I think the biggest problem I have with the notability guidelines is that none of the editors (pedantic as they tend to be) understand what the word "guideline" means. Most of the AfD discussions center around WP:N. Yet notability is a scarily vague and personal criteria. In this case, the original deletion discussion appeared to be 100% in favor of keeping the articles in question with only Monsanto against. The only apparent question was WP:N and despite quite a bit of evidence demonstrating notability, the editor appeared to unilaterally delete the articles.
In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in at that moment, you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense.
So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone.
If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?
Apologies, it's terribly easy to drop into jargonland when discussing Wikipedia.
AfD is "Article for Deletion".
WP:N are the notability guidelines Wikipedians are supposed to use when deciding if something is notable enough to be included and to keep out one-off topics.
In other words, this demonstrates that the burden of proof, why an article must be included in AfD cases, is on the people who wish for it to be included. If you aren't personally monitoring thousands of articles that you may or may not be interested in at that moment, you may never even have a chance to participate in an AfD discussion! And if you don't participate, the article gets deleted (or even if you do participate, like in this case, the article gets deleted). The default outcome of the process is to delete, it's fundamentally a knowledge removal operation without any clear method for ensuring continued inclusion! Talk about a process that doesn't make any sense.
So in this particular case, a single individual, unable to recall these languages off the top of his head, flagged these articles for AfD, the discussion voted all to keep, he cited WP:N and BAM! they're all gone.
If this "process" as it were were applied across all of wikipedia (suppose every article in WP were flagged AfD) then we'd be left with only the most famous proper nouns that most people could be reasonably expected to know already as common knowledge! What's the point of WP then?