There's something I've had thrown at me a few times now, that when I use the word "notability", it's scoffed that it's hard to imagine that I ever used that word before Wikipedia made it famous. I can't say for sure whether or not I had ever used it before January 2001, but it's likely that any of us encountered it once in a while in the newspaper without raising a stink.

What do others think?

It is meaningless. 'notability' ought to have some grounding in significant, whereas in wikiland it seems to be no more than written down somewhere.

Not just "somewhere". It must be in place which has a "reputation for accuracy and reliability". Nevermind if the reputation is justified or not. And never mind if the medium has flubbed up by reprinting some rumor from a worthless source, a sort of churned-up notability aptly called churnalism in today's world of lazy and overworked primary reporters.

The NYT's 2001-2 "exclusive" stories on Iraq's WMDs (which helped the drumbeat toward the 2003 war) were based in no small part, but without attribution, on Ahmed Chalabi's claims, and that guy cannot tell truth from fiction and does not care. But have Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller put them in the NYT (no source given) and now they're notable and even believable. Though still as totally a bunch of B.S. as CBS and Dan Rather's defense of the Killian forgeries (those ROTC papers used against Bush).

Some of this wouldn't be used even by legal standards of evidence. Some Iraqi defector Rafid Alwan al-Janabi a.k.a. "Curveball" tells a tale (without a scrap of verification) to the German intelligence people, who pass it by grapevine to the CIA, where it is believed by the hawks/neocons/idiots at the Whitehouse, who send Colin Powell to present it to the U.N. At that point it's hearsay from Powell based on hearsay from the CIA based on hearsay from the Germans about what a defector told THEM. And all the best newspapers dutifully now print what Powell says, making it a WP-reliable and verifiable fact. Not that WP matters, but such things do slip into reliability via reliability-creep, in the real world, too. With consequences we saw. (Curveball was about as trustable as Chalabi, but he said what Bush wanted to hear).

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/

Nonsense of course.

Most words of any service to clear and critical thought have lost their meanings so long as you limit yourself to Wikipedia's Bubble Of Influence (WP:BOI), the derivatives of “notable” being but a drop in the toilet.

But time's a wasting and still you all dabble in trivialities …

Jon Awbrey

"Notable" == a topic I want talked about
"Not notable" == a topic I don't want talked about

That's all you need to know.

Remember, Wikipedia isn't about knowledge. It's about control.

You have a gift for summarizing a bullshit-laden situation into a few well-chosen sentences.

Now, if only bloggers and commentators had such detectors for reporting on Wikipedia.....

I'd say it's more Wikipedia doublespeak than it is a Wikipedia neologism.

But by far the prime example of Wikipedia doublespeak is "consensus".

It used to have a meaning before the Wikipedia Humpty Dum-dums mangled it:

Definition of NOTABILITY
: a notable or prominent person

That definition, according to Merriam-Webster, goes back to 1832.

The Latin 'notabilitas' seems to have the same meaning, dating back to at least the Renaissance

http://www.google.com/search?q=notabilitas...w&start=10&sa=N

The root 'notabilis' (noteworthy, conspicuous, distinguished, remarkable) is classical Latin. So Wikipedia did not invent it.

I don't remember using the word "notable" before 2001, or even 2006. In the past it was really just a synonym for "well-known" - a term you might use for someone or something that wasn't quite "famous," but was more than just an ordinary person, place or thing.

Lexically speaking, it might be no huge loss if the Wikipedia definition ("covered by the one or more media outlets we like") should gain prevalence over the common English usage, since we'll still have "well-known" to fall back on, but it's still a loss, nevertheless. I just hope the world's other languages are under less of a threat, for their sake.

Most languages are being systematically affected (perhaps threatened is too strong a word) by American culture in general. The French Academy frequently complains about this but has had only limited success in reversing the tide. Wikipedia is just another facet of the problems caused worldwide by American culture. I do not believe that its influence on French or German, the languages I know best, is particularly strong.

Oh, but what about Danish?

I'm going to disagree with prevailing opinion, for the most part. The use of the word isn't great, as it should probably be something like "standards for inclusion", but the concept on WP is at least an attempt to set a bar. Unfortunately, it's way too often gamed to insert really unnecessary, or even libelous, stuff into WP. If it were only promotional pieces, it wouldn't be nearly so bad, but, as we're seeing, it's often crap like attacks on 13-year-old girls.

The problem is often WP's head-in-the-sand approach to site leadership more than policies.