8 ms·

> However, not all of Wiki-world was happy with her. Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors

> However, not all of Wiki-world was happy with her. Several of her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most influential contributors and editors are called. She told TODAY.com that they said a handful of the women she wrote up were not all that well-known. > 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.

robswc 4y ago
Looks like these are their guidelines on notability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_notability_guideline 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_have_these_requirements 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.
- jl6 4y ago
  Lowering the standard of notability starts to create problems for the even more fundamental policy of verifiability. If articles are allowed without having even a couple of independent sources discussing the subject, it’s harder to weed out the self-promoters, spammers, and hoaxes.
  - robswc 4y ago
    >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.
    - richbell 4y ago
      Relevant story from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      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_living_persons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
      - leereeves 4y ago
        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.
        andsoitis 4y ago
        > In the US What about the rest of the world?
        duskwuff 4y ago
        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.
- trynewideas 4y ago
  The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them. Some articles deemed non-notable are rapidly deleted, some are flagged for improvement, some are moved to draftspace, some are put up for a request for deletion and pass or fail, some are ignored for years or decades. 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.
  - RunSet 4y ago
    > The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them. 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? [0] https://getsession.org https://getsession.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_instant_messaging_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_i... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
    - formerly_proven 4y ago
      > 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? 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.
- not_your_vase 4y ago
  Makes me remember Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize winning physicist, whose Wikipedia article was rejected multiple times, saying she was not notable enough to have one.
  - robswc 4y ago
    I think winning a Nobel Prize is certainly enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    This is a mischaracterization. The issue was lack of volunteer effort writing an adequate article, not failure of the subject to meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline. See the FAQ at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donna_Strickland 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.
- croes 4y ago
  If a pokemon gets an article on Wikipedia so should a real person
  - robswc 4y ago
    The sad fact of life is that pokemons will probably be more popular than many "notable" people. More famous than any of us, for certain, haha.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  >A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. 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.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    Nobel Prize winners are without question notable. The reason random pop culture stuff has more thorough articles is due to Wikipedia author interest and commitment of effort, not the notability criteria.
watashiato 4y ago
> 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. 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.
- concinds 4y ago
  Wikipedia is so huge that it's hard for editors to police effectively. All new articles are reviewed by one editor, but they'll likely be low-traffic enough that 90%+ of the page will be written by one person, and pages that are non-notable may survive for many years. Look at how awful some of Wikipedia's "1000 most vital articles" are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles 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.
mr_mitm 4y ago
Couldn't we somehow fork Wikipedia into a version that is a superset, containing many deleted pages as well?
- tptacek 4y ago
  You obviously could do exactly that. What upsets people about the way Wikipedia is run is that they know their "better" fork would attract no meaningful usage.
- notatoad 4y ago
  this is essentially what wikia is, but focused only on specific niches rather than all content that wikipedia doesn't want to include. 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.
karaterobot 4y ago
> I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously. 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.
crazygringo 4y ago
I disagree completely. 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.
lelanthran 4y ago
> 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. 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.
EamonnMR 4y ago
If you hit random on Wikipedia you usually get a stub for a random town or a random sports team of a random town.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jesswade88 . She didn't object to any
- leereeves 4y ago
  Why would she object to deletion on her own talk page instead of the deletion discussion? She did object on at least one of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Clarice_Phelps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
oldstrangers 4y ago
I can't get a wiki page about my father (https://eddhayes.com/ https://eddhayes.com/) and he's got 60+ monuments across the globe. Was rejected a decade ago or so for not being noteworthy. Fair enough.
- yreg 4y ago
  With all respect, I don't think one should create or edit articles about themselves or their loved ones, no matter how important they are. Those articles should be written by someone else.
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    I don't mean I personally did it, I just offered what I could for news articles at the time for a page that had been up and then got removed for not being noteworthy enough. And then I think the authors argued amongst themselves about what constituted relevancy. Regardless, the barrier to entry seemed unnecessarily high at the time.
- rchard2scout 4y ago
  >60+ monuments across the globe 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.
  - oldstrangers 4y ago
    I realize I'm biased, but considering the amount of extremely obscure people on Wikipedia it didn't seem like that much of a stretch. 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.
varenc 4y ago
> I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously. 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.
chaostheory 4y ago
This is exactly why I stopped contributing. I don’t think why an entry needs to be deleted if someone arbitrarily decides it’s not “notable” enough
rrwo 4y ago
Wikipedia will allow pages devoted to individual characters from Tolkein stories, but not pages about real people who have contributed something to science or culture.

robswc 4y ago

Looks like these are their guidelines on notability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_notability_guideline 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_have_these_requirements 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.

jl6 4y ago
Lowering the standard of notability starts to create problems for the even more fundamental policy of verifiability. If articles are allowed without having even a couple of independent sources discussing the subject, it’s harder to weed out the self-promoters, spammers, and hoaxes.
- robswc 4y ago
  >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.
  - richbell 4y ago
    Relevant story from earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    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_living_persons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
    - leereeves 4y ago
      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.
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        > In the US What about the rest of the world?
      - duskwuff 4y ago
        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.
trynewideas 4y ago
The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them. Some articles deemed non-notable are rapidly deleted, some are flagged for improvement, some are moved to draftspace, some are put up for a request for deletion and pass or fail, some are ignored for years or decades. 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.
- RunSet 4y ago
  > The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them. 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? [0] https://getsession.org https://getsession.org [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_instant_messaging_clients https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-platform_i... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    > 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? 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.
not_your_vase 4y ago
Makes me remember Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize winning physicist, whose Wikipedia article was rejected multiple times, saying she was not notable enough to have one.
- robswc 4y ago
  I think winning a Nobel Prize is certainly enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  This is a mischaracterization. The issue was lack of volunteer effort writing an adequate article, not failure of the subject to meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline. See the FAQ at the top of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donna_Strickland 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.
croes 4y ago
If a pokemon gets an article on Wikipedia so should a real person
- robswc 4y ago
  The sad fact of life is that pokemons will probably be more popular than many "notable" people. More famous than any of us, for certain, haha.
Rebelgecko 4y ago
>A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject. 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.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  Nobel Prize winners are without question notable. The reason random pop culture stuff has more thorough articles is due to Wikipedia author interest and commitment of effort, not the notability criteria.

watashiato 4y ago

> 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. 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.

concinds 4y ago
Wikipedia is so huge that it's hard for editors to police effectively. All new articles are reviewed by one editor, but they'll likely be low-traffic enough that 90%+ of the page will be written by one person, and pages that are non-notable may survive for many years. Look at how awful some of Wikipedia's "1000 most vital articles" are (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles 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.

mr_mitm 4y ago

Couldn't we somehow fork Wikipedia into a version that is a superset, containing many deleted pages as well?

tptacek 4y ago
You obviously could do exactly that. What upsets people about the way Wikipedia is run is that they know their "better" fork would attract no meaningful usage.
notatoad 4y ago
this is essentially what wikia is, but focused only on specific niches rather than all content that wikipedia doesn't want to include. 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.

karaterobot 4y ago

> I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously. 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.

crazygringo 4y ago

I disagree completely. 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.

lelanthran 4y ago

> 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. 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.

EamonnMR 4y ago

If you hit random on Wikipedia you usually get a stub for a random town or a random sports team of a random town.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

> 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jesswade88 . She didn't object to any

leereeves 4y ago
Why would she object to deletion on her own talk page instead of the deletion discussion? She did object on at least one of those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Clarice_Phelps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

oldstrangers 4y ago

I can't get a wiki page about my father (https://eddhayes.com/ https://eddhayes.com/) and he's got 60+ monuments across the globe. Was rejected a decade ago or so for not being noteworthy. Fair enough.

yreg 4y ago
With all respect, I don't think one should create or edit articles about themselves or their loved ones, no matter how important they are. Those articles should be written by someone else.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  I don't mean I personally did it, I just offered what I could for news articles at the time for a page that had been up and then got removed for not being noteworthy enough. And then I think the authors argued amongst themselves about what constituted relevancy. Regardless, the barrier to entry seemed unnecessarily high at the time.
rchard2scout 4y ago
>60+ monuments across the globe 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.
- oldstrangers 4y ago
  I realize I'm biased, but considering the amount of extremely obscure people on Wikipedia it didn't seem like that much of a stretch. 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.

varenc 4y ago

> I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously. 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.

chaostheory 4y ago

This is exactly why I stopped contributing. I don’t think why an entry needs to be deleted if someone arbitrarily decides it’s not “notable” enough

rrwo 4y ago

Wikipedia will allow pages devoted to individual characters from Tolkein stories, but not pages about real people who have contributed something to science or culture.