Wikipedia Content
Notability of a subject determines which articles will be included or not at Wikipedia. In his book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih writes that notability is at the center of the debate as to what the world's greatest encyclopedia should be -
"One faction believes Wikipedia should contain pretty much anything, as long as it’s factual and verifiable.... On the other side of the debate are the ‘deletionists’, although this somewhat unfairly characterizes their view in a destructive way. Some prefer the word ‘exclusionists’. This camp believes it is important to strictly determine not only whether something is factual, but whether it is notable, whether it is worthy of being included in the pantheon of human knowledge..... At the center of the debate is notability, which is where inclusionists and deletionists have their skirmishes.Emily Artinian compares this passage with Borges' The Library of Babel.
Persons wanting to delete an article on the grounds of non-notability are called deletionists. Those not wanting to delete the article are called inclusionists.
A team of computer scientists at MIT and Rutgers University has used notability at Wikipedia to create a measure of hierarchy in a directed online social network.
The number of hits from a search engine has been proposed as a measure of notability; Wikipedia does not recommend the use of Google's results.
The number of citations has been proposed as a measure of notability of a publication or author; the field of study is called citation analysis.
Notability may be considered to be absolutely objective, e.g., inherently as the big bang; relatively objectively determinable using a conventional definition, which is subjectively determined by consensus, e.g., an online encyclopedia consensus to consider all towns as being notable, no matter how small; or subjective, such as a notably emotional day for an individual.
Read more about this topic: Notability
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