Forum:SH Archive/Our new species notability policy

So, we we now have a notability policy for species, thanks to the recent Mofference. Just to get the sour grapes out of the way, I think it's pretty lame that something like this was passed at a Mofference rather than brought to a wider CT; the choice of Mofference to pass this meant that there was no opportunity to debate this more carefully, as should have been the case with our first official notability policy, in my opinion. I really had wanted to participate in the Mofference specifically to voice my opinion about this part of the agenda, but an emergency stay in the hospital prevented me from doing so. C'est la vie. But it still sucks.

But now that my grousing is over, I wanted to bring up a potential issue with the proposal as passed. To wit, as worded, the proposal only really seems to work for sentient (or potentially semi-sentient) species. The opening line—"If an individual is of a unique and unnamed sentient species that does not appear elsewhere, that species should not receive an article; instead, the character's physical appearance should be described in the individual's article"—assumes that there is an article on the character, but we tend not to do this for non-sentient creatures.

There's some variation with this; for instance, Unidentified Endor arachnid is categorized as a species article, but it could easily be converted into a character article. The same could be said for Unidentified six-legged creature. However, something like Unidentified spiny Endor creature is written more about a species than a character.

So, my question is what should we do about non-sentient creatures for whom there is no character article to scoop up information we delete due to their being non-notable as species? Should we convert them all to character articles? ~ Savage  18:35, January 27, 2014 (UTC)