Talk:Owl Club (Harvard)/Archive 1

Archive 1

Picture removed

4/25/09 You removed the picture from the article -- why? What do you want me to do to fix this article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Owlclub (talk • contribs) 12:32, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Membership section

The Membership section needs references beyond OC's membership directory.SLY111 (talk) 16:30, 16 November 2009 (UTC)SLY111

Member notability

216.165.95.75 posted the following at my talk page:

FourViolas,

You recently deleted Kevin Rex from Owl Club Notable Alumni, commenting: "Undid revision 790168735 by 216.165.95.75: Good for him, but this is a technical meaning of "WP:Notable": it means "at least two independent reliable sources have written about him", which is not true here." but the wikipedia guideline page you cite explicitly states: "Wikipedia articles cover notable topics—those that have gained sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time, and are not outside the scope of Wikipedia. We consider evidence from reliable independent sources to gauge this attention. The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic should have its own article." In fact, a section of the notable topics guideline page is entitled "Notability guidelines do not apply to content within an article."

Please undo your changes to Owl Club (Harvard) and refrain from making the same mistake in the future.

Thank you.

I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.

Thanks for starting a discussion! You're right that WP:NNC means not every piece of information in an article needs two independent reliable in-depth sources, which is the standard for "notability" in the sense of "appropriate for a standalone article". However, that policy notes that some lists restrict inclusion to notable [in the Wikipedia sense] items or people, and that content coverage within a given article is governed by the content policies. These rules give three reasons for excluding Rex for now.

First, since this list is titled "Notable alumni", inclusion is restricted to those Owl Club members who meet Wikipedia's definition of "notability". We could change it to just "Alumni", but an enormous indiscriminate list like that would be very unhelpful to the reader. Second, one of the core aforementioned content policies is WP:V: all content must be supported with a citation to a reliable source. The linked video does not mention the Owl Club, so our readers can't trust that this information is true. Third, even if the video did state this, it would be a "self-published source", and we aren't allowed to use those for self-promotional claims like "was a member of the prestigious Owl Club".

Sorry, and thanks for your understanding. FourViolas (talk) 02:44, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

Though you offer your own understanding of Wikipedia's treatment of "notability," I'm afraid it is plainly incorrect.

There are two wikipedia articles on "notability," one on the broader meaning of notability and one on notability with respect to wikipedia editing. The first "notability" page begins as such: "Notability is the property of being worthy of notice, having fame, or being considered to be of a high degree of interest, significance, or distinction." Even if this article were meant to guide editors of wikipedia (which it is not), it would be too subjectively interpreted to have any real value. The second "notability" page begins: "On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article." This explicitly states that the notability test does not apply to content within articles.

Most importantly, if, by some stretch of the imagination, the "Due and Undue Weight" principal is evoked (from "Wikipedia:Reliable sources and undue weight", consider the fact that, according to wikipedia page views statistics, the Owl Club (Harvard) page was viewed 9 times in the past year. I consider Kevin Rex to be a notable alumnus of the Owl Club and, as one out of nine visitors to the article in the past year, it can be extrapolated that of all the people in the world with knowledge of the Owl Club and of Kevin Rex, 11% believe Mr. Rex is a notable member of the Owl Club. This is 3% higher than the 8% of people who believe Elvis was alive after his reported death (as is alluded to on the Elvis wikipedia page). Why should the burden of proof for the King of Poker Vlogging be higher than the burden of proof for the King of Rock & Roll?

The "notability" argument is explicitly rebutted by the wikipedia guide on "notability" and Kevin Rex's prominence in Owl Club history objectively receives due weight on the Owl Club (Harvard) article.

Sorry, and thanks for your understanding.

I don't have time to argue details, but Wikipedia is not a democracy and your personal opinion of his notability, like my own, is inadmissible WP:Original research. The WP:Due weight policy is about fairness to each position expressed in WP:Reliable sources; e.g. if four newspaper articles said he was a "prominent member of the Owl Club", and one said he was just another recent grad with a YouTube channel, we would describe him as the former. But we can't apply that here, because there aren't even any reliable sources saying he was a member. Therefore, inter alia, his inclusion on this list violates the core content policy of WP:Verifiability, so I am removing it; please do not restore it until you can support his being a "member", let alone a "notable member", with an independently published reliable source.

Also, for the record, there have been ~14,000 views of this page in the past year [1]. FourViolas (talk) 15:38, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

References