As far as whether I was making a joke or not, it is a bit of both. I understand that the wikipedia definition of the term notable means something that has been decided to be included in the encyclopedia, however in discussions over whether articles should be deleted, I have noticed that it seems very common for wikipedia members to give notability as the reason for deletion, which if notability merely means whether something has been decided to be suitable for the encylopedia, is then circular reasoning.
They use it as a proxy for the notability criteria laid out in [0] and the various more concrete notability criteria for various genres. I think that's all right. But it often comes down to people subjectively feeling one way or another about an article's notability and then applying the rules in a way that delivers the desired outcome.
