User:Aditya Kabir/Notability

Debates on AfD lack guidance and become very hard to establish consensus.

• People make defenses on inadequate rhetorical grounds
• Ad hominem defenses: all articles should be judged on their own merits, not on the personalities of the people involved in the discussion, INCLUDING the original nominator.
• Bad faith nominations of a deletable article should not be dismissed off hand.
• Bad faith nominations of keepable articles can easily establish notability, and are easy to spot and correct
  • Autobiographical articles can STILL be about notable people. This requires a massive rewrite, not deletion. If the subject is worthy of keeping, in all cases, it should never be deleted.
• Notability is related to the SUBJECT, not on the WRITING.
  • Many articles are created as stubs, with the intent to have them expanded later.
  • A poorly written article can be written about an inherently notable subject.
  • An excellently written article can be written about an inherently non-notable subject
  • Articles often lack references, which come to light during AfD discussions.

Every article is to be judged on its own merit, not in comparison to other articles.

• One obvious exception is to largely similar articles covered by established AfD precedents.
• The existence of other deleteable articles does not make the article under discussion keepable. People OFTEN cite this as a keep reason: "This other shitty article exists, so mine should be kept too".
• The existence of other superficially similar articles that ARE notable is no reason to keep either. People often say "if you delete this article, you should also delete all XXX articles".

Clear notability guidelines can make AFD processes more easy to work through, and can simultaneously improve the article in question. The AFD process should center around the presentation and discussion of EVIDENCE.

• People arguing for delete can cite the lack of credible, nontrivial references.
• people arguing for keep can provide those references.
• With such evidence, or lack thereof, can reduce AfD discussions to moot: Most of AfDs are fraught with the above logical fallacies. These falacies become moot when presented with the evidence. Most editors (if we assume good faith) are capable of making good decisions based on this evidence.