Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

Jazz bands don't get a terrible amount of coverage in main stream media, they don't become top-40 acts, they don't get academic papers written about them in the ACM, etc. But they may be hugely influential, have tens of thousands of listeners, and may have other qualifications for why they should have a page. But if they don't meet 's requirement for notability they may flag it AfD and then it ends up working it's way through Wikipedia's impressively broken editing process where it'll probably end up deleted despite any discussion to the contrary.

Importantly, my hypothetical jazz band may only be well known in Jazz circles, having never pierced more mainstream circles. But just like a singular academic paper that no lay person has heard about, but been cited hundreds of times, this band may have influenced hundreds of other, highly visible bands.

I'm picking Jazz here, but it could be any other fairly insular sub-culture, say Blue Grass, or Model Train collectors. It's not up to me, as somebody not interested in their sub-culture to decide if it's notable. That only tests whether or not something has percolated up to "common knowledge". If that's the test for inclusion, then we don't really need Wikipedia anyway do we? Everybody already knows what's in it!

Absolutely not, and you clearly know it. That's like me saying your argument is that we should get rid of the rest of the internet because one can post lolcats to Wikipedia as notable examples of, er, lolcats.

>But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging"

No I don't. But you're getting sidetracked by the fabricated analogy and forgetting that the removed articles don't have the [fictional] notability of the subject of your story and would have been very unlikely to have been removed if they had and would have certainly been reinstated.

>To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability

Let's try this as a first approximation on notability. The internet is probably the main repository of CS info - 120 Google Scholar articles mention "'Alice ML'" (appear to be some false positives). Arguably art history is better represented in works that are yet to be fully integrated online - 17000 Google Scholar articles mention "Fra Angelico".

How about books as a further approximation. 33 book results for "'Alice ML' programming" (18 are obvious false positives too). "'fra angelico' ~painting" (I don't think it's ambiguous without the addition of "~painting" but for equivalence ...) gives 133000 book results.

Popularity and plurality don't dictate notability of course. Notability in this case is a function of the appearance of notability to the authors and editors too, hence pop-stars, etc..

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On the subject of the AfD (articles for deletion). I've looked now at the one for Alice ML, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

The oppositions are clearly poor. Most of them are based on the false assumption that Alice (software) is what is at question. A couple mention notability based on being in a book and the proposer convincingly counters these IMO. Vorov2 is the only dissenting voice that appears to know what they are talking about and gives a reasonable argument. Again, it seems clear that the proposer was most knowledgable about the subject, knew the relevant reference works (so had researched) and knew the WP policy well. SarekOfVulcan makes the deletion.

So in summary, one flagged, another gave good opposition, yet another deleted.

In many ways the fact that there was no other decent opposition to this deletion leads me to believe that it was the correct course of action. Note that Alice ML is still present in Wikipedia in a priori relevant places (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksH...).

If you read what I wrote you'll note that I argued that if a sufficient argument for notability was pressed that this would be a reason for inclusion.

So, by your account that I am wrong I'd have to assume that the article was reinstated without presentation of evidence of notability or logical argument for such?