This is an essay I am working on about clarification of WP:GNG after being involved in several deletion discussions at WP:AFD and WP:DRV

In an WP:AFD for a small school in a foreign country[1], the creating editor added the following content from a reliable 3rd party source.

"...the school had difficulty finding qualified German teachers, so the possibility that the school would have to cancel its German classes existed."

This coverage was from a reliable 3rd party source, presumed independent of the organization in question, and seemed to pass the WP:GNG muster. That being said, applying a WP:DUCK test asking "is this notable in an encyclopedic context" should hopefully result in a no.

Hierarchical Notability Guidelines

I think the following layout for determining notability would help provide clarity of what content is encyclopedic, and what content is not, without reducing it to a single 5 lines to judge all articles.

Example

Imagine the following two hypothetical WikiProjects: WPROJ:Dumb Sports and WPROJ:Thumb Twiddling

'ThumbTwiddling, a new novelty, has received a decent amount of coverage, with various local thumb twiddlers receiving the brunt of the attention. Not all of these thumb twiddlers are truly "notable", but may pass WP:GNG so,

WPROJ:Thumb Twiddling adds the following hierarchical notability requirements

These requirements are very specific to this dumb sport. and by applying them on top of WP:GNG allows for further refinement of notability expectations based on the specifics of this sport.

Implications

Notes

  1. ^ I would rather not cite the discussion because I believe all parties acted in good faith.
  2. ^ This is how academia has self organized. Universities say "Computer Science" is a notable domain, The Computer Science department then says "this topic is" or "this topic is not" appropriate for our domain of study.
Categories