>it’s harder to weed out the self-promoters, spammers, and hoaxes

That is a very good point. I assume this is why they have the rule then.

Also because articles about people are inherently more sensitive than other topics. An article about a town that doesn't actually exist or a garage band that's never played a show is merely an annoyance; an article about a real person that makes false claims about them is a defamation lawsuit in the making. To protect the site from this, Wikipedia has stricter policies for articles about living people than most other topics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

In the US, section 230 protects Wikipedia from defamation lawsuits. A victim of defamation via Wikipedia would have to sue the people who wrote the page, and that's unlikely to be worth the trouble.

Whether Wikipedia is fully protected by Section 230 is unclear. While they do host user-generated content, they also exert a substantial amount of editorial control over it, which could potentially nullify those protections. I suspect we'll never know without an actual court case, and it's in Wikipedia's interest to avoid that happening. And Wikipedia has operations and staff outside the US, including in some countries with significantly stricter defamation laws (like the UK), so relying on Section 230 protections wouldn't be sufficient anyway.

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.

> In the US

What about the rest of the world?

I remember the hoax that led to that policy. I think it was as much about embarrassment and trying to improve the integrity of wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...

It was definitely a CYA move at first, no argument there. 17 years later, though, it's held up surprisingly well.

Relevant story from earlier this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063

So Wikipedia should enforce its standards of verifiability strictly, but there's no reason to use the standard of notability as a proxy for that.

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.

What standard of notability would you propose?

I think Wikipedia's current standard in this area is fine.

But I also think Wikipedia has historically mixed up discussion of notability and verifiability standards in a way that has been unhelpful to both.

To be the most useful you have to go a bit beyond the edges of what a reader will want, to avoid holes. That means you should have stubs up already about barely-notable people who are in the news. That provides a meeting spot with a talk page for people to discuss or build the actual article. If in a year the article didn't get any traction and the person is out of the news cycle, delete it.

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.

Let me tell you a story of a self-promoter from Italy.

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.

And just a few hours sgo, he published a detailed write-up of his exploits on HN. ;-)

He has the initiative, just needs to get better at taking credit for others' accomplishments and he could be famous.

As in this case.