http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)

Within Wikipedia, notability is an inclusion criterion based on the encyclopedic suitability of an article topic. The topic of an article should be notable, or "worthy of notice"; that is, "significant, interesting, or unusual enough to deserve attention or to be recorded". Notable in the sense of being "famous", or "popular", although not irrelevant, is secondary.

So it's not all about being famous.

in which case it is clear that the topic asks why porn stars are more famous than scientists.

and that it is also clear that the topic asks why porn stars are considered more significant than scientists given the numerous noble achievements given to mankind by scientists.

let's take a step back for a second and see if we can re-read "noble achievements given to mankind" without snickering.

In short, whatsoever gets attention on wikipedia deserves attention by dint of it having gotten attention. that's the whole point, innit?

So we're really just complaining when we try to draw more attention to scientists. Just as we're complaining if we're irritated that pokemon trivia gets more lengthy treatment on Wikipedia than important historical battles/chemical reactions/poems.

I think this is rather ridiculous. We don't decide what goes into scholarly journals based on a public poll, I don't see why we should do that for an encyclopedia.

EDIT: If one accepts the premise that even wikipedia requires curation and cannot simply include all submitted articles, then it follows that one of the tasks of the editors is making value-judgments about what knowledge is interesting and important to wikipedia's readers. I assume the guidelines about notability, conflict-of-interest and whatnot are attempting to set forth policies that assist in making these value-judgments.

You appear to be arguing that the only basis for making this value-judgement is recognizability to a layperson. I'm having a hard time understanding why this is a suitable metric.

I doubt that having lots of information about porn stars will benefit wikipedia's readers. It might entertain them, but I don't think it has any scholarly benefits. At the same time, I don't see how removing information about scientists benefits wikipedia's readers. I can see that in some extreme cases having lots of articles about little-known scientists might clutter wikipedia. However, I don't see how holding articles about published scientists to a higher standard than articles about pornstars benefits either wikipedia or its readers.

One of those might be the most famous Dane known to people on HN in the sense that if they made an ordered list of all the famous people they know of and then went down the list checking nationalities, one of those would be the first Dane.

However, if you actually asked them to name the most famous Dane they can think of, I think there's a good chance none of those would be named. Until your post, I had no idea any of them were Danes. Most of those names are common in several countries, and I'd have guessed most of them were from Germany, Sweden, or Norway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viggo_Mortensen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klovn

This is hilarious too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_(character)

However, I'm unable to think of anyone from Argentina that is more famous than Maradonna even if I try to be as objective as possible, the only competition I can think of is Messi.

You can laugh all you want at Royals and Royal Weddings, but they still have a positive impact on international relations, which I'm pretty sure was their original use case 10 centuries ago.

Prince Frederik for Australians.

s/random stranger/random male stranger/