https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
Here is why they claim to have them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Why_we_ha...
Honestly, looks pretty reasonable to me. Looks like its less to do with "we don't want less-known people to have wiki bios" and more to do with "many wiki bios of less-known people typically don't uphold the standards needed to create an entry."
I do agree they should be more lax on some of the rules... but I say that as someone that hardly uses wikipedia, so maybe not the best person to consult, lol.
That is a very good point. I assume this is why they have the rule then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
Besides, it's the right thing to do. There's a very real potential for harm by hosting authoritative-looking but false information about real people. Wikipedia can prevent that harm by refusing to host those articles.
What about the rest of the world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...
If Wikipedia ended up often having to say "we're going to delete this content because it isn't verifiable, even though its subject may well be notable enough for our current standards otherwise", I don't think that would be a problem in itself.
But I also think Wikipedia has historically mixed up discussion of notability and verifiability standards in a way that has been unhelpful to both.
Wiki is for its users, and that means as casual editors, not just the dedicated editors who think they own it. That means that the rules for casuals have to be quite relaxed in enforcement.
This individual has been active for more than 10 years. He's promoted himself as an world record holding programmer, a metaverse expert, a university professor, the owner of an academic cheating service, a politician, and more recently an honorary consul and knighted individual.
He created an article on a programming competition 10 years ago on Italian Wikipedia. The article was created specifically to promote himself as a record holder in the competition. He was actually a record holder for a period, but not in any notable sense.
He uploaded a couple of academic articles to Wiki Commons covering a school he'd created in Second Life. He also wrote a book on Second Life which he attempted to integrate into numerous articles on Italian Wikipedia in 2014.
He managed to score a position at an upstart online university in 2015. He created an article on Simple English Wikipedia and incorporated himself as faculty. He created numerous fake articles off Wikipedia about his new position to use as sources. Reports online suggest he lied about his academic credentials and was subsequently canned after a month.
He ran an academic cheating service which helped students circumvent anti-plagiarism tools for several years (~2016-2018). There are several English Wikipedia articles with histories littered by links to his LinkedIn articles promoting the service and links to the service itself.
He ran in the 2018 Italian elections through his own political party with his mother. I found on Wikipedia evidence of him promoting this party going back to 2015. He tried to create articles on the party numerous times, and he also integrated the party's website into several articles which were later removed. My favorite one was where he utilized an article about a plane crash to promote a "memorial service" by his party. There were a lot of unanswered questions about his candidacy at the time.
He most recently tried to recreate his own English Wikipedia article by claiming to be an honorary consul for Panama in the US and British Virgin Islands. This prevent the article from being deleted right away. He needed a source to support his claim, so he created a website.
He registered a .org domain. The naked domain redirected to the Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. He copied that site's look and feel to create a page about his being an honorary consul. This was also the source for him being a knight in the Order of Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
He also copied an MIT website under another newly registered domain to support his claim to graduate education. It contained a single article about him.
This doesn't include the multitude of websites that he runs attacking people and institutions who've "crossed him" in the past. He edits numerous Wikipedia articles to try and slant the tables against these people and organizations.
He's been blocked on Wikipedia numerous times. Counting the number of socks that I'm aware of the number is 20+, but that doesn't include his use of IP edits. They're usually on his home ISP, but he sometimes uses rented residential IPs.
It's mind blowing the depths this guy goes to promote himself.
Notability is held up as a core concern of Wikipedia mostly by editors who want to delete specific articles, and who measure the value of their contributions through deletion by the barnstars they're awarded for it. For the rest of the non-notable articles, it's like any other Wikipedia guideline - a point to discuss and iterate on, if anyone's even paying attention.
My current wikipedia pet peeve:
Session Private Messenger[0] is absent from Wikipedia's comparison of cross-platform instant messaging clients[1] because it doesn't have a wikipedia entry. Session does not have a Wikipedia entry, despite having a well-sourced draft[2] because "github, medium, app stores are not sources".
I note that github is cited throughout the Wikipedia entry for Signal messenger[3]. Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is available on the Apple App Store?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_i...
Because that’s a primary source which Wikipedia tries to avoid. Obviously this can get quite weird, but good luck arguing with a wiki rules lawyer fixated on that. People are often more reasonable than that though.
If I'm writing an article about you from scratch then I'd want to look for sources, to see if you're notable - etc. But if I was updating an existing article and just trying to find a source for your address it would seem easier to take it from your website than wait for a third party to write about it. At some point ideological purity gets in the way of practicality. And there's no need, you could easily tag first-party data so it could be audited and replaced.
If Wikipedia had an article about every start up company, every product, and every software application, it would be filled with unmaintainable / uncheckable marketing spam. (To an extent it already is.) Wikipedia’s goal is to be an encyclopedia, not a software project directory.
Note that there’s a somewhat different standard between establishing notability vs. verifying particular claims in article content. Primary sources can sometimes be used for the latter. But it’s also plausible that the Signal article doesn’t establish all of its claims to the satisfaction of Wikipedia guidelines.
The criteria are that the coverage is “significant” (i.e. more than just a throwaway mention) and made in “reliable sources” that are independent of the subject of the article. This certainly includes peer-reviewed papers. For examples of reliable sources, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOURCETYPES
I don’t understand what you are getting at with “... next to historic and outdated 20 yo material...”
* * *
Once notability for the main topic has been established, the criteria for validating specific claims is a bit looser. For example a company’s own website could be used to demonstrate the current version number of a piece of software, a press release (or even a tweet) could be quoted to describe the company’s first-party response to some event, an arxiv preprint from a tenured scientist or mathematician could be used to support some mathematical formula, a blog post by a living person could be used to validate their birthday or the name of their spouse, and the like.
(For example, in 2005 Google made up a brand new prize to award to Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson expressly for the purpose of padding out his O-1 visa application to move to the USA. Does that mean the O-1 visa requirements/criteria are bullshit? Maybe.)
(a) Wikipedia notability guidelines can certainly be gamed to some extent by motivated self-promoters who are willing to jump through hoops to place their pet topics in newspaper articles, research papers, published books, etc.
(b) Sometimes Wikipedia ends up rejecting topics that should be included based on a lack of sufficient third-party write-ups in secondary sources.
But Wikipedia still has to have some kind of guideline to prevent itself from being flooded with self-promotion spam, and the current notability guidelines and reliable source guidelines work better than many suggested alternatives.
you're conflating two different things. the sources required to establish notability are different than those than can be used to say something more mundane, like when something was released. it's a higher bar. a product's own website can be a source for basic things, but it can't be a source to establish that it's notable.
> Comment: github, medium, app stores are not sources. Not seeing any indication of notabilty, just an ad [Slywriter]
I think Sylwriter reached the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons. I also think it would have been polite to write a more substantive message considering the amount of work that clearly went into the draft.
Edit: I read the article more careful and I now think Sylwriter was wrong and didn't read the article carefully.
The article cites to articles published in NDTV Gadgets 360, itsfoss, MUO, Fossbytes, TWN Plugged, RestorePrivacy, and Cointelegraph. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia policy enough to say whether in this context these sources count. However, Sylwriter should obviously have addressed them. They're not "GitHub, medium", they're secondary sources in publications that are okay by the standards of software reviews and poor by the standards of something like the New York Times.
Saying the article fails due to only primary sources when it has secondary sources is flat wrong, though. Simply reading the list of references would have cleared this up. Despite volume I find that inexcusable. I'd expect a reviewer to at a minimum read the first few hundred words and then skip to the generated references list and skim for source type.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_(software)...
Which is to say, the optimal amount of inconsistency is not zero. How do we know whether they got the balance right?
More importantly people who bring it up aren't interested in finding out since they can use "inconsistent enforcement " as an argument for the rest of time
Wikipedia is a living document and so expect the entries to continue to evolve [0] Besides, editors work on whatever they think is worthwhile; Wikipedia is not compulsory [1]
> Notability is held up as a core concern of Wikipedia mostly by editors who want to delete specific articles, and who measure the value of their contributions through deletion by the barnstars they're awarded for it.
As someone who edits Wikipedia on a fairly regular basis, it is annoying to come up against such editors [2], but this pretty much is working as-designed unless someone's actively trying to game the system, which is not encouraged [3] and you can definitely call them out on it [4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BRICK_BY_BRICK
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VOLUNTEER
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOFUN
It's exhausting as a volunteer with limited time working on a narrow area to have drive-by administrative editors who don't contribute to the subject, and bots with broken or overzealous criteria, snipe one of a half-dozen similarly sourced articles on the same subject that I've contributed six months after the last edit, with no meaningful means of redress no matter how many times someone links WP:DR to me.
The end result isn't a better Wikipedia, it's one fewer contributor.
More articles of low notability means worse searchability and editing inherently. The issue as somebody who has fought to delete far more articles across knowledge bases than anybody I've met (also somebody who had ADDED an unusually high amount of articles), you have to fight for every inch, and reasonable people eventually people give up because they get nothing but abuse for their labours and just let things decay. Of course, this only makes it easier to berate anybody so unreasonable as to keep up the fight.
Look at the people who fought edit wars for notability over these articles, they are literally now in an article about "gender bias on wikipedia", what sane person would wilfully inflict such reputational damage on themselves? Did the people who added all the articles of men but never added articles of women end up in such an article? Honestly the person in the OP would be more useful deleting the articles of irrelevant men than adding those of under-represented women which addresses the exact same issue of gender bias, but then she would likely receive several times the hate. The neutrality of her edits would receive several times the scrutiny despite having the exact same agenda.
See the FAQ at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donna_Strickland
> Was this article previously deleted because Wikipedia editors thought that Strickland was not notable?
> No. One previous attempt to create this article, in 2014, was deleted because it was copyright infringement. In March 2018, an editor declined to publish a draft article on Strickland, but this draft was not deleted; it remained in existence until it was superseded by the current version of the article, created in October 2018. The reviewer's pro forma reason for declining included a link to our notability guidelines for biographies, but in a subsequent discussion most editors agreed that Strickland was notable before she won the Nobel Prize. The reviewer clarified that they agreed that Strickland was notable, but had declined to publish the draft because at the time it did not include any references to independent, reliable sources.
I don't love that criterion, because it just ends up upholding biases from other media. That's how you end up with situations like how the Gorn (a throwaway character that Captain Kirk encounters in Star Trek) has a more thorough Wikipedia article than many Nobel Prize winners.
I agree that there's a lot of chaff on wikipedia, but your complaint is immediately followed by a method to make the problem worse. One of the bigger problems I've observed when the (high?) bar isn't enforced is things like people writing their own articles for the sake of self promotion.
Look at how awful some of Wikipedia's "1000 most vital articles" are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles) and you'll get an idea for how neglected Wikipedia is. Most of these articles haven't seen significant content edits since 2010, when Wikipedia had far more editors.
if you wanted to create a wiki that included all the stuff you wished wikipedia hadn't deleted, you could. but that doesn't really solve the problem, because the problem isn't that there's nowhere on the internet to post information about topics you are interested in - the problem is that people want to use wikipedia's authority and importance to promote topics that they are interested in. posting that content on some other site that isn't wikipedia doesn't accomplish that goal.
if jessica wade didn't want her work to be subject to wikipedia's notability requirements, she could have made a blog and written a series of posts highlighting different female scientists.
I mean, I think that's the issue. Seems like you agree with Wikipedia that there's a minimum requirement for notoriety, but want it to be lower than it is: how low? What's the cutoff? How would you define that clearly and have volunteer editors enforce it consistently, so that everybody looks at it and says "that's just right"? It's easy to notice the problems with Wikipedia, but I think it's harder to solve them.
I can get original research anywhere on the internet.
Wikipedia is valuable precisely because I know it's a tertiary source that tries to cite only secondary sources and not primary ones. I want it to be an encyclopedia that separates the wheat from the chaff, that represents some level of consensus academic thought and cultural/historical notability. I don't want it to be the entire internet.
And important isn't really that subjective -- the notability guidelines are extremely extensive with lots of examples for each type of person (researcher, actor, etc.). Sure there will always be edge cases, but the guidelines really are quite thorough.
Wikipedia wants to document the notable things, it does not want to make notable the non-notable things.
Much like newspapers want to report the news, they don't want to be the news.
I hate one off article based on say just one news article or personal knowledge or something. It makes it impossible for someone to add anything or edit the article. It's very clear that the the person in the article wants to just add entries not maintain it for multiple years. Also as far as I can find, she didn't object to any deletion[0].
Basically I am sure she has good intentions, but optimising on number of pages created is not a good metric as all.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jesswade88 . She didn't object to any
She did object on at least one of those:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Those articles should be written by someone else.
Regardless, the barrier to entry seemed unnecessarily high at the time.
That might be impressive, but it doesn't prove that he's notable. Have there been articles about him or his work in newspapers, art magazine, etc? Have art critics commented on his work? If so, that could be used to establish notability, and be used as sources for an article about him.
I look at it this way: if I'm driving down the highway and see a giant bronze monument and I go to ask wikipedia about the artist, I'd just expect to find that information (regardless of how obscure they are).
Just some quick examples:
Texas A&M campus, there's a statue there honoring the lives lost in the bonfire collapse, wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A statue of Michael E. Debakey outside the DeBakey Museum and Library at Baylor College of Medicine... Wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A 27ft tall monument in the middle of Colorado Springs that millions of people pass a year, Wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A 22ft tall, 200ft monument outside NRG Park where the Houston Texans play, wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
To me its more a case of "general information" I'd want to learn vs "oh this person is famous enough" to learn about.
I suspect many Wikipedia editors believe exactly that. They just think they’re enforcing that low bar, but not too low. No matter where you make the cut off there’s going to be debates about things on the edges.
> Wade said that’s right, that’s the problem: they should be better known.
This is my biggest problem with Wikipedia, it sees itself too much as an encyclopedia, when it's clearly more than that. Wikipedia is already full of boring and random stubs, I don't see the obsession editors have with making sure that a person is "important enough" to have an article. I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously.
Important is fairly subjective, and you're limiting yourself to things people in the past have written about. Original research shouldn't be discouraged to the extent it is, as long as it is backed up with valid sources.