Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2024 November 19
This template has been around since 2017 but has only 7 mainspace transclusions, so it has never meaningfully caught on. I'm not sure what sort of title it would be used for — perhaps a name of a photo that's somehow famous enough that people might reasonably search for it but not famous enough to be notable? In that case, I'd find it inappropriate, per a corollary of the notability backdoor argument I made about {{Wikispecies redirect}}. Sdkb talk 00:52, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
This template has been around since 2017 but has only 6 mainspace transclusions, so it has never caught on. It has a theoretical use for book titles that are not notable for an encyclopedia article, but in that case, a corollary of the notability backdoor argument I made about {{Wikispecies redirect}} applies. Sdkb talk 00:50, 19 November 2024 (UTC)
I start from the philosophical perspective that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and we should therefore make use of the sister projects when they help us build a better encyclopedia, but that otherwise we should give them no special preference over any other content anywhere else on the internet.
This template was boldly created in 2017 without a larger discussion (or at least nothing was mentioned in the edit summaries). It takes a similar form to the much more widely used {{Wiktionary redirect}}. However, unlike Wiktionary redirect, which helps us provide information readers searching for terms that would never warrant an article, Wikispecies redirect functions more like a loophole in our notability guideline. The vast majority of its uses are for biologists that would not be notable for an article.
We have notability standards to constrain the size of the encyclopedia and reduce the maintenance burden, and I do not see a reason that we should carve out an exception for biologists just because our parent organization also happens to run a non-encyclopedia project that — unlike us — finds it appropriate to create a database of biologists. Such an exception opens some floodgates: If the WMF created, say, a Wikipaintings project that had a database of all visual artists without a notability bar, would we want soft redirects there? How about soft redirects to any concept with a Wikidata item? Or let's say we find a highly reliable non-WMF database of musicians — why not create soft redirects there for all musicians that can't survive AfD?
Either a biologist is notable and should have an article, or they are not and should not be included in Wikipedia. The only redirect in the latter case should be "go search the internet". Sdkb talk 00:44, 19 November 2024 (UTC)