User:El Sandifer/History of notability

The saying is that it is best not to look at how laws and sausages are made. Though this is perhaps good advice, the continued controversy over Wikipedia:Notability is such that a tour of the sausage factory may be necessary to properly understand what the page is, historically, and what legitimacy it does and does not enjoy. This is particularly relevant both to those wishing to push back against the tide of deletions for notability, and to those wishing to expand deletion to scour undesirable topics from Wikipedia.

As we will see, Wikipedia:Notability is in short, a strange beast, and one that "guideline" does not even quite accurately describe. It is too popular to abolish, but too illegitimate to enshrine as policy.

Origins of notability

The earliest consolidation of a debate on notability can be found at [1]. Note that this is from a much earlier era of Wikipedia policy-making, where policy pages tended to be collections of short essays by people rather than actual controlling documents. It is worth noting that the original topic of notability - fiction - remains the most vexed aspect of the debate.

Eventually, that essay was consolidated into this form: [2]. The proposal evolved over time, and bounced in and out of tagging, often being labeled as Wikipedia:Semi-policy, a now deprecated label that addressed pages that carried significant weight, but were not official policy as such.

Co-existent with that, for many years, was this page: [3], which made the matter bluntly clear: "There is presently no consensus that lack of "fame" or "importance" should be a legitimate reason to delete an article." This position had high-profile support, including, at the time, Jimbo. The associated poll on the matter, which has votes ranging from 2004-2005, eventually settled at 57 in favor of fame/importance as a deletion criteria, 38 opposed. (For reference, the poll can be found at Wikipedia talk:Notability/Historical/Fame and importance)

This is about a 60% threshold - a significant threshold, because the de facto rule at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion has long been that 2/3 votes for delete are roughly sufficient for deletion, all things being equal. The practical result of this is that even in the absence of a firm consensus for a notability criterion, notability was able to enjoy a practical consensus in many cases. Simply put, enough people supported notability as a deletion criterion to delete articles using it.

Some thoughts and requests on further editing of this page

Obviously this page does not entirely conform with the accepted conventions of essays on Wikipedia. I believe this is appropriate given the specific purposes of this page, which is both to present some legislative history and to ruminate on the implications of that fact. I consider the following to be requests, therefore, but I hope that they will be honored.

1. All edits to sections prior to "Some editorialized commentary" should be restricted to factual assessments of historical data. These sections should be thought of as a Wikipedia article - claims should be sourced and NPOV.
2. The "Some editorialized commentary on the matter" section should be left untouched by others except to correct any typos or infelicities of language I may have introduced.
3. Other editors should feel free to insert their own commentaries on the historical record above this section, and to sign them. I would like these commentaries to be essays in their own right.
4. To that end, threaded discussion on commentaries should be avoided. Let the arguments and their evidence speak for themselves. The point here is to document perspectives on the history for the record - not to rehash these debates endlessly.

I will leave it to others whether this section should be eliminated entirely, revamped into a sort of pseudo-policy section, removed from the first person, or whatever.

See also

• Wikipedia:Notability/Historical – an index of discussions, drafts, and failed early proposals on the way to WP:Notability