it's great you're trying to contribute, but you may want to look at WP:NPOV to see what our policies are on that type of writing." This would not be biting. Saying "Hey, quit trying to push POV you idiot!" would be biting. A gentle correction is acceptable, and indeed, required. Similarly, stating "Hey, it's great you want to create articles, but maybe you should start out editing some existing ones first to get a feel for what we do here. The article you created didn't follow our policies and guidelines, and unfortunately that means it'll be deleted. Here are some things you might want to read..." is not biting. The newbie may, in good faith, have created a vanity bio or spamvertisement, and genuinely thought that type of thing is acceptable here. If that's all that person wanted to do, and they never intended to edit again, they may leave in a huff-but then we haven't lost anything, they weren't sticking around anyway! On the other hand, we should be careful not to take a genuinely biting approach-"What were you THINKING when you wrote that crap article? Don't do that again!" Again, the correction should be gentle-but it should be done.

Album stubs. Yeeeesh. If those are going to be supported as "acceptable" without qualification, we should put in the notability guidelines that "notability by association" is acceptable. (This would be a terrible idea.) Otherwise, we should require the same of album articles-the album itself should be a central subject of sufficient sources to write a comprehensive article about it. Most album articles that I've seen are "permastubs" by a band that barely scrapes by WP:BAND, and generally, the band article is terribly thin in itself. We would do much better to merge what little there is on the album to beef up the article on the band. Of course, this applies to "Stuff We Came Up With One Day" by the Barely Notables, it does not apply to something like Nevermind or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album should stand apart, and be somehow notable as an album, and have received coverage as such-not just "X band released Y album" (trivial coverage), but real, in-depth coverage of the album's importance and impact.

Cities^[2] should be presumed inherently notable unless demonstrated otherwise, and even for smaller ones a ton of sources will likely be available, but Nowhere, Montana (population: 8 if you count dogs) is probably not. (I made that up, of course, may that link never turn blue.) Regardless, however, each example should be looked at for sufficient reliable sourcing on a case-by-case basis. As with anything, if enough nontrivial source material is available for a comprehensive^[1] article, the subject is notable, if not, it's not.

Highways should in no way be considered inherently notable, many have no nontrivial coverage. (Of course, some do, Route 66 and the Pacific Coast Highway come to mind. Again, "stands out among its peers", not just "is a (insert highway, geographic location, album, railway station)", should be the order of the day.) Just as we should not have notability by association, we should not have it by categorization-if everything in a category really is inherently notable, there will be no trouble finding the sources anyway, and if sources can't be found for some of those things, well, not everything in the category passes after all!