Because WP:N cordons off a whole huge swath of human knowledge and says WP doesn't have to bother keeping articles about it accurate; it can just be removed wholesale from the encyclopedia.
WP says, Pokemon yes, Thomas Ptacek no. Pikachu must be yellow, not green, but it doesn't matter if Thomas Ptacek invented ketchup salt, because WP doesn't have to cover it.
I feel like you're kind of having to go through contortions to avoid this fact, James.
I just don't really understand why another redundant label -- "not notable" -- is needed to express the underlying concept of "not verifiable".
With only a couple of narrow exceptions, lack of notability is not sufficient for speedy deletion by an administrator, which means that all those articles still take up time and consume the effort of editors who participate in the AfD. In other words, I doubt that there's enough of a saving of time and effort to justify the myriad other problems the notability criterion is known to generate.
And so it seems to me that it'd be far simpler to do away with the notability guideline and keep the focus on what it allegedly aims to accomplish: ensuring that information in Wikipedia can be verified by reference to reliable sources. If an article cites no sources to back up the information it presents, get rid of it unless/until someone comes up with suitable sources, and throw the politics and the popularity contests out of the process.
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Because WP:N cordons off a whole huge swath of human knowledge and says WP doesn't have to bother keeping articles about it accurate; it can just be removed wholesale from the encyclopedia.
WP says, Pokemon yes, Thomas Ptacek no. Pikachu must be yellow, not green, but it doesn't matter if Thomas Ptacek invented ketchup salt, because WP doesn't have to cover it.
I feel like you're kind of having to go through contortions to avoid this fact, James.
I just don't really understand why another redundant label -- "not notable" -- is needed to express the underlying concept of "not verifiable".
With only a couple of narrow exceptions, lack of notability is not sufficient for speedy deletion by an administrator, which means that all those articles still take up time and consume the effort of editors who participate in the AfD. In other words, I doubt that there's enough of a saving of time and effort to justify the myriad other problems the notability criterion is known to generate.
And so it seems to me that it'd be far simpler to do away with the notability guideline and keep the focus on what it allegedly aims to accomplish: ensuring that information in Wikipedia can be verified by reference to reliable sources. If an article cites no sources to back up the information it presents, get rid of it unless/until someone comes up with suitable sources, and throw the politics and the popularity contests out of the process.