3 ms·

I can only imagine this is related to PG‘s recent tweet about how the Wikipedia article on Jessica has “questionable notability” warning due to sexist nonsense.

tptacek 3y ago
Anybody in the world can put a notability tag on an article in Wikipedia. The notability tag is properly read as a "this article needs more sources and more claims of notability" call for help, not a "get this article off the site" argument. Livingston will have no trouble maintaining a Wikipedia article; she's had profiles written about her in mainstream sources. A big chunk of complaints about Wikipedia notability come from people who don't quite grok the dynamic of how biographical articles like these get added to WP. Usually, someone writes a stub article with few sources and no clear statement of what the person is notable for. Those are bad articles! They actually need the notability tag! That's how they turn into better articles!
- tobyjsullivan 3y ago
  Anyone who's seen an article covering a topic of personal interest removed due to "lack of notability" would be forgiven for assuming the bar is "important to an arbitrary few editors", because that is the bar. From the examples I've encountered over the years, once an article is deemed irrelevant, it is deleted permanently with little to no opportunity for recovery (unless some event makes the subject suddenly more noteworthy). The reality is the most active Wikipedia editors make great contributions to the world's knowledge, but aren't exactly the most representative sample of humanity.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Cite examples, so we can look at the deletion log and the AfD and make up our own minds.
- cubefox 3y ago
  I always found it a mix of amusing and annoying that my complaints about Wikipedia are usually self-defeating: "This article is bad! They should have ... okay, I should ... nevermind."
- bluepod4 3y ago
  Exactly. I left a similar comment.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  The typical Wikipedia complainant simply is a talker, not a doer. I have started Wikipedia pages, edited controversial ones (including the Derek Chauvin page), and fixed things very straightforwardly. I would have fixed this one, but someone was faster than me. My experience with this is quite simple: it is really fucking easy to do all these things but that 1% rule is real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule Most people cannot do things. They simply cannot. There's always a reason they can produce: "Oh it'll just get deleted", "oh I don't want to get into a fight", "oh the editors will delete me". You can see this because they cannot provide situations where this happens because they cannot try. They will Google to show "there is some evidence this is happening" and produce some newspaper article where the reporter has not tried it either. But the reality of the thing is that they cannot do it. The faculty it takes to see a problem and make it not a problem is not available to them. Presumably, at work they are told what to do and they just do it - execution agents incapable of autonomous operation. Of course pg cannot modify his wife's page. But I see it a lot.

tptacek 3y ago

Anybody in the world can put a notability tag on an article in Wikipedia. The notability tag is properly read as a "this article needs more sources and more claims of notability" call for help, not a "get this article off the site" argument. Livingston will have no trouble maintaining a Wikipedia article; she's had profiles written about her in mainstream sources. A big chunk of complaints about Wikipedia notability come from people who don't quite grok the dynamic of how biographical articles like these get added to WP. Usually, someone writes a stub article with few sources and no clear statement of what the person is notable for. Those are bad articles! They actually need the notability tag! That's how they turn into better articles!

tobyjsullivan 3y ago
Anyone who's seen an article covering a topic of personal interest removed due to "lack of notability" would be forgiven for assuming the bar is "important to an arbitrary few editors", because that is the bar. From the examples I've encountered over the years, once an article is deemed irrelevant, it is deleted permanently with little to no opportunity for recovery (unless some event makes the subject suddenly more noteworthy). The reality is the most active Wikipedia editors make great contributions to the world's knowledge, but aren't exactly the most representative sample of humanity.
- tptacek 3y ago
  Cite examples, so we can look at the deletion log and the AfD and make up our own minds.
cubefox 3y ago
I always found it a mix of amusing and annoying that my complaints about Wikipedia are usually self-defeating: "This article is bad! They should have ... okay, I should ... nevermind."
bluepod4 3y ago
Exactly. I left a similar comment.
renewiltord 3y ago
The typical Wikipedia complainant simply is a talker, not a doer. I have started Wikipedia pages, edited controversial ones (including the Derek Chauvin page), and fixed things very straightforwardly. I would have fixed this one, but someone was faster than me. My experience with this is quite simple: it is really fucking easy to do all these things but that 1% rule is real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule Most people cannot do things. They simply cannot. There's always a reason they can produce: "Oh it'll just get deleted", "oh I don't want to get into a fight", "oh the editors will delete me". You can see this because they cannot provide situations where this happens because they cannot try. They will Google to show "there is some evidence this is happening" and produce some newspaper article where the reporter has not tried it either. But the reality of the thing is that they cannot do it. The faculty it takes to see a problem and make it not a problem is not available to them. Presumably, at work they are told what to do and they just do it - execution agents incapable of autonomous operation. Of course pg cannot modify his wife's page. But I see it a lot.