What is minimum notability of claims for this site?

Question

Recently there was a question that asked if a certain twitter quote was attributable to Adria Richards. In the comments do that question I raised the question of it was even a notable claim for the purposes of this site. I did this for two reasons: one is that the claim itself wasn't very notable (i.e. a random person said something) and the second is that even if people Richards to be notable, the claim itself refereed to something that is unlikely to be of interest to people in the future, i.e. too localized, which is a question in and of itself.

While the topic of what is notability has been raised, what is the actual bar for when someone or something is significant enough to be considered notable enough for this site?

Answer 1

Re: notability

The bar for notability is very low. We accept facebook posts ("I'm seeing a lot of this being posted and re-posted on facebook"), email ("I received a rather intriguing email"), signs on trails, and quotes from books and blogs as evidence of a claim's notability.

It appears to me that our notability threshold is being able to demonstrate that at least one person other than the asker has made the claim in question. It was suggested by Fabian that "the number [of people making the claim] should be more than a handful", but given that we accept a single email as demonstration of notability, we're actually applying a very lenient test. In either case ("at least one other person", or "more than a handful"), the bar is quite low.

The purpose of Wikipedia's higher bar for notability is because it is an encyclopedia. Stackexchange is a question and answer site. Questions don't need to be useful or interesting into eternity. The purposes of our notability threshold are different than the purposes of Wikipedia's notability threshold.

This purpose of our notability threshold is two-fold:

1. Elimination of idle speculation, and
2. commitment to a particular, specific claim.

The subject of the claim (Adria Richards) does not need to be notable, only the claim.

Answer 2

I started to compose a longer answer discussing the goals of our notability rule, and pointing out recent questions that suffered from the problems it was trying to solve.

Very briefly - and this should probably be in the FAQ somewhere:

1. provides evidence that many people believe it, so it is worth lifting a finger to research it, in an effort to reduce (not increase) the spurious claims spread over the Internet.
2. provides specifics, so we know we aren't challenging a strawman, and can see what definitions and context the original claim has.

This particular question was very specific. It was easy to research, and once someone had actually given an answer, the first issue is rather moot.

However, it dawned on me that the objection isn't really about our notability clause. It is about our 'Too Localized' close reason, i.e.

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet.

Now I wondering if this confusion between our "not notable" and "too localized" close reasons is widespread, because I can see now the distinction is rather subtle.

Answer 3

To start things off, I don't think that the Adria Richards question really reached the level of notability that it should have been included on this site in the first place. Had it not been for the "donglegate" it is very unlikely that anyone outside of her social network would have even known who she is. As it is, she's more known now for the issues in the IT community itself as opposed to any contributions that she has made to the community or society at large.

Minimum notability I think is something that is worth addressing but is going to be difficult to do so, but I think that Wikipedia does a good job of hitting upon the major point that notability requires some staying power and something should be relevant in the future. Going back to the Adria Richards question, is a comment that she may or may not have made actually relevant to anything and is anyone likely to even care a year from now?

Another bar that I've sometimes seen before is the number of Google hits a topic may have; however, I don't really feel that is a very good approach since Google search results appear to adapt themselves to the user and there are obviously going to be differences based upon localization (i.e. www.google.co.jp does not return the same results as www.google.com).