Board Thread:Wiki discussion/@comment-5635930-20141122144518/@comment-4812386-20141123071501

Your concerns are excellent, and I thank you for expressing them. I believe they come mostly from a misunderstanding which is not unique to you, and I will take this occasion to explain where the criteria come from and what they really mean.

I have written in 2013, before I had the intention to rewrite the policies, a blog post in which I have attempted to calculate what would be a good criterion for the number of place visits required to have a page on the wiki. It has received much favorable support, and I have reused the criteria in it when I later wrote the new policies. I strongly recommend that you (and everyone else) read it, because it explains the reasoning because the current notability policy, whereas the policy only serves as an authoritative document and not as a rationale for itself.

It must be understood above all that the numeral criteria are only a shortcut. If it was possible, we would have a thorough discussion about every article about every user, place and group to determine whether it is notable before accepting it in the main space. However, this would require way too much work and activity and is in no way sane. For this reason, there are some numerical criteria (more than 15,000 members for groups, more than 750,000 place visits for users and places) that, if met, automatically make a subject be considered notable because it is indeed very likely it is notable.

But this remains a shortcut. It is tempting to see it as the normal, usual way to determine whether a subject is notable, because it is the one applied most often, and in practice it indeed is; but it remains that discussion and choice by the community can and is intended to be used to establish the notability of a group, user or place. Cases where the community decides should not be seen as exceptions, because even though they are uncommon, they are the preferable way to determine whether a subject is notable. Community consensus should be seen as the source of the criteria, and not as a way to override them.

If you consider as notable a group, place or user that does not meet the criteria, you can create a thread like this one on the forum and ask other contributors if they agree. If there is general agreement that the subject is worthy of mention, then the article about it may be created without any regard for the number of place visits or members. Similarly, if consensus is reached that a subject which meets the numerical criteria is not worthy of mention, the article about that subject may be removed from the main space.

Consensus is not a majority vote between administrators, or any vote at all for that matter. It does have similarities to a vote, but with some subtleties.