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This is bit bizarre to me, but we have one user arguing that our policy on notability which specifies,

The idea here is that once a large number of people are exposed to the claim, it is of general interest to validate the claim and either confirm or refute it.

is not satisfied by an online petition. While an online petition is NOT evidence of belief -- you can sign a petition without believing the outcome possible -- it does seem to be evidence of exposure. I'm not sure how we can realistically better quantify exposure.

Would a change.org petition with 50,000+ signatures be evidence enough of a "a large number of people are exposed to the claim"?

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    Not this started over a question that was asked, closed, and deleted for reasons of moderation and they seem to blame me for all of that happening. The question that this started about is skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56738/…
    – Joe W
    Commented Mar 1 at 19:10

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No, it would not be able to be used as a notable claim as those sites can easily be manipulated and have fake votes cast for things. There is also the issue that there is no way to determine if someone voted for something because they believe in, voting as a protest vote, or some other reason.

Granted this petition doesn't have 50,000+ votes it does show that people will vote for anything and I am sure if someone went on a campaign to get it more votes they could do it.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

If there is something on change.org that is widely believed there will be other sources for such a claim.

It should also be noted that your source for what is notable doesn't define what a large number of people is and how many people it needs will change based on who they are.

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  • I don't know what you're trying to prove with your link to change.org/p/… (a) there is no falsifiable claim on that petition, and (b) if there was a falsifiable claim on that petition that it has 38 signatures would be sufficient to show that 38 people are "exposed to it". You seem to blur belief and exposure. A claim is notable if people are exposed to it. We are skeptics: we can NEVER know how many people actually believe it.
    – Evan Carroll
    Commented Mar 1 at 19:16
  • @EvanCarroll I am just pointing out that because it is on change.org and has votes doesn't mean that it is a notable claim.
    – Joe W
    Commented Mar 1 at 19:17
  • This answer introduces a term "belief" which isn't required to satisfy notability.
    – Evan Carroll
    Commented Mar 1 at 19:18
  • @EvanCarroll It does not introduce belief in the claim but belief that the source itself isn't notable. Also please don't continue to use the comments do debate my reasons for voting to close your question.
    – Joe W
    Commented Mar 1 at 19:20
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The problem is you can have satire articles that have many views too. The main dispute on that Q was (1) whether people truly believed it was possible, an issue of implied claim, and (2) whether legal analysis of not explicitly decided issues is on-topic here, or if it's "original research" by this site's standards.

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  • You can never prove that anyone believes anything. This is just a position that is of unmaintainable skepticism. At the point that 60,000 people sign a petition and you're not convinced a single person believes the claim, you've provided a bar no one can pass. We also don't have to provide a legal analysis (original research) to cite other experts that have provided a legal analysis.
    – Evan Carroll
    Commented Mar 15 at 18:00

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