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I'm not arguing it never happens, but that it's been "moving in this direction", i.e. that notability plays an increasingly small role relative to verifiability. That's my observation over about 8 years of writing articles now and then, but I would be interested in a more quantitative test of that claim if someone knows of a way to do it. Nobody has given me any grief since around 2008 for new articles, even ones on quite "minor" subjects, whereas the question of "does this belong in an encyclopedia?" used to be a more common discussion in Wikipedia's early days, as everyone was trying to figure out what "a wiki encyclopedia" really meant. (In particular, people coming from a more academic background, like Larry Sanger, were advocating for a much smaller, more traditional encyclopedia, certainly not one with millions of articles.)

I do think there are specific areas that remain more controversial, mainly around recent pop culture and business. If people suspect you're self-promoting, then they may try to get an article deleted (there was a recent rash of hotels hiring PR firms to add articles on them, which wouldn't be so bad in itself if the articles didn't read like ad copy). Same if you write an article on a recent internet meme, or a website.

In the areas I've been working in, which are mainly geography, history, science, mathematics, and literature, "notability" as a separate requirement seems basically completely dead in practice. I used to have to argue against deletion of my articles on minor 19th-century Prussians. But nobody even thinks of deleting those these days, as long as they have solid citations.

edit: Looking elsewhere in the thread, it looks like your views of Wikipedia are generalized from one very self-interested example: an article about your dad. May I suggest that isn't the most unbiased way of forming an opinion on a complex subject?



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