Suppose X is the most notable non-notable topic (assuming we can designate one non-notable topic as such)

Is X notable merely by being such? No – because to be notable, it isn’t enough to merely have a given property. It is necessary to have obtained attention from the world (“be deemed worthy of notice”) for having that property. And to have that evidenced by being written about substantively, in “reliable sources”.

So just having the property isn’t enough. On to the fallback case “…suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines…”

The problem here is, yes you could. But not for each and every topic, because there is a practical limit to conference calling, publicity generation, and interest the world is likely to pay, and ultimately time people and resources, that will limit your ability. Eventually and probably fairly quickly, you will find yourself hitting topics that are “the most notable non-notable” for which you will_not_ have been able to obtain world attention.

It all comes down to the fact that, unlike numbers, notability depends upon attention paid to a property, not merely having the property alone… and attention is limited and hard to obtain.

QED.

my name is Christian Bahls, i am member of MOGiS e.V.
The deletion of the MOGiS Article in the german wikipedia
lead to the discussion about relevancy in Germany.

By accident i have to admit that i am also Mathmatician
And i have to admit i loughed my head off

And you know what ..
.. we are actually doing the induction step of your proof
http://news.google.com/news?q=mogis%20wikipedia%20-mike
http://www.google.com/search?hl=de&q=mogis+wikipedia+-mike&btnG=Suche&lr=&aq=f&oq=
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Hei_ber/Mogis

yours
Christian Bahls

> Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?

Very clearly not. There is no self-referentiality in the notability guidelines, nothing to make this even close to being possibly ‘yes’.

> But suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines, and thus the answer to Question 2 would be “yes”.

Another commenter points out an ambiguity in the wording – is the conference and all the coverage on the Answer or on the paradox? If the latter, then the Answer still has not notability. If the former, then nothing objectionable has happened and there is no paradox.

Let us imagine that the Answer is the very interesting podesta political system used in medieval Italy (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Podest%C3%A0). If you convene a conference, generate lots of new coverage, new research papers, etc. then why wouldn’t WP cover podesta, especially if it was on the edge to begin with? I don’t see any issue at all there. Every notable idea or historical event or person was non-notable at some point.

Someone might object, ‘But this feels like “gaming” Wikipedia – cynically manipulating what it will and will not include – manufacturing Notability.’

But you could manufacture notability just as well by going to your local public space and shooting 30 people to death, but no one seriously objects to articles on Cho or Hasan. Manufacturing notability is what happens as time moves on; as the expression goes, ’shit happens’. (And besides, if you are devoting your resources to publicizing and researching one Answer, you are thereby not doing so all the other possible Answers.)

The ancient math history gold standard that qualified a topic as notable are the ancient texts that report one or more numeration, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, weights and measures or higher math foundation. Let the ancient texts speak for themselves, absent modern censors, or revisionists – who which history had taken a different course.

For example, Archimedes creation of calculus was born outside of the modern view of the ‘limit theorem’. Archimedes calculus did not primarily use the method of exhaustion (though fragments of the modern idea are reported his his finding the area/volume of a section of a parabola). Dijksterus documents in “Archimedes’, that Heiberg showed in 1906 that Archimedes converted an 1/4 geometic (infinite) series

A + A/4 + A/16 + A/64 + … + A/rn + …

(the modern method of exhaustion fragment)

to a (finite) Egyptian fraction series

A + A/4 + A/12

as used from 4,000 BCE to 1454 AD (within Fibonacci’s 1202 AD Liber Abaci – Europe’s arithmetic book for 252 years)..

Milo Gardner

Similarly a Wikipedia page of subjects not covered by Wikipedia would negate itself.

[MN: I can just pick an arbitrary one - say, lexicographic - and go with it, and start promoting The Answer. Whether or not the ordering was notable would be incidental to establishing the notability of The Answer.]

This argument is incorrect. The fact that a set is countable doesn’t guarantee that it has a “largest member”.

For instance, the set of rationals between 0 and 1 is countable, because we can list them all:
1/2
1/3
2/3
1/4
3/4
1/5
2/5
3/5
4/5
…

But there is no largest member in this set.

[MN: Point (b) is that there be a way to pick out a unique, i.e., well-defined, member from the set. It don't say anything about it being a maximum, or a minimum, or anything else like that, and it's not needed for the argument to go through. Of course, as I said above, it's not as amusing as "the most notable topic not notable enough to be in Wikipedia", but still leads to the same conclusion: everything's notable.]