Wikipedia:Historical archive/Policy/Notability/Informative

This is a proposed policy.

Content on Wikipedia must be informative (that is, containing information), as well as being verifiable, neutral, and so forth. This is because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the purpose of an encyclopedia is to inform.

Information, for the purposes of Wikipedia, is data that is:

• Actionable
• Interesting

Actionable

A piece of information is actionable if it might be used to do something, and actioned if it has been used to do something. Everything actioned is therefore actionable. For example:

• Einstein's theory of relativity is actionable, as it is used in a wide range of scientific endeavours.
• The theory that bread always lands butter side down is actionable, as it has been empirically tested by countless school children, as well as various purer treatments by mathematicians and physicists.
• Alicia's theory that the raindrops falling on her head increase when she's singing in the rain is not actionable, as nobody takes her seriously, and even if they did, it wouldn't be good for much.

• The birthday of the Queen of England is actionable, as on certain anniversaries of it, all of the UK goes on holiday.
• The birthday of Lev Borisovich Kamenev is actionable, as something that has been written about in his biography, and in discussions of his age relative to contemporaries.
• The birthday of Alicia's cat is not actionable, as the cat's been dead for two years, and even Alicia would struggle to remember it if she hadn't written it down.

Interesting

By "interesting", we don't mean "interesting to everyone", or "interesting to you". Rather, we seek information that is potentially interesting to, at least, some small but significant proportion of the world's population. For example:

• The date of the Battle of Hastings is interesting to people interested in 11th century history
• The time that King Harold was killed in said battle is interesting to slightly obsessed historians of the Norman Conquest
• The general diet of King Harold, as opposed to his contemporaries, is interesting to historians of 11th century nutrition.
• The time that King Harold had breakfast 183 days prior to said battle is interesting to no-one, even if King Harold had kept a meticulous diary which has been preserved to the present day.
  • However, the diary itself would be both actionable and interesting to certain nutritionists and many historians.
  • It is also possible that certain numerically-minded historians would be interested in King Harold's disposition on that day, noting the French defeated the English again exactly 384 years later in the Battle of Formigny, ending English occupation of France; also noting exactly 182 years after that, Sweden defeated the Holy Roman Empire in the Battle of Rain (a total of 566 years). Observing that October 14 is the 287th day of the year, one may note 566 is numerologically equivalent to 17, which is also numerologically equivalent to 287. Thus, a seemingly trivial breakfast on April 14 may be far more interesting than it appears at first glance.
    • This goes to show that nearly everything may be of interest to some people.

If someone says they find something interesting, then they probably do, but this is not an excuse to include idiosyncratic information that really is found interesting only by this one person.

One type of uninteresting information is that which is obvious. Note that what is obvious to one person may not be obvious to someone else. However, sometimes things really are too obvious for words, and we'd rather live without them. For example:

• Worcester, England is located on the Severn River - not obvious.
• Worcester, England contains houses, flats, streets, and shops - obvious.
• Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours of sleep a day - not obvious.
• Margaret Thatcher regularly breathed in and out, sometimes hundreds of times a day - obvious.