Except the notability guideline is at odds with the stated goal of Wikipedia -- to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free.
Far better would be to do away with the notability guideline entirely. The purpose it allegedly serves is in keeping unverifiable (as in, cannot be confirmed by reference to reliable sources) information out of Wikipedia, but Wikipedia already has two full-blown and actively-used policies regarding that matter. All that's left for notability, then, is to turn Wikipedia articles into popularity contests, something that's definitely at odds with its stated goals.
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Except the notability guideline is at odds with the stated goal of Wikipedia -- to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free.
Far better would be to do away with the notability guideline entirely. The purpose it allegedly serves is in keeping unverifiable (as in, cannot be confirmed by reference to reliable sources) information out of Wikipedia, but Wikipedia already has two full-blown and actively-used policies regarding that matter. All that's left for notability, then, is to turn Wikipedia articles into popularity contests, something that's definitely at odds with its stated goals.
You might be right, but I think you confused Wikipedia's goal with Google's.
I looked (casually) and did not find anything on Wikipedia that said its goal was "to collect and provide the totality of human knowledge, for free."
There's a whole huge article on Wikipedia that contradicts this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISNOT
Well, technically it's the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation in general, rather than the Wikipedia project in particular.
See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home which states:
"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment."
It's clearly not the goal of Wikipedia itself.