Arguments for the proposed criteria for people:
- demographic reasons (increase of population decreases the relative importance of individuals)
- a relative paucity of information about the less recent past (making the relatively little information that is known relatively more important)
- an increase in the volume of contemporary publishing (making it unrealistic to expect historical topics to receive the same level of coverage as modern topics of equal importance)
- BLPs can be problematic due to issues that are not relevant to biographies of those who died long ago
- POLITICIAN doesn't take into account the tendency towards increasing centralisation, such as merging sub-national courts into national courts with no (practical or significant) increase in the actual powers of the judges (eg merging the old palatine courts of chancery into the high court, because they had more or less the same jurisdiction as the chancery division of the high court)
- Criteria 3 of AUTHOR doesn't take into account the fact that book reviews did not exist before the 1660s: [1]. Nor does it allow for the overall number of published book reviews being lower at any point in the past than it is today.
- generally, contemporary standards of notability cannot be projected back into the distant past
The proposed criteria of "common sense" already exists in one SNG, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't apply to the others. James500 (talk) 21:21, 17 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This proposal will be brought to RfC as soon as possible. It may take a certain amount of time to write up a supporting statement (which I am preparing now and want to get right on the first attempt) due to the number of reasons why it is essential that this be adopted. The main criteria (common sense) is certain to be adopted as it is already a guideline. James500 (talk) 19:05, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]