Gebruiker:Kleuske/Open Letter
L.S.
The Dutch Wikipedia is celebrating its 15th anniversary, but to me, this does not evoke any festive feelings. In 15 years the Dutch-language Wikipedia has not been able to reach any form of consensus about such basics as notability or requiring independent, reliable sources. There is no guideline on notability and there is no guideline requiring any sources (reliable, independent or otherwise). This is intolerable for an encyclopedia.
This results in the situation where no article can be nominated for a lack of notability, even if not a single independent source can be found. The current practice consists of invoking someones personal judgement on notability and is nothing short of arbitrary. The situation has been unworkable for a number of years and no solution is in sight. A collection of texts without any requirement of third party sources and no criteria by which to judge notability cannot earnestly call itself an encyclopedia and claim to be disseminating knowledge.
I have tried to improve things and managed to update WP:BLP (biographies of living people) and WP:GOO (original research) to guideline status, but "relevance" (WP:REL) remains a non-binding suggestion and relevance is what somebody thinks it is, without any need to back any claim of notability with actual sources.[1]
It is for that reason that I request office action to remedy the situation:
- Declare the notability guidelines (en:WP:GNG) as developed by the english language community binding on nl.wikipedia.org
- Declare the 'reliable sources' (en:WP:RS) guidelines binding on nl.wikipedia.org
This will, no doubt, meet a lot of opposition, but I see no other way of saving nl.wikipedia.org as something even resembling an encyclopedia.
Kind Regards,
Kleuske.