User:Basement12/An open letter on Paralympian notability

Originally written as part of a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Notability (sports)

A less than arbitrary break

I'm concerned we are getting off topic from the original case I was attempting to make so I've attempted to write a summary of my thoughts here in the form of an open letter to the community as a whole which I now copy to this page. I note that if this were merely a WP:Vote as one editor tried to make it then it currently stands 3 to 2 in favour of my suggestion as a whole, rather than the less wide ranging proposal I have made to limit it to more recent athletes.

I'm well aware Wikipedia is ableist, because that is a reflection of society as a whole even if it isn't a nice thing to think about. Whilst the motto of the Olympic movement is “'Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Faster, Higher, Stronger) the public as a whole will always care more about “Celerrimus , Altissima, Fortissimus” (Fastest, Highest, Strongest (citius doesn't translate well in this contect but perhaps someone with a bettre knowledge of Latin will hook me up)) and despite the concerns from the able bodied, Oscar or someone less caught up in legal issues isn't likely to beat Usain anytime soon. The discrimination argument won't ever fly in this arena and honestly it probably shouldn't.

However, I've done my best to make the case that in the modern age any Paralympian will recieve enough press coverage to justify having an article at our humble encyclopaedia. As it stands the points I've raised have not been addressed with anything more advanced than (I'm paraphrasing) “Prove It” or “we discussed this years ago and the Olympics are more popular”. The concept behind these guidelines, as best as I can tell, is to allow a little wriggle room so that articles with limited sourcing aren't immedietly comdemmed to the AfD scrapheap; they merely state in each case that a person is “presumed notable”. I'm fully aware that notability isn't confirmed by meeting any guideline at WP:ATHLETE and does still need to be proven. I've accepted the fact that we probably wont ever have an article on Archery at the 1960 Summer Paralympics silver medallist “Delapietra” and have tried to propose that we include only post 2000 (or 2004 etc.) competitors in the guideline; given a random list of redlink competitors from the last three Games I think I have shown the sources exist and given a current AfD debate I think there is evidence to show that athletes from outside the English speaking world also have relevant sources on which to base an article. This isn't a ploy to ruin the sanctity of the 5.1 million articles we have with an extra few thousand, just a plea not to have to go through Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Junko Fujii every single time. I remain confident any such request for deletion can be rebuffed with some effort even, as seems likely, guidelines stay as they are. I've had my say and don't intend to weigh in again.

For those that read this far, thank you, I hope I've at least made you think even if I've not changed your mind - Basement12 (T.C) 22:12, 5 May 2016 (UTC)