6 ms·

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

by 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.
    - JamesianP 4y ago
      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_biography_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...
      - duskwuff 4y ago
        It was definitely a CYA move at first, no argument there. 17 years later, though, it's held up surprisingly well.
- mjw1007 4y ago
  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.
  - jl6 4y ago
    What standard of notability would you propose?
    - mjw1007 4y ago
      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.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        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.
- rossmosley 4y ago
  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.
- hoseja 4y ago
  As in this case.
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.

by robswc 4y ago

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.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    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_biography_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biograp...
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      It was definitely a CYA move at first, no argument there. 17 years later, though, it's held up surprisingly well.
mjw1007 4y ago
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.
- jl6 4y ago
  What standard of notability would you propose?
  - mjw1007 4y ago
    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.
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      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.
rossmosley 4y ago
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.
hoseja 4y ago
As in this case.

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.