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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4148995" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm pretty miffed at Wikipedia's 'notability' standards.In my mind, the standard of a page's notability is whether or not people visit it.  It shouldn't be whether or not some person - no matter the academic credentials - decides that the page meets his standards of what is worth reading and knowing about.I find Wikipedia to be as biased and suspect a source of information as anything else - for everything but the sort of articles that are typically deemed not notable, and in these wikipedia tends to be by far the best and sometimes the only easily available reference..It seems that there is a certain crowd of idiots that wants to perceive wikipedia's strength as its weakness.  Actually, while I wouldn't base any strong opinions on a wikipedia page alone, I find that's its pretty good summary information source.  Generally any fight for control of the information is won by those that care most about the subject, and that those that care most about a subject tend to be the most knowledgable about it.  To the extent that 'caring most' also generally implies bias, it also tends to be very predictable bias that's easily accounted for.  Whereas, in the work of a single author whose relation to the subject material is unknown, who knows in what direction the bias goes.   Worse come to worse in wiki, you can always track the changes and the discussion and actually click on and follow the links to get a feel for what is really being debated and what evidence there is on either side (if any).  With a book, unless you are well read, you often don't know what the contrary positions might be and you have to take the writer's word for it (barring extensive research) that the cited material is worth citing and actually says what the writer says it does.</blockquote>

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