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Most inclusionists were not extremists: they did not favor articles on that morning’s breakfast. But in a vast range of cases, they thought that limited and imperfect information was better than nothing. Deletionists disagreed, and to resolve the many borderline cases, the community had to find an objective and quantifiable metric for discrimination. Neither cash nor file-size could do the job, so they settled on the principle of notability: “a topic is presumed to be notable if it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.”
Wikipedians are 80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, and around 70 percent of them are under the age of 30.
The principle did not end the debates, but shifted them onto the interpretation of the qualifiers: “significant,” “reliable,” and “independent.” Do mentions in popular blogs such as BoingBoing or TechCrunch provide “significant coverage”? If they do, can those sources be viewed as “reliable” on all subject areas? Can film criticism published in Cahiers du Cinéma count as “independent of its subjects?”
Most such questions had to be answered on a case-by-case basis, and, gradually, those precedents led to the emergence of hundreds of guidelines that could later serve as shortcuts in dispute-resolution. For example, having articles published in MathSciNet is not a guarantee of notability (MathSciNet falls under the insufficient category of “review publications that review virtually all refereed publications in that discipline”), while notability is assured if one has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society or received a Linguapax Prize. Similarly intricate guidelines establish the notability of diplomats, porn stars, athletes, victims of criminal acts, postal codes, irrational numbers, music ensembles, court cases, and even boulevards (a boulevard “heavily lined with commercial or other major non-residential development that serves as the main road within a suburb or some other heavily-developed area” could be notable; roads that simply have “Boulevard” in their names . . . probably not).