User:StevenJ81/Sandbox/Draft notability essay

Draft essay on notability at simplewiki

Thank you. I appreciate that, by the book, notability requirements are the same. Still ...
If we leave both English-language Wikipedias out of the discussion for the moment, different subjects are often judged on notability differently by different language communities. That is to say, some topics exist in one language, but not another; some topics exist as a full article in one language, and only as a piece of an article in another. As I don't have to tell you, there are a lot of different variations of this across the Wikimedia projects.
At one level, that is as true for enwiki as for any other language's Wikipedia. However, as a pending change reviewer on enwiki, I am increasingly seeing there all kinds of articles for what I would consider fairly obscure non-English-language films, television shows, books and the like. And if enwiki were just like other language Wikipedias, I would personally judge an awful lot of these to be non-notable, especially when their supporting sources are only available in the other language. Maybe they remain there simply because there is too much to do to weed them out. But English is increasingly the world's second language (in places where it is not the first). So, de facto, English Wikipedia becomes more of a global record. After all, even if a topic would not be notable to native speakers, there are people who really speak English out there for whom the topic is an important, notable one.
I have thus come to treat enwiki as a global encyclopedia of record. If an article has a well-sourced article in another language's wiki—and certainly if has well-sourced articles in two other languages—I'm inclined to leave it alone at enwiki, at least with respect to notability.
So now, we come to us here at Simple English Wikipedia. In a way, the argument above applies to us even more than to English Wikipedia, because so many people who come here are non-native speakers. In another way, though, I could hypothesize the opposite: people come here for one of two (usually overlapping) reasons:

1. They are looking for a core set of information in basic language they understand.
2. They are looking for information not readily found in their native-language wiki, but at a level more understandable than that of English Wikipedia.

We're not trying to be Britannica, as I pointed out here.
At the same time, I do not think we have to be the "global wiki of record" the same way enwiki does. Let's take for a moment, the example of articles I have seen on certain Turkish, Polish and Farsi films and television shows. These were films and tv shows for which there were no reliable sources in English, which have never been translated to English, and which are probably really only of interest to speakers of the given language.

• To speakers of these languages, reason #2 above does not apply: these articles are (often) found in their native-language wiki, so speakers of these languages do not need to come here to find information.
• To anyone else, reason #1 above does not apply: these articles are not part of the true core set of information for this wiki.

To put it simply, we do not need such articles here. And for the sake of simplicity, we should not clutter up this wiki with such articles. We should focus on the two points above: (1) core information and (2) generally interesting and worthwhile information, perhaps not quite true core information, but that exists only inconsistently in other wikis.