[ghaff]

>And information not captured in a verifiable primary source will never make it in

In theory. In general? I was just looking at an article where I have a lot of personal knowledge.

Is mostly True, as far as much of my first-hand knowledge can tell. And leave aside a couple of the random personal insertions that are definitely True if outside of all proportion to the rest of the article.

But there's one section in particular that goes into even more detail than I knew even as someone fairly in the depths of this particular thing. (But it's very plausible and consistent with what I do know.) It's certainly not something that's ever been written about publicly AFAIK and the actual references in the article are minimal.

Which comes back to that notability/verifiability/etc. are nice theories--and may even make sense in the abstract--but there's a huge amount of inconsistency depending upon whether someone has taken notice of an article or not. (And, in at least some cases, I'm often happy with people not looking too hard.)

[tptacek]

Which inconsistency is, of course, what you'd expect from an all-volunteer project.

[ghaff]

Sure. I'm also not sure that the fact that Wikipedia's rules often fall through the cracks is entirely a bad thing. You end up with some unverified information. You also end up with maybe somewhat unreliable information that would never have been verifiable. Even if I can't fully endorse this sort of informal breaking of the rules, I'm not really opposed to it either.