Comment from Jim Croft

Liam Wyatt — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:46:26 +0000

This comment was placed at my blog with a note to move it to this forum.

http://www.wittylama.com/2010/02/wikipedian-in-res...

The notability/deletion nexus is to me the most vexing aspect of Wikipedia, associated with the perception of a propensity of self-appointed arbiters not necessarily expert in the field to delete others’ work on the basis of lack of notability. The anonymity and lack of accountability coupled with omnipresent threat of deletion keeps a lot of museum professionals from getting too deeply involved in creating and managing Wikipedia content [I know, I know - citation needed].

The distinction you draw between notability and significance is a good one. The problem with notability, and to a lesser extent significance, is the question of ‘to whom’; does the opinion of a few undo that of many; and who decides?

In the biological domain, every species, no matter how rare or insignificant to the general population is both notable and significant and should have its own Wikipedia (and Wikispecies) article. However, Wikipedia probably does not want to cast its net over every specimen in a museum, no matter how notable and significant these may to the museum or the science (these specimens could be the analogue of your individual coins).

Another example would be authors. Any person who publishes on a species, even if it only a ‘one-page-wipe’, becomes ‘notable by that very act. But you probably do not want every technician who has ever worked in a museum.

This is where GLAM-Wikicam comes into its own: museums are going to maintain this level of highly atomized granularity for their own operational purposes so there is no reason for Wikipedia to do it as well. They will also be doing it with species level information, often harnessing and coordinating efforts of entire scientific communities. This authoritative ‘point of truth’ information can be harvested (in real-time or cached, in whole or in part) for Wikipedia without the need for human intervention or ‘value-adding’. Projects like the Encyclopedia of Life (http://www.eol.org/) are already doing this with Wikipedia content - there is no reason why the reverse should not be possible.

The key is information integrity, and the chain of acknowledgement and attribution. If we can deal with this, contributions from those currently reticent will flow.

In terms of criteria, it is difficult to list these without a degree of circularity. A couple of things relating to scientific collections and information (and cultural material may be similar?) might include:

Significance: object/concept and its its metadata required for research; object/concept required for collections management, accountability; object/concept required by internal or external information systems;

Notability: object/concept of public interest or educational value; object/concept required by other parts of Wikipedia (internal references); object/concept referenced by external applications (the Google test)

I have a fairly liberal attitude to notability i if one person is interested enough to look it up and write it and another is interested enough to look it up and read it, then it it notable, even it it is lowbrow ‘trivia’. We are not dealing with a book and there are no real theoretical or financial limits to the number of pages. That is not to say they may not be some ideological ones.

museumsandtheweb.com - Comments for "Notability Criteria"

Comment from Jim Croft