Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:05, 30 December 2006

Notability

• RFJason's Craigslist and Encyclopedia Dramatica TV News, MSNBC
• 119,000 google hits for "Encyclopedia Dramatica"
• 9,585 Traffic Rank on Alexa.
  • What are other people's thoughts on notability for an article at this point? Smeelgova 08:53, 30 December 2006 (UTC).

I believe the issue is, was, and continues to be, the lack of reliable, independent third-party sources which speak of ED in such a fashion that might allow the construction of an encyclopedic article by themselves. No matter how many offhand mentions, parallels, or quotations one may find regarding ED, unless one could construct a wikipedia article about ED from them, and from them alone, they are useless. It's not a WP:N thing, it's more a WP:V thing, by way of WP:RS. AS a sidenote, none of the above sources provides justification for ED under WP:WEB's criteria, so notability questions remain unanswered. Until such time as useful policy-compliant sources are provided, this article will probably remain in a type of wiki-limbo, interspersed with periods of brimstone and hellfire. Oh, and we still can't link to the website, as per Misplaced Pages:Requests for arbitration/MONGO#Links to ED.

Good luck on everything! Geuiwogbil 09:59, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm still surprised this page exists. Didn't the past few Deletion Reviews go the other way? Or did I miss something? Geuiwogbil 10:02, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I have no idea, I was not involved with that. There was a talk page earlier which discussed that, but it was deleted. Interesting enough as it is to delete and protect a page from ever being re-created, it is even more suspicious to delete the talk-page about that article, so that editors cannot even discuss the potential need for the article. All very interesting. Smeelgova 10:14, 30 December 2006 (UTC).

This entire thing, across multiple Wikis, VFDs, AFDs, DRVs, ARBs, Talk pages, and years, is indeed profoundly interesting. I've spent many a night poring over those old transcripts and trying to divine at the complex, tempestuous, Baroque, emotions of the principal Actors in this grave Stage-Drama. I am nonetheless going to withhold my personal opinions, on any of those issues, (which are not relevant to this page, if I remember the talk page guidelines correctly) and stick to the whole dull "sources" affair. The 3rd AFD, stripped of whatever irrelevant material you or I might see in it, still falls down to that same lack of sources. Geuiwogbil 10:20, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I apologize, for I am tired. I'm the one who brought this affair off-track, and the fault lies with me. Sorry. Geuiwogbil 10:28, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Geuiwogbil is right: "notability" is not measured by google hits, nor by Alexa rank. Notability here means nothing more than non-trivial coverage in multiple independent sources. We've been working on WP:N to try and make this clearer. The only thing to do with this talk page that can possibly lead to an article being created is to collect citations to discussion of ED in independent published sources. (That means published online or offline.) Discussion straying far from that topic is likely to get this talk page deleted again, if history is an indicator. -GTBacchus 10:28, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

To quote WP:N, "A topic is notable if it has been the subject of multiple, non-trivial published works with sources independent of the subject itself and each other." (Emphasis mine.) RFJason's Craigslist may have been the subject of "multiple, non-trivial published works with sources independent of the subject itself and each other", and you might well consider writing an article on that, but these sources don't tell me anything about ED. Because they aren't really talking about ED. At the risk of repetition, they're talking about RFJason's Craigslist. Quoting WP:V, "Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources." What could these, admittedly reliable and independent, sources tell us about ED, beyond the fact that it contains this queer oddity known as "RFJason's Craigslist"? Geuiwogbil 10:49, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Blanking my mind of ED for the moment, what I've gathered of ED from these articles is that it is 1) A "public website" , 2) "devoted to parodies and satires online" , and 3) a "wiki" . That is, assuming that all the articles are referring to the same site. Geuiwogbil 11:02, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Ah, but wait. That's trivial, isn't it? According to WP:WEB, one type of trivial material is that which provides "(3) a brief summary of the nature of the content". This material, therefore, is generally unusable as a notability-proving device. Geuiwogbil 11:07, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Good idea. I will incorporate it into a section below, which can be used only for posting up citations:

Citations to discussion of ED in independent published sources

This subsection should only be used to collect references/discussion of Encyclopedia Dramatica in independent published sources (online or offline), in order to assess notability:

1. RFJason's Craigslist and Encyclopedia Dramatica TV News, MSNBC - Smeelgova 10:41, 30 December 2006 (UTC).
2. Sex and the City, San Francisco Chronicle, September 17, 2006 - Smeelgova 10:41, 30 December 2006 (UTC).
3. "Megabits and Pieces The latest teen hangout", 95 - North Adams Transcript, John Mitchell, MA - May 20, 2006 - Smeelgova 10:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC).
4. Controversy Erupts Over Craigslist Prank, Slashdot, September 11, 2006, (not necessarily a good source, but an interesting part of the saga) - Smeelgova 10:50, 30 December 2006 (UTC).
5. When public and private collide, Sept. 11, 2006, BBC News (again, doesn't mention ED directly, but interesting part of story) - Smeelgova 10:50, 30 December 2006 (UTC).
6. Prankster posts sex ad replies online, Sept 12, 2006, Associated Press, - I am starting to think that if not an article about ED, might be worthwhile to have an article about this incident itself... Ah, found more at Jason_Fortuny#Jason_Fortuny_and_Craigslist. Smeelgova 10:53, 30 December 2006 (UTC).

Misplaced Pages:Notability

Please see that guideline before continuing with this; sources that indicate notability must have the topic as their main subject. If it is a newspaper article, the entire article must be about the topic. Sources that are about something else, with trivial mentions, do not attest to the notability of the topic with trivial mentions. —Centrx→talk • 12:02, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

But they could be used as sources/citations in possible articles about the subject. Smeelgova 12:05, 30 December 2006 (UTC).