Wikipedia Deletes Hundreds of Biographies Every Day for Not Being Notable Enough
The tragedy of losing your Wikipedia page
Every day, Wikipedia volunteers nominate and delete biographies of living people judged insufficiently notable, from a NASA analog astronaut to a nonprofit CEO. Editors say the standard is verifiability, not truth, and that coverage is not a prize. But those who lose a page describe real professional costs, and the deletion debates themselves can turn into strange, personal battles.
We're not really looking for what's true. We're looking for what's verifiable.
- internetter
> A Wikipedia editor can tag an article for deletion, and unless satisfactory edits are made within a certain timeframe, the page will disappear. Simeonovski didn’t do this—he referred the article for debate among his fellow editors.
Only in uncontroversial cases. In most cases, there is a debate where consensus is formed on if there is enough information about a person / topic to warrant an encyclopedia article. Wikipedia is struggling as is with the amount of content. An article cannot be written for every person under the son.
> Wikipedia pages, for better or worse, matter to people. To be included is a validation of a life.
There are billionares without wikipedia articles. There are people who have saved thousands of people from death without wikipedia articles. The only thing that matters in getting a wikipedia article is sufficient coverage by reputable 3rd party sources, such that there is enough material to write an accurate, informative, and neutral article. You should not derive your worth by this metric.
Furthermore, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:An_article_about_you...
- pwdisswordfishq
> Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?
How entitled must one be to assume they are owed a page in Wikipedia?
- cmiles8
It’s a not very well kept secret that many of these pages for less-than-notable people were created by the person themselves or their “publicist.”
- rwmj
https://web.archive.org/web/20261026155018/www.wired.com/sto...
- anonreplier
This took me down a rabbithole of randoms who have wikipedia pages. "Spacetrail" who created Dimoska's page also created one for Rajinder Singh Tumber who seems completely unremarkable but has somehow wangled an MBE, presumably due to his ability for self-promotion.