Wikipedia notability and ideons
Russian Wikipedia decides what may have an article by its notability rule. Ideonology measures how much of other people's thought a person has shifted. It is one question asked from two sides, and this page puts them together. The rules quoted here are those of Russian Wikipedia; the English counterparts are named once. The criterion is half a joke: it replaces nothing. Verifiability (ВП:ПРОВ, WP:V), reliable sources (ВП:АИ, WP:RS) and the minimum requirements for an article (ВП:МТ) stay as they are; this is only about notability.
1. The rule
A person or a topic is notable if their impact is at least one Vita.
One Vita is parity: notable is the one who has given to other heads more than they received into their own. No second number is needed. The strictness comes not from the threshold but from the rules of counting:
- Counted by the protocol. One declared channel, every input an interval, and only external documented quantities go in: print runs, views, numbers of students, statistics. Nobody has documented the minutes spent among family and friends, so the typical 0.2 Vita that everyone has stays out of the count by itself, with no separate rule. Documented influence on those close to a person counts like any other: Socrates never wrote a line, and his whole account is in the readers of Plato.
- Three zones. The lower bound of the interval is at least one Vita: notable. The upper bound is below one Vita: not notable. The threshold falls inside the interval: a discussion, that is, an ordinary deletion discussion (ВП:КУ, the counterpart of AfD).
Intervals in Fermi estimates span two or three orders of magnitude, so "the lower bound is at least a Vita" in practice demands a central estimate of tens of Vitas. The criterion is strict: it is deletionism with a formula.
For comparison. The English Wikipedia has about 1.15 million articles on living people: one for every five thousand adults on Earth. All language editions together have roughly one for every two thousand. By the model of how impact is distributed, the threshold of one Vita is passed by about one adult in a thousand on the central estimate, and by one in ten thousand on the lower bound of the interval. Judged by the central estimate, the criterion is softer than Wikipedia; by the lower bound, as the rule of three zones requires, it is twice as strict as the English edition and five times as strict as all editions together.
2. The general notability guideline, word by word
ВП:ОКЗ (the counterpart of WP:GNG): a topic is presumed notable if it is "covered in sufficient detail in independent reliable sources". The rule speaks of sources, the theory of minutes. This is not a paraphrase of the rule but a parallel: every word has a relative.
| Word of the rule | What the rule requires | Its relative in the theory |
|---|---|---|
| Covered in sources | Secondary sources from which facts about the topic can be taken | Documented re-emission: someone spent their minutes on the topic and wrote down the result |
| In sufficient detail | Enough for an article without original research; a passing mention or a database row is not enough | Degree: a passing mention shifts nothing |
| Independent | The author of the source has no stake in the subject: not an advertisement, not a press release, not paid content | Re-emission without payment: the topic captured someone's minute by itself rather than buying it |
| Reliable | Editorial control, the reputation of the author and the publisher | Rule R1 of the protocol: only external verifiable data go in |
| Presumed | A presumption that the community may rebut by other rules | The estimate is an interval, and the discussion has the last word |
For topics the theory has a substitution test. Replace the subject with its neighbor from the same catalogue. If only the figures in the text changed, the minutes of the author and the reader stayed the same: the topic is replaceable. If the text would have to be written anew, the topic captured those minutes by itself. It is the same irreplaceability that divides credit among people, applied to a topic. The test is stricter than the rule: it would screen out most beetle species, chemical compounds and processor models that have solid secondary sources. Here the theory and Wikipedia part honestly: a reference work has a duty of completeness that a ruler does not.
3. What the theory reproduces
- ВП:НЕНОВОСТИ (not news). News is reach without degree: a hundred million people × two minutes × 0.01 make 0.08 Vita. A short burst does not pass the threshold.
- ВП:НЕУТРАЧИВАЕТСЯ (notability is not lost over time). Impact is a cumulative account and does not decrease. An ideon may go out; what it has gathered stays.
- ВП:НЕГУЩА (not a crystal ball). Rule R4: the future is not counted.
- ВП:1СОБ (people known for one event). A person known for one event is written about in the article on the event. The theory does the same: the event gets the magnitude, the participant a share. An event of a hundred Vitas with a thousand participants is notable, and none of them is.
- Sign does not matter. Hitler is notable in both systems: both measure magnitude.
- Relatives are notable only in their own right. A share is counted by irreplaceability, and the son of a great man has none in his father's deeds.
4. What the theory overturns
Channel versus share. ВП:КЗП (the counterpart of WP:BIO) grants notability by office: members of parliament, members of government, heads of cities of a hundred thousand or more, players in the top leagues of popular sports. An office, an award and a print run answer the question of how large the channel is. The theory asks a second one: what is the holder's share in it. A deputy's seat is large, but had he not pressed the button, the next name on the party list would have. The office is notable; the holder is replaceable.
Inherited upward, not downward. The son of a great man gets nothing, but the teacher, the parent and the publisher get a share along the chain of causes. The article on Max Brod rests on sources about Brod, as it should; the theory adds that the man who did not burn Kafka's manuscripts would have earned his share without them. One percent of Marx's account is four thousand Vitas.
Fame versus trace. Sources write about names, and Wikipedia measures the minutes around a name. The theory measures the trace, and by the rule of cargo the name is the first thing lost in transmission. The two accounts coincide only when the name is part of the working part of the ideon. The larger the trace, the smaller the chance of an article: the author of a proverb will never have one.
Equality of minutes. Sources are a measuring instrument biased toward the cultures that produce texts. Axiom A1 has no such bias: a minute of a village singer's listener weighs as much as a minute of a reader of a metropolitan newspaper. Wikipedia cannot fix this and should not: without sources there is nothing to write an article from. But it is worth remembering what exactly the instrument shows.
5. People
Fermi estimates, except Harrison, who was computed by the protocol. The ordinary case is counted by what is documented. More summits, with the calculations, are in the Hall of fame.
| Occupation | The summit | An ordinary case notable under ВП:КЗП | The ordinary case by the threshold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philosopher | Marx, ~1 MVt | A rector, a member of an academy (ВП:УЧФ): 0.01–1 Vt | Not notable, or a discussion |
| Politician | Trump, 10 kVt | A deputy from a party list, the mayor of a city of a hundred thousand: 0.001–0.1 Vt | Not notable |
| Writer | Tolstoy, on the order of 1 kVt | An author with thirty thousand readers: 0.01–0.1 Vt | Not notable |
| Musician | The Beatles, 5 kVt for the four | A song with ten million plays: 0.01–0.1 Vt | Not notable |
| Footballer | Messi, 20–400 Vt | A top-league player: 0.004–0.1 Vt | Not notable |
| Chess player | Carlsen, 5–200 Vt | A grandmaster: 0.001–0.01 Vt | Not notable |
| Donor | Harrison, 1–700 Vt | — | Notable, by the very edge |
| Creator of a language | Ben-Yehuda, 50 kVt | Zamenhof, 3 kVt | Notable |
| Wikipedia editor | — | Not notable under ВП:КЗП; 0.2 Vt over twenty years | Not notable |
Carlsen shows both factors. The world champion's title is a seat, and without him someone else would have sat in it; what is his own is the style, the fast chess, the streams. The minutes around him number thirty to a hundred billion: matches, streams, analyses. A fifth is the study of his games, a skill, degree 0.2; the rest is watching, degree 0.01 to 0.05. Only what would not have existed without him counts: the chess boom would have happened anyway, and people would have watched someone else, so the share is 0.1 to 0.5. Even the lower bound is above a Vita: notable.
Those who pass the threshold but will not get an article: the founder of a closed community of five thousand (tens of Vitas, no sources); the person who single-handedly maintains a library used by millions of programmers; the speechwriter, because degrees go to the author and fame to the reteller; the author of a joke. The author of a popular game modification, at about two Vitas by the central estimate, would land in a discussion. The theory calls them notable; Wikipedia answers: notable and verifiable. Both requirements are needed, and the theory does not replace the second.
6. Topics
The general guideline speaks of topics, not people, while impact accounts are opened only for people: an earthquake is credited to nature. The measure of a topic is the magnitude of an ideon: the sum of the captured parts over all the minutes it passed through, before sharing and whoever owns it.
| Topic | Calculation | Magnitude | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| A village of a hundred people over seventy years | a hundred lived Vitas × a degree of place of 0.01–0.1 | 1–10 Vt | Notable, by the edge |
| An ordinary asteroid from the catalogue | about 700 minutes of work per object, and those replaceable | ~10⁻⁵ Vt | Not notable |
| All sky surveys together | the work of astronomers, telescopes, commissions, viewers | 30–50 Vt | Notable |
| Ceres | the first; for its orbit Gauss developed his method of orbit determination | far above a Vita | Notable |
Magnitude, unlike a person's impact, depends on the slicing: for all asteroids together it is large, for one ordinary asteroid negligible. The slicing is set by the encyclopedia itself: one article per topic. Hence a conclusion Wikipedia reaches without formulas: the list is notable, not the element.
Down the supply chain the same damping works as back along the chain of causes. Without asteroids the lens grinder would have ground a lens for another telescope, and his minutes would have been almost the same. Time spent may be counted, but only what would have been different without the topic goes into the account.
7. What is serious in the joke
It cannot be a rule. A counterfactual estimate is original research by definition (ВП:ОРИСС, WP:NOR): what has been said is verifiable, what would have been is not. A formula cannot be brought to a discussion.
A question can. The formal criteria answer how large the channel is; the theory's question is about the share: what would have been different without this person, and would another in their place not have done the same in the same year. It cannot be asked in that form: the subjunctive is the same original research. But it has a translation into the language of sources:
Do independent sources single out the person's own contribution — or do they describe the office and the organization, naming the person in passing?
Three objections the theory can answer, and one it cannot. Inflated views: bots have no minutes, and a feed has a degree of 0.01. Scandalous fame: sign is not part of notability in either system, and caution with articles on living people is the business of another rule. Antiquity: the theory knows about Socrates exactly what Wikipedia knows, from sources. What remains unanswered is the main thing: every estimate of a share is a judgment, and Wikipedia does not pass judgments, it retells them.
And one observation. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of what has been written about, not of what has shifted the most thought. The largest account in history is unsigned, and articles about its owners are impossible under rules that need no changing.
The theory itself does not pass the criterion: a few readers, not one independent source. There should be no article about it.