Lowering notability to allow more entries will just lead to a flood of mediocre articles not backed by much, which wikipedia already has a problem with.
The end effect is new articles don't get the attention they need, existing articles will get less attention as a result of more articles to patrol overall -- I've already seen less popular subjects become targets of vandals or activists, sometimes its subtle perversions of facts; with only a couple page watchers, these are far more likely to pass under the radar.
Articles can go years with offensive or misleading info if not attended, which is fine for run if the mill articles, but not for pages about living people, where the content can affect their lives or employment.
I wanted to write a bit extra about wiki policy, less my opinion and more an interpretation of the current state of policy enforcement:
In theory wikipedia aims to be a mirror of the current times. As they say, if wikipedia was around in the 1500s it would say the sun revolves around the earth, according to notible sources at the time, like it or not.
A gender bias in wiki entries then in theory would also mirror biases in our current media, i.e, if news is only written about men scientists, then thats all there will be for notible sources. It would be more effective to petition news sources to write more comprehensively about women in science, which is the real problem, instead of just fighting policy on one website.
The end goal should be to fix the bias at the source, not lower wiki standards to fix a problem created elsewhere.
The end effect is new articles don't get the attention they need, existing articles will get less attention as a result of more articles to patrol overall -- I've already seen less popular subjects become targets of vandals or activists, sometimes its subtle perversions of facts; with only a couple page watchers, these are far more likely to pass under the radar.
Articles can go years with offensive or misleading info if not attended, which is fine for run if the mill articles, but not for pages about living people, where the content can affect their lives or employment.