Big huge AFD here for a four-sentence stub:

Nevermind that I didn't hear anything about it until now.

One user wants to just list these attempts, err… plots, err… flippant remarks into a single article, which seems reasonable enough as none have culminated in any kind of attack.

But alas there seems to now be a three-way merge war in progress. Should be interesting to see how this turns out.

The President of the U.S. receives thousands upon thousands of death threats. I don't understand why this is notable in the real world or Wikipedia sense.

There's no accounting for the Wikipedia sense.

Of course there's an argument that Wikipedia should reflect the real world rather than attempting to shape or redefine it. I'm sympathetic to that, but only to a point.

Looking at this I have to wonder how the real world decides which threats are credible enough to report.

Is anyone going to write/writing an article about the "2009 Attack on Pope Benedict XVI?" I would think that would be more notable than some crazy woman claiming that she had a plan to kill the President.

This isn't even in the area of Squeaky Fromm trying to kill Ford, for crying out loud.

That would be a good article topic. Unfortunately, it would probably be suffocated by cries of "WP:NOTNEWS!" Then the solution would be to add a line or two to the article on the Pope himself, but editors of that article would naturally consider the attack to be a very minor detail in the very long life of a very important person, so it would probably get edited out. Thus Wikipedia would extinguish all mention of the incident.

If an assassination attempt/plot/threat is deemed sufficiently important by the external world that important news sources publish articles about it, it should be covered by Wikipedia. If Wikipedia gets into the business of determining what ought to be notable ("yes, it got a bunch of press coverage, but the press was probably just having a slow news day, and the whole thing is just silly..."), then it's creating a false impression.

Maybe Wikipedia should have a "detail level" control sorta like the "thread score" thingy on sites like slashdot and reddit. You could read the article at "main info only" and get a few paragraphs on the most important aspects of the topic, or you can push the slider down to "mindnumbingly arcane trivia" and get a complete report at a detail level that would make a marketing analyst wet himself.

Except that would require writing "n" versions of the article, and create even more editorial strife as people fight over what detail level a particular factlet deserves.

Yet more proof that Wikipedia doesn't have the remotest clue as to what it's doing.

Can you run that past me again? Do you mean that Wikipedia is attempting to shape or redefine the world, or that it should do so? Wikipedia isn't trying to do anything because editors are pulling in dozens of different directions with no coherent focus. The WMF may be trying to do something (well it's definitely trying to do something ) but it isn't doing very well at it - nor can it so long as it has to avoid interfering with content because of c.230 or whatever.

As for seriously shaping or redefining the world, would you want it to do so?

Let me rephrase that, then I'll scupper off for a while and you can draw whatever conclusion you want.