Talk:Notability/Archives/2013

The "paradox of notablity"

The "paradox of notablity" - If notability is being worthy of notice, and if someting is not worthy of notice, but it cannot help but be noticed, is it notable or not notable? PPdd (talk) 05:36, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I would argue that the mere fact of 'being noticed' does not imply notability. The point made about things being 'worthy' of note is more important than the act of notice. Irishexpatriate (talk) 14:27, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

For the record, people quite regularly try to analyze notability in terms of trying to suss out logical flaws; it seems, by and large, to be motivated by the notion that Wikipedia should be about everything (including you, me and my cat), and isn't generally worth taking all that seriously.

Your response here is correct, though: in reality, if you dug deeply enough, you could probably write an article about almost every person on the planet — if they've ever been quoted in the local Pennysaver as a spokesperson for their local volunteer group or their church bake sale, or offering an opinion in a vox pop, or writing a letter to the editor, or even if they have a professional profile up on LinkedIn, that would all qualify under "verifiability" if we didn't apply further standards to distinguish topics that Wikipedia should or shouldn't be writing about. Which is why we have rules in place such as WP:NPOV — we don't care, for instance, whether one individual editor thinks that Justin Bieber is a talentless hack who doesn't actually deserve to be as notable as he is — and an insistence on reliable sources, and it's also why many of the more specific notability guidelines document certain specific achievements that will take subjective debates about a person's notability permanently off the table (e.g. duly elected state or provincial legislators are always notable whether you personally care about them or not, etc.)

So yeah, if this guideline existed in isolation, the holes that people try to poke in it might mean something. But it doesn't, so this "paradox" is no paradox at all. Bearcat (talk) 18:30, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Journalism, marketing: two distinct fields, two distinct sets of standards

As a former reporter, I want to float an idea informally here before going in haphazardly to split one extremely short section into two based primarily on personal experience which, lacking credible secondary and tertiary sources for citation at this point in time, would blatantly violate WP:OR. I mention it here only because I do not believe that it actually constitutes a new synthesis of views, but also would very much value others' input on the matter one way or another before deciding if the section split which I propose is something I in fact might want to do.

Journalism and marketing are utterly distinct from each other, due to overwhelmingly incompatible motivations which propel persons to engage in either field of endeavour: in the discipline of journalism, always to the total exclusion of marketing directives (the very inclusion of which would create specific conflict of interest issues which in part distinguish the two fields), but in the case of marketing, often with the express goal in mind of affecting or "shaping" journalistic coverage. This fundamental incompatibility between the two has been historically enshrined in journalistic organizations by creation of institutional "firewalls" between news-gathering and -disseminating departments on the one hand, and sales and marketing or fundraising departments on the other. Although in recent years we have seen this institutionalized framework largely collapse, at least historically, a news editor or reporter's notion of what constitutes "notability" (or "newsworthiness") would have tended therefore, generally, to be at sharp variance with a marketer or press agent's ideas of what constitutes the same.

I therefore would respectfully propose that the idea of "notability" as it has been (at least historically) understood and/or employed in these two separate fields should be considered separately: under separate section headings, though ideally with at least passing mention in each section of how each field's unique views and practices determining what's "notable" (or "noteworthy") has affected the other.

Cheers, ༺།།ༀ་ཨཱཿ་ཧཱུྃ།།འཚེར།།xeltifon།།སར་ཝ་མང་ག་ལམ།།༻  ^{{say it}  {contribs}} 06:30, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

It's important to understand that this guideline doesn't exist in isolation; our insistence on reliable media sources and our insistence on maintaining a neutral point of view both mitigate against the marketer or press agent's ideas of notability entering into ours. Bearcat (talk) 18:34, 2 April 2013 (UTC)