My reading of the relevant Wikiepedia rules/policies suggests to me that there is a fair amount of leeway in these decisions and I would have thought that a reasonable approach would be to err on the side of inclusion, not on the side of deletion.
they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons.
I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P
† upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.
When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.
This is spot on. I had to engage in a battle on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things.
What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count".
The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem.
There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one.
I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.