A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
tedgioia.substack.comHonestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry? Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways?
There’s not a storage issue. Wikipedia can literally have billions of articles and still be easy to maintain.
There’s not really a quality issue. Wikipedia is known for not being 100% reliable. But moreover, they have tons of ways to denote “this article needs citations” and “this isn’t a reliable source”. If Wikipedia is concerned about quality, they can have “verified” and “contributed” articles, just like how distros have “stable” and “user-contributed / experimental”.
Spammers and useless content? This is an issue. But this guy is clearly not spam, the proof being any of his official works. I do agree that Wikipedia authors should remove “spammy” entries and entries on complete nobodies and random things, but you shouldn’t need to be in an Oxford journal to not be considered a “nobody”.
Even things which are famous in small towns and 1000-member groups should be on Wikipedia IMO, because most of the stuff is already on there is about as relevant to me or anyone else (which is to say, pretty irrelevant). If you want relevant content, that’s what the search tools and indexing are for.
Wikipedia is supposed to be “the grand encyclopedia” where you can find info on basically anything. There are already tons of Wikipedia articles on obscure people, places, and things. Way more obscure than this composer even if he isn’t truly well-known. Why does “relevance” even matter?
> Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways?
Think of it like code in an active open-source project. Someone needs to maintain the article: update it when house style changes, evaluate any new contributions to it as being valid or not, etc. Like code experiencing code-rot, a Wikipedia article rots if editors don't give it active attention.
This has exactly the implications you'd expect: it means that articles about things that don't change, are easier to keep around than are articles about things that might change; which are in turn easier to keep around than are articles about things that definitely will change.
Living people — where the article is basically living biography for them — are in that last category.
The "notability" requirement can be translated into editor-ese as a combination of 1. "how many people could we find who could contribute to this page", and 2. "how much demand is there for Wikipedia — rather than some other website — to do the work of keeping this."
Re: the first point about contribution, this is why Wikipedia doesn't let people be their own primary source — it's because, when that primary-source person eventually stops maintaining the page, who will then be able to take over the maintenance? If that's "nobody", then to prevent that, the page shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
Re: the second point about demand — the Pokemon Pikachu has its own Wikipedia page, because people expect Wikipedia specifically to have an article about Pikachu. Other Pokemon do not — because there's already Bulbapedia around to satisfy the demand for an encyclopedia with articles about Pokemon, and the pages from it are easily found in any search engine. If a different set of editors are willing to take on the maintenance burden for those articles in their own domain — and are doing a decent job of it — then why should Wikipedia's editors duplicate that effort?
> Re: the second point about demand — the Pokemon Pikachu has its own Wikipedia page, because people expect Wikipedia specifically to have an article about Pikachu. Other Pokemon do not — because there's already Bulbapedia around to satisfy the demand for an encyclopedia with articles about Pokemon, and the pages from it are easily found in any search engine. If a different set of editors are willing to take on the maintenance burden for those articles in their own domain — and are doing a decent job of it — then why should Wikipedia's editors duplicate that effort?
You've got the chronology here backwards IIRC - Bulbapedia exists because Wikipedia got rid of "non-notable" Pokemon.
Bulbapedia was launched in February 2005[1], while Wikipedia reached the consensus that "not all Pokémon are notable" in mid-2007[2].
[1] https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_test
Which brings us to, should wikipedia have more domain specific wikis? Why does everyone end up on fandom or some other random wiki site when wikipedia is already ad free, hosted worldwide and ain't going anywhere.
Wikipedia doesn't _have_ to be just a encyclopedic overview of topics, it should have dive ins as deep as you want if there are people willing to write it.
A wiki "is" its maintainers. Separate editors — separate wiki. Wikipedia stops where the interest of Wikipedia's editors in maintaining pages stops; which is usually where the interest of another, distinct group of editors in maintaining those pages starts.
That other set of editors could all just be Wikipedia editors, but then they'd have to play by Wikipedia's rules. They'd rather play by their own set of rules, and more importantly, have the ability to define their own rules. Autonomy. Sovereignty.
Now, in theory, there could be some "hierarchy of wikis" all maintained within one system, where different namespaces are maintained by different groups of editors (similar to e.g. Reddit with subreddit moderators) — but, because the goal would remain the creation of a single cohesively-presented encyclopedia, this would result in terrible inter-group conflicts about things that don't fall crisply into the magisterial domain of one group of editors or the other — e.g. rules for when a wiki page in one namespace, should link a topic of a wiki page in another namespace, and how that citation should be done.
(Imagine if editors in namespace A believed that a page in namespace B really should exist, and so kept linking to it, despite the editors of namespace B disagreeing; and the system hosting all of these constantly bubbling up the non-existent page to the attention of the editors in namespace B because it received new external links.)
The solution to this is decentralization. No hierarchy, no shared system, just reusable open-source software and federation through hypertext linkage entirely controlled by the origin. Which is exactly what you get when each wiki is its own website.
> Why does everyone end up on fandom
Fandom dot com is a commercial venture started by Jimmy Wales. Inferences are left as an exercise for the reader.
When it was Wikia, it was alright. It has evolved into something atrocious that I actively avoid.
Fandom has become incredibly scummy. I only try to use it on my PC where I have adblockers and a userscript to cut out all the BS they push, and even then it's not enough. They've now turned all searches into cross-wiki searches with absolutely no way to tell if something's on the wiki you're already on until you mouse over it. If I go to The Orville wiki and search for Moclans, it gives me that wiki's page on Moclans, but also pages on Moclans from the "Aliens Wiki", a wiki for some weird ironic cartoon drawn in MS Paint, and another vastly inferior The Orville wiki where the only text on the page is "The Moclans are an alien race in The Orville." All these pages look the same in the search box, and there's no way to turn off cross-wiki search (as far as I could see). I get that they gotta make money somehow, but you should not be able to make your site horrible to use while still dominating the market because you're the easiest product to use.
It was alright until you wanted to leave, suddenly you were banned and "no longer represented the community", and wikia employees had wide latitude in doing whatever they could to frustrate any attempt to migrate off of wikia.
Remember that Wikia/Fandom are co-owned by Jimbo Wales. Forcing things off Wikipedia and onto Fandom drives his revenue.
Write or maintain? Because anyone is willing to write almost anything, see: Twitter.
Maybe the people who wanted to write about Pokemon were tired of being debated about what pages, or paragraphs, of their output were "notable"?
It feels like you described what the plausible deniability is; or the ostensible excuse that could be used.
But does that actually describe reality?
Given how corrupt and petty Wikipedia's editors have become, the more complete and realistic reason might be that having a complex set of rules that allows some humans to pick and choose who makes it on Wikipedia gives people who would otherwise have little of it, some real world power.
And if you think humans aren't above basing their life activity over a petty bit of power, well, I've got some Reddit moderators to show you.
I mean, I wasn't trying to define notability; the question asked was "why does Wikipedia have notability requirements" — i.e. what stops them from just getting rid of the concept altogether, and keeping everything — and the answer to that is to look at the marginal OpEx of keeping a page around.
Think of it like code in an active open-source project. Someone needs to maintain the article
No, they don't, no more than Google Maps needs to "maintain" older versions of their imagery for access through Google Maps Timeline.
Curation should be directed towards informing the user and allowing them to make their own judgements regarding the content, not towards excluding content based on someone's completely-arbitrary opinion of "notability."
No matter how much hand-waving Wikipedia does on the subject, that's ultimately what notability comes down to: someone else's opinion.
> Re: the first point about contribution, this is why Wikipedia doesn't let people be their own primary source — it's because, when that primary-source person eventually stops maintaining the page, who will then be able to take over the maintenance?
It's also because people use having personal Wikipedia pages as a credentials boost, and they write puff pieces about themselves or their friends. If a person is notable, there will be multiple editors on their article, and the hope of the project is that multiple collaborators will reduce bias. If someone is not notable enough that people besides themselves and their friends would contribute to their page, there is room for substantially biased puff pieces. Most people take Wikipedia articles at face value, and don't delve into any of the sources cited, so that is a huge problem.
Wikipedia articles will always struggle with bias issues, but for the reasons you mention, there is no point in spending volunteer time verifying articles and removing bias when they're for people who aren't notable. That's why they just get removed.
But a village of 7 people in the middle of nowhere in Russia... that's notable enough to maintain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norinskaya
Or a random Kazakh football coach:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Finonchenko
Or a library in Scotland that's planning to close:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedburgh_Library
Wikipedia has been capricious for years about what can stay and what must go.
The nature in which Wikipedia seeks to make access limited to many and to dictate the relevance of subjects it covers kind of diminishes it's credibility in my opinion. e.g. "Pokeymon" has not done anything as an individual being, it's a fictional being, but somehow it had an individual entry even though many other beings with publications and published work do not qualify somehow because of a constantly changing measure of "notoriety".
By this I'm saying sure, you can have a dictionary with select words in it without problems... But when you label it as an OFFICIAL INFORMATION RESOURCE, it becomes subject to a higher level of scrutiny and objectivity that can't just hand pick what words are in it, there has to be a solid democratic aspect involved to managing the resource.
Democracy seems to be failing in many ways right now on public resources.
Regardless of all the accusations of incompetent, unfair, or inconsistent enforcement of their own policies (which are serious and deserve inspection and criticsm), I don't think Wikipedia's stated policies around notability are unreasonable. The policy that most directly addresses your comments is "Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no.... They explicitly reject arguments of the form "we should be able to have any page we want as long as storage costs aren't a problem."
>Honestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry?
The answer is Deletionists, people who are unable to contribute with actual knowledge and information, so they have decided that their contribution is destruction of knowledge and information.
The Wikipedia bureaucracy, as it exists, is unfortunately not equipped to handle these types of book burners…
Readers interested in these arguments can find more at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism.
I can't get on there myself with over 20 years of making and publishing music and being on radio etc... And for that same reason can't get verified on Twitter and many other sites I promote my music work on.
First of all, Wikipedia has banned all T-Mobile IPs from being able to even log in to my account... 10 years ago when I tried to post my biography there, they rejected it for lack of notability... Twitter also requires an entry to be published on Wikipedia for artists, now I could probably wait forever until someone still never writes one about me, or I could choose to pay a renowned publication to run a fluff piece on me like many other musicians do.
I am so tired of the manufactured gatekeeping nonsense that is required of me just to make music and be heard, no wonder why so many quit the business... ugh.
From your profile "A web design, promotions, branding, and PR group based in Washington DC http://www.winternett.com"
I don't want crap on wikipedia, thanks.
>I don't want crap on wikipedia, thanks.
Wow, that's not the company I was referring to...
The company I was referring to is RUFFANDTUFFRECORDINGS.COM
It's kind of amusing to think of this from the perspective that the requirement for a person to be eligible for a page on Wikifeet is they need to have a bio on IMDB, and that is really easy to get. A whole lot of people I know from primary school are there for appearances in student films. I could be on there since I was on a television game show in 1992, but no one has bothered to create an entry for it.
If you're not already there, perhaps you can try to get yourself an entry in allmusic.com, which presumably would warrant a Wikipedia entry. You're gonna need to get someone else to write the article for you, though. You're not supposed to create a Wikipedia page for yourself no matter who you are, which is stated here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Your_first_article#Things....
I just created my own site - https://walterbright.com/ - where I decide what goes on it and what doesn't.
Wikipedia isn't (or isn't intended to be) a platform for promotion.
That's not what I wrote. I said a Wikipedia entry is required for Twitter verification... Where we do promotion (On Twitter).
I'm surprised more ambitious people don't have "having an entry on Wikipedia" as a life goal.
It's def. not any sort of life goal. More like getting a driver's license, so that you can drive. Once you pass the test, the driver's test is no longer a concern (unless you change countries perhaps).
So Twitter requires you to have a Wikipedia page? It seems the problem is with Twitters policies, not with Wikipedias.
I think it has to do with verifiability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:V Essentially everything written has to be verifiable, and if a person doesn't have enough reliable sources talking about them, it isn't really possible to write a verifiable article. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GNG and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:RS
>Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways?
To prevent me having a Wikipedia page.
Pretty sure you have one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_spoofing ;-)
lol, not the person you responded to but very funny.
On serious note notable is relative in my opinion. There is also just the value for history wise. So being able to lookup a brief synopsis of someone who may only be notable in a small area or less well known niche still seems useful for an encyclopedia.
Damn you’re good
Anybody can already create their own web page or wiki following their own policies.
The reason people want their content on Wikipedia is because a Wikipedia page signal a certain notability compared to a random web page. So the inclusionists want to eat the cake and keep it too.
Wikipedia includes entries based on notability, but they have their own idea on notability. A friend of mine is a famous voice actor who has won not one but two CLIO awards. Wikipedia deleted the page I created for him on the basis that he was not notable. Another page I created was for the person who introduced deaf sign language to New Zealand. Deleted as she was not notable.
There are more than 19,000 entries for CLIO awards [0] from 62 countries yet only 18 Clio Awards juries comprised of industry leaders from across the globe awarded 13 Grand Clios in 2020/2021 [1]. The Global Advertising Agencies Market Size in 2022 was worth approx. $332.1 billion [2].
By comparison the Academy Awards give out Oscars in 24 categories [3] to nominees selected from only 9,921 members [4]. The Motion Picture Association released a new report on the international box office and home entertainment market showing that the industry reached $101 billion USD in 2019 [5].
Oscars are considered notable. CLIOs are not. It would appear that making art is notable (except in the sad case of Bruce Faulconer), while impacting an entire industry or contributing to marketing or education in a highly visibly recognized manner is not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clio_Awards
[2] https://www.ibisworld.com/global/market-size/global-advertis...
[3] https://www.britannica.com/art/Academy-Award
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Motion_Picture_Arts...
[5] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaescandon/2020/03/12/the-fil...
Wikipedia's notability requirements are enforced very haphazardly. Broadly, editors and admins can be split into two camps: inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything. The life of your new article entirely depends on who happens to stumble upon it.
I've had success appealing notability deletions in the past, but it was a pain in the ass, especially after I just spent hours researching, sourcing, writing, referencing, and proofing the article. I never made a new article again after that.
Sadly, some of the admins there are power tripping idiots who will also use random loopholes to forbid edits that don't reflect their own ideologies, often in direct contrast to Wikipedia's own guidelines.
Like any bureaucracy, it has become a cabal of aristocrats who are in it for the power and control. Regular lowly editors generally don't have much recourse. It made me gave up on editing Wikipedia. Became an editor in 2004 and the climate has changed dramatically since then, from "newbies welcome, please edit" to "this is my private library, don't touch anything!"
>inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything
That's probably a bit B&W but a lot of people tend towards one side or the other. Part of it too also relates to the availability of secondary sources which are far more available for some domains than others. Even a fairly minor politician or entertainer has probably had quite a bit written about them by third parties. A senior executive even at a large global company? Very possibly not--especially if they pre-dated the internet.
I didn't make it up, but I did get the terms slightly wrong. It's "inclusionists" vs "deletionists" (not exclusionists).
There's literally a Wikipedia page about it (how notable is THAT): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
It's a stupid debate to even be having. IMO only. Clearly I fall into the former camp.
I know you didn't make things up and I didn't see correcting the terminology to be worthwhile. But most people don't think simply everything makes a worthwhile article while, at the same time, I for one generally don't think articles should be deleted even if they're a bit thin on detail and notability so long as they're reasonably sourced.
Maybe it's like politics, where given only two choices, people will just gravitate towards the extremes over time and become hyperpolarized?
I wish there was a sane third way. Like instead of "Speedy delete" (why the hell is that EVER necessary), maybe a friendly auto-merge suggestion ("Hey, thanks for your contribution! This article may not be notable enough to stand on its own, but your addition would be a very valuable addition as a new section of this other existing article. Mind if we put it there instead?") or something like that.
When someone spent hours creating something as a volunteer, they shouldn't ever be met with a choice of "Either convince our bureaucracy in the next few days that this is important, or you will lose all your work." That's an insanely hostile policy towards new editors.
Often its related to people not finding sources when they start articles, if you do detailed research first rather than posting a stub survival rates are higher. However thats often not how articles come about.
I sourced an article from 5-6 major news sources and it was nominated for deletion within hours. It ultimately survived appeals but why the hell did I have to waste my time on that.
I think that's why I'm skeptical of the notability requirements. I know plenty of colleagues with Wikipedia pages where the notability aspect is sort of suspect, at least relative to many others I know. Sometimes it seems intuitive that someone would have a page, but other times it's just another form of marketing and SEO.
In my opinion, notability better be clearly defined with a high bar, akin to encyclopedias of old, or not be used as a criterion at all.
Most people would expect there to be a table on the "Clio Awards" Wikipedia page that lists award winners. I don't think anyone would object if such a table was added to the page; just nobody has done it yet.
But there is a difference between having someone's name listed in a table on a page in Wikipedia, and that person needing an entire Wikipedia article about them.
If there's only one notable fact about someone, then that fact is data, and is best recorded together with other data of the same shape, to put it in the context of its meaning.
It's only when there are many distinct notable facts about someone, all of different shapes, where the best way to connect all those facts together is in carefully-formatted prose, that the right way to record that data becomes "a distinct Wikipedia page for that topic."
I like it. What can make a name on that list notable above other names is the plethora of other awards they may have also made - in advertising it would not just be ClIO, but IBA, ADDY, Hatch, New York International, Sunny, Silver Microphone, Mobius, RAC, London International, ANDY, EFFIE, The One Show, not to mention regional awards. A multidimensional matrix of such award winners would indicate true notability. Other factors might also include the notability of the campaign they created - e.g. the famous 1984 Apple Chiat Day commercial [0] - or the top advertising agency revenues.
Wikipedia's notability guideline does not pass judgement on the importance of Oscars or "CLIOs," both of which are notable and have their own pages.
Wikipedia's guideline for the notability of voice actors is:[1]
> 1. Has had significant roles in multiple notable films, television shows, stage performances, or other productions; or
> 2. Has made unique, prolific or innovative contributions to a field of entertainment.
This can be difficult to define. I'd suggest you instead follow the guideline of notability for people generally, which is:[2]
> A person is presumed to be notable if they have received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.
I'm always sorry to hear about someone that has gotten frustrated editing Wikipedia. Even though I'd discourage it as a conflict of interest, editors have successfully created articles for friends by simply citing reliable secondary sources that cover them. I'd suggest you give it another try if such sources exist and reach out in the Teahouse[3] if you need help.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)
The problem isn't with the editors, but admins who spuriously make these judgment calls. It takes hours to create a new article and seconds to delete it. Not going to spend hours more in the silly appeals process.
The bar on deletion should be as high or higher than the bar on creation (spam aside, of course) or you're just going to keep losing editors. Nobody has time to play these stupid games with the juvenile admins.
> The problem isn't with the editors, but admins who spuriously make these judgment calls.
Deletion decisions are made by editors, not admins. See, for example, the decision referenced by the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
> It takes hours to create a new article and seconds to delete it.
I think the "seconds to delete it" process you're describing is PROD[1], which is for "non-controversial" deletions and there's no appeals process—it can be added back with no justification at any time if any editor disagrees with the deletion. The full deletion process that takes time to appeal is "Articles for Deletion,"[2] through which articles are deleted only through 7 days of consensus-building. This is the process "Bruce Faulconer" went through.
I know it's confusing, and often really frustrating. I'd encourage you to try contesting your PROD deletion if you're willing to give it another try, because it really will bring the article back instantly. It can be difficult for new editors, but users of this forum are a bit better than the average person at source editing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Can I just say... no thanks? I've gone through that process and successfully appealed a deletion before, but it's a dumb policy to begin with. I'm already volunteering my time to create articles for a supposedly open encyclopedia. I'm not going to waste my time arguing with your bureaucrats about whether it's noteworthy enough.
Either Wikipedia culturally decides in favor of openness or you just drive away editors. No ifs and buts about it. Its bureaucracy sucks and has gotten worse over time.
You speak for a lot of people.
That's the problem right there. Advertising is not even included. The number one employer of voice actors (advertisements) and they're not even included in Wikipedia's guideline for the notability of voice actors. I suggest a major revision in that Wikipedia guideline.
> significant roles in multiple notable films, television shows, stage performances, or other productions
- this shows the Wikipedia bias against commercial enterprise and success.
The voice actor who was not "notable" only won over 700 awards, including most of the BIG awards – from Clio, IBA, ADDY, Hatch, New York International, Sunny, Silver Microphone, Mobius, RAC, London International, ANDY, EFFIE, The One Show, and hundreds of regional awards.
Wikipedia serves the public, and its notability heuristic is demand-driven. It doesn't matter how famous someone is within their own domain, if a member of the public outside of that domain would never have reason to look that person up, and therefore would get no marginal value out of Wikipedia having that page.
Personally, I don't know the name of a single advertising voice actor. Nor would anyone even three steps removed within my social circle. I suspect nobody would, save for people in the advertising industry. Ads don't have credits rolls; there's no distinctive visual to recognize voice-actors by, like there is for pitch-men; and voice actors even often sell themselves on their ability to imitate popular ad voices, so "that voice" isn't necessarily just one person. The dynamics of the ad audio industry are stacked against building public recognition.
This is the perfect use-case for a domain-specific wiki about advertisements (which tbh would be a really good idea for several reasons; there isn't much centralized effort currently to do presevation/cataloguing/history on ad media.)
> Wikipedia serves the public, and its notability heuristic is demand-driven.
This sentence seems to be incompatible with itself.
> the public
This constitutes all public groups, including the advertising industry.
> its notability heuristic is demand-driven
Driven by who? The editors at Wikipedia? Depending on which domain they reside in, they may have a very skewed perception of what the demand in a particular area is. Donald Knuth is certainly a notable person in computing, but if I ask any of my non-CS friends (and even several CS friends) whether they would consider him notable, most would respond that they don't even know the man.
So it's hard for me to buy this argument since there are certain domains with their own experts and notable figures that are relatively, if not completely, unknown in tangential domains.
> This constitutes all public groups, including the advertising industry.
You're making a useless semiotic distinction. The default English-language connotation of the words "the public" is to refer to "lay-people; civilians; people with a non-vocational interest in a subject." As in, Wikipedia is not an academic publication, nor is it an industrial publication, nor is it an esoteric publication. When such interests are incompatible with the interests of people outside of those groups, Wikipedia chooses the interests of the people outside of the niche ("the public") over the interests of the people in the niche. Niches can go make their own websites. Wikipedia is for the average human being — one who isn't thinking "in" the context of a domain, but rather in the context of "common knowledge." One who can't just take a step back and search for "[domain] wiki" and then use that, because they wouldn't know what to plug in for the [domain] part.
See also: the job of a dictionary in defining words, vs. the job of an academic or industrial or esoteric text in defining jargon terms.
> Driven by who? The editors at Wikipedia?
Like I said — demand. As in, analytics data of what users are trying to look up — Google Analytics traffic for "[topic] wikipedia"; things typed into Wikipedia's own search box; etc. The aggregate measure of humanity's expectation of a particular Wikipedia article existing; and the generalization of that into an expectation on whether Wikipedia will cover particular classes of topics.
> Like I said — demand. As in, analytics data of what users are trying to look up — Google Analytics traffic for "[topic] wikipedia"; things typed into Wikipedia's own search box; etc
Yeah, no. That's literally never cited as a reason to keep or delete a page.
I disagree. Information today is a unified field across all domains - wikipedia has done better than most at addressing that - you may search for something thinking of it in one domain only to find it relevant in another domain. A domain-specific wiki would not deliver that. The first thought that comes to mind is millions of (public) entrepreneurs who in search of a business / domain / trademark name invariably include in their search a peek on Wikipedia. Such searches cross-fertilize so much creativity.
And I also disagree. I'll bet you know James Earl Jones not just as Darth Vader but also because of his instantly recognized voice. In the past 30 days, commercials featuring James Earl Jones have had 28,635 airings. [0]
> The dynamics of the ad audio industry are stacked against building public recognition
While that is true, the opposite is equally true. Advertisers pay top dollar for instantly recognized voices, which are countless in number.
[0] https://www.ispot.tv/topic/actor-actress/kes/james-earl-jone...
> While that is true, the opposite is equally true. Advertisers pay top dollar for instantly recognized voices, which are countless in number.
People recognize the voice, but they don't put a name to it. And that's the thing about Wikipedia, or the Internet in general: you need a textual handle onto something to be able to find it. Even if I recognize a voice actor, I can't search them "by their voice"; I have to figure out how to name something they appeared in, and then search for that.
And advertisements don't have (viewer-visible) names either! So how do I even search for the ad, other than by struggling to describe what happened in it? (This is much of why commercials are "lost media": there's no explicit name to use as a Schelling point to gather people onto the same forum post looking for it.)
Disagree completely, with respect. Suppose you hear someone with an exceptional voice on a commercial for Toyota or whatever. Why wouldn’t you want to find it on Wikipedia even if it’s the only commercial that person that has ever done it? You may not know about the existence of specialized wikis.
First: Thank you to take the time to write these Wiki pages, especially about deaf sign language in NZ. Maybe you can repost and HN can do some "Internet battle" to keep that page alive? It would be an interesting "Internet fight".
Regarding bizarre pages that remain (but yours does not): a daily cloud -- yes, read that right... a cloud(!) -- has its own Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_(cloud)
Sounds like The Clio Awards need to get the word out
Talk to anybody in advertising, marketing, radio and television ... believe me they know what a CLIO is (and get paid accordingly). There are so many industry specialties now, that to be a dominant player in one may render you virtually unknown in all others.
that, and ads get a bad rap, but damn does it bring in the $$$
Plenty of comments on here suggesting WP relaxing/removing notability requirements: the problem is deeper.
WP could retain the exact notability requirements they currently have, as written, and still vastly improve the situation from the current mess. As it stands:
- mentions of any thing or person without a pre-existing article (by extension meeting notability requirements) are quickly deleted by fans of the frequently referenced "Write the Article First" essay[0]. While this essay is clearly labelled as an opinion piece, not policy, that opinion is staunchly defended by people with more time on their hands than you do.
- Any effort to follow the essay's advice and actually create a new article is quickly curbed: despite the notability requirements policies containing detailed sections on the benefits of "stubs" as prompts to grow useful article content, newly minted articles are summarily deleted if they are not perfect on first draft (and extremely comprehensively referenced).
When I first started contributing to Wikipedia almost 2 decades ago, these articles and similar debates between cohorts of "deletionists", etc. certainly existed, but what looks to have happened over the years is that the most progressive of those cohorts left, probably tired of constantly grappling with the hostilities of those with seemingly nothing better to do than to pour all of their hours into making Wikipedia their staunchly defended castle.
Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Write_the_article_...
> Becoming a new contributor to Wikipedia today involves a barrier to entry only zealots will bother to spend time overcoming.
The current editors and admins will die someday. Who will replace them? If only the worst kind of people bother making the effort to become the next editors and admins, then Wikipedia will decline in quality and eventually die and be replaced by other sources, like fandom.
I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.
This comment would've been mostly* the case a number of years ago - and describes a sane, measured approach to editorial control.
It has changed. There are users with scripts running to detect any additions that don't fit their model, no matter how uncontroversial. It's become difficult to contribute even on the most boring of topics.
* I say "mostly" because the funny thing about controversial topics is that it's often the contributors (rather than "deleters") that possess the greater amount of persistence in pushing the content they want added and kept. So very politically loaded subjects will suffer from the opposite problem, resulting in sprawling trees of linked articles on a subject, each a huge bulk of prose wrestled through numerous talk page threads of PoV objections.
It's the normal/mundane stuff that gets summarily deleted and forgotten about forever.
In other words, shithead humans took over, took control, and made sure it works like every other dull shithead archaic human organization in history. And the deletionists can say they aren't because there's no such thing, because WP was never "meant" to be that, it was always "meant" to be this, this way is the only one feasible, and we've always been at war with Eastasia.
Victors rewrite history, and now the article about it too.
I probably will side with Wikipedia this time.
As mentioned in the discussion page [1], there doesn't seem to have any coverage from mass media about him, the only opponent in the discussion lists a bunch of sources/references that are either database-type websites, attendance lists, or product credit. These unfortunately don't really count, any professionals would have such things to a degree.
Also it looks like he self-edited the page [2]. This isn't strictly prohibited AFAIK, but it will raise self-promotion [3] red flag and obviously there were hardly any references in his editing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&d...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
The idea of an encyclopaedia that only includes topics with significant mass media coverage is both incredibly crass and extremely depressing.
If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.
> an encyclopaedia that ..
Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.
Because it is a much tighter “standard” than it needs to be given the constraints.
It is depressing to think of all the effort that people put into writing articles that no one can ever benefit from, knowing there’s no good reason for their work to be wasted in this way.
Maybe they shouldnt write these articles on Wikipedia then? Make your own website or wiki and nobody is going to delete it.
Alternatively, critique threads like this and overall community discussions might eventually lead to a change of policy.
They also might not, but it's both a lot less work than your suggestion, and if succesful would lead to a better overall outcome.
So the problem is it is easier to edit wikipedia than creating ones own page or wiki? In that case, this should be adressed by better tools instead of convincing wikipedia to accept anything.
Perhaps! I also believe Wikipedia would be a better encyclopaedia and a more useful resource if it relaxed the notability requirements.
But it’s true that in the absence of that, the alternative is indeed to create a page on a different wiki/web publishing platform or one’s own website, or even to create another wiki, yes, and improving the tooling for that would also be great, of course.
Maybe it’d even be better if we used Wikipedia for less and brought the whole web closer to its original vision.
That diff in [2] is pretty egregious, and given the timing seems to be exactly what sparked the controversy. I think regardless of one's opinion on the outcome here, it's very odd that the author doesn't mention that Bruce Faulconer made a large edit to his own Wikipedia 19 days ago.
FWIW I personally am in the camp that Bruce Faulconer is probably sufficiently recognizable that a small stub article is justified and better than the redirect they added. However, this article skips over a lot of the story, possible disingenuously so.
OTOH, similarly small articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Godfree are all over wikipedia, the backlash seems completely unjustified.
You know what else isn't happy-times? When Wikipedia editors are trying to maintain things one way or another, and someone disagrees with what they've done, so they go off and write an article about how these terrible trolls have so heinously decided to efface such a luminary of accomplishment, et cetera.
Look! I'm going to promote a rather dull controversy to an online magazine and the front page of Hacker News! I'm 100% confident that this process will effect justice and result in only 100% positive and desirable contributions to Wikipedia! cough
Pedantically:
"In another bizarre case, an editor at Wikipedia told Philip Roth, “one of the most awarded American authors of his generation” (according to Wikipedia) that he was not a reliable source on the subject of Philip Roth."
Philip Roth is not an authoritative source on Philip Roth. I would have thought that was obvious.
Some mistake or miscommunication happened there, as Wikipedia does have a policy that people can be cited for information about themselves, the policy is called SELFSOURCE. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SELFSOURCE
Perhaps the issue was that Philip Roth was unable to sufficiently demonstrate his identity? Of course, Wikipedia can't take a random editor's word when they say "I am this person and this is the truth", then anyone could say anything. There has to be some citation, for example I've seen someone cite a tweet for simple biographical information (e.g. "today is my birthday").
How does laundering the info through The New Yorker make it authoritative? Any putative fact checking for the article itself would necessarily entail asking him "Hey Phil, that article you just wrote for us about the inspiration for your best-selling, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel - was that true or were you just having a giggle?"
Philip Roth was the authoritative source on Philip Roth. In fact, he wrote a whole book about him called The Facts.
Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. It's broken on every conceivable level, and yet people stubbornly cling to the myth that was formed around it circa 2005.
Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.
All models are broken, some are useful... Wikipedia works really, really well at specific points of leverage. It can change over time but the most likely-successful change will still center on building from leverage points outward.
> It's broken on every conceivable level
And yet it's still really good.
People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.
As many problems as Wikipedia has, and it surely has them, it's amazing how useful it remains despite those problems, and it's the only thing we have like it.
Stack Overflow is similar: you can make it look pretty bad case by case, yet it's an unchallenged best of breed despite its warts.
Maybe there's no perfect way to run these massive operations just like there is no clean, pretty answer to "should this article exist?" no matter where you set the bar.
> Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale.
"Decentralized" <> "unmoderated", "without content standards", or "without editors". Is there a more decentralized knowledge resource of general significance? Hosting happens to be centralized, only because nobody else cares enough to rehost it themselves (which the license allows you to do).
It is things like this that has reduced the usefulness of wikipedia for me personally. I wasn't aware of the whole "notability deletionists" before I tried to look up the Rockstar programming language when discussing esoteric programming languages a while back. I knew that there was a entry there it was a nice short introduction to it but it was deleted by these people. In one way it is piece of "programmer culture" that was removed but at the other hand it is an esoteric programming language so it might not be "notable" almost by definition.
This article highlights the slippery slope of it. It is one thing to remove the esoteric language that nobody is seriously using but has a little cultural significance except for a small number of programmer nerds like myself. This composer is actually notable in comparison. Who gets to decide notability? What is next? Are we going to be removing lore from small ethnic groups because there isn't some academic reference to it and someone dutifully transcribed oral tradition and translated a language which only a few speak... No not notable...
Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway couldn't Wikipedia relax their notability requirements? I understood why they didn't want anybody to create a marketing page for themselves ten years ago, but I don't understand the rational now. The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person.
> The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person.
That is very explicitly not a goal of Wikipedia. Of course you're free to disagree with what Wikipedia ought to be, but they're at least fairly clear and explicit about their own goals.
> Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway
Can you expand on this? I wasn't aware Google penalized Wikipedia now.
Why?
Just a guess, but probably because Wikipedia does not contain AdSense, so there is no money in putting it to the search results.
No one would officially admit this, of course, but whenever I see that Google prioritizes X over Y, X is usually a type of thing more likely to contain AdSense than Y.
Wikipedia actually seems like a good replacement for personal "websites" in the social media era. I'd love to see the wikimedia social network
Not sure if this has changed, but I wish there was a way to kind of dull the downside-edge of this kind of outcome. For example maybe there's another place the person's info can go that's not so obviously a trash can, and ideally even still a useful or interesting place.
It ought to be possible, IMO. And I'll add that noteworthiness is a real cringe of a model in a lot of ways.
Personally I saw the downsides of this first hand back in the early 2000s, when I created a page for a software developer. It didn't seem right to put their information, much of which was interesting and relevant, but which wasn't related to the software, on the software's page.
So anyway, their page was deleted with the note that his info should probably just go on that one app's page. A really shallow/easy suggestion especially given that it had already been considered and didn't make sense in various ways.
And then I realized: This whole thing has created extra pain for someone, who for years had a Wikipedia page, and who now has had it deleted. None of which was their choice, but all of which started with intentions to inform and build on a useful corpus of knowledge.
So, is that pain-side really, really necessary? I think such a process can be done better.
Wikipedia commingles the “facts” with the organization of those facts. What Wikipedia really is, is that organizational structure. Whether a developer has their own page, or is mentioned on the page of a product they created, is irrelevant in that both views acknowledge the same facts: the developer exists and the product exists and these things are related in that the developer created it.
It would be interesting if the database of facts driving Wikipedia were available to all, and Wikipedia is recognized as providing one of potentially many ways to organize/publish that database for human reading. In other words, if I want to add information about a composer and her composition to the database I can do so, and if Wikipedia chooses only to publish the composition but not the composer, that is entirely their decision.
Wikipedia is a joke nowadays. I made a small correction on the ARM Cortex-M page (the listed instructions available in ARMv8-M base were wrong), I cited the relevant ARM document in the change. Nope, got reverted back to the wrong thing... Pretty sure I know this architecture approximately 1000% better than the joker who reverted this, but OK, whatever, let everyone have the wrong info. I gave up.
I just happened to notice your edit on the Cortex-M page when correcting a typo. As far as I can tell, it doesn't look like your edit was reverted. All of your changes are still present on the current version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type...
That was a second attempt a few years later when I decided to try again. First time was while not logged in.
Reminds me of a few months back when I tried to link Amy Winehouse's "Mr. Magic" to the great original Grover Washington piece of the same name. Same name, same music, some Wikipedia support in other places, though not extensive. Both on Youtube, takes seconds to confirm.
Some pedanto reverts it every time I tried. Says "it's not in the booklet" (of the CD). Believe the thinking is that reality is not good enough, it must be confirmed by an authority. A disturbing enough idea in itself.
The author is calling everyone who doesn't agree with him about Faulconer's notability a "troll" (and more times than one in the article).
>> In the spirit of Wikipedia procedures and reliable source documents, I want to add a few endnotes to this article.
>> TROLLS (Par. 3): Here’s my conversation with Faulconer on the use of this word:
>> Ted: People may question the suitability of the word trolls here—some of these trolls are Wikipedia editors >> Bruce: When they act in this way, they behave like trolls. So it’s a fair word. >> Ted: Yes, that’s my considered judgment too.
That's not a "considered judgement". That's just a flame. Very disappointing.
It’s a fun, relevant metaphor. Some folks live under a bridge and have nothing to do but to harass travelers. Trolls don’t own the bridge and they certainly shouldn’t be demanding tolls and taxes. But their position has stunted their minds and twisted their hearts.
They’ve spent too much time wallowing in the unreal realm of the internet; they fear the light of day. If people were to shine a light on them, they’d die of embarrassment.
There is a redirecting Wikipedia page for Bruce Faulconer [0]
And there is a link from the Dragon Ball Z page where its music is discussed to the Bruce Faulconer page (which existed for 15 years, but no longer does), but that page then redirects back to the Dragon Ball Z page. Seems pretty dumb.
Some factor needs to determine what the content of page on wikipedia ends up being. Since "anyone can edit" (credentials are not used as a filter), the content is determined by whoever is most persistent. There are also various processes in place to ensure that content is verifiably correct, and wikipedia largely succeeds in that regard. However, basically everything else, including what information is included, and what spin is put on that information, is decided by the wikipedia editors. They succeed in this regard by being willing to spend the most amount of time camping pages, reverting any change they disagree with, and forming cabals of editors willing to stand up for one another when an editing war emerges.
Given wikipedia's funding, it ought to be possible to pay for credentialed experts to curate the editorial bend of articles in their area of expertise. This would have its own issues, namely of causing a bias towards institutionally favoured interpretations, but I think that would be preferable to the status quo.
Please read the discussion that deleted this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
It's a hard problem. Volunteer editors are spread thinly over millions of articles, some of which (like "Bruce Faulconer") are about living people that are really important to get right.[1] The project has settled on the guideline of _notability_, meaning that articles are kept only if they have significant coverage in reliable sources.[2] Proving a negative is not really possible, but it works okay most of the time.
It's worth thinking about alternate policies you could set up.[3] You could decide deletion based on whether a figure were "known and beloved all over the world," as the author suggests, which is difficult to define. You could could keep everything,[4] which some alternate Wikis have tried. You get unmaintained pages and probably libel.
Gioia criticizes the barrier to contribution, which is also a difficult balance to reach. Some processes are just inherently complex and involve reaching consensus among hundreds of people. Others could be simplified, but every hour spent discussing and implementing improvements is an hour taken from improving the content.
The policies are under constant discussion and change,[5] and no one thinks we've reached the perfect balance between these constraints. See, for example, this month's headline case at the Arbitration Committee around deletion.[6]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
>Volunteer editors are spread thinly over millions of articles
I would like to point out that this is, effectively, a very clever way of saying that Wikipedia is controlled by a tiny group of people whose goals for Wikipedia do not match the expectations of the general public.
There's definitely a systemic bias on Wikipedia towards its generally more-white, more-male, younger, English-speaking editors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias
I'm not sure what the policy solution is. Some suggestions are given on the linked page, but it's a continuing issue.
It seems the policies for notable composers [1] fail to recognize the work of TV composers.
Judging by this case, composing the music for a TV show watched for years by millions of people doesn't count, but composing something performed in a theatre and watched by far fewer people is officially notable:
> Has written musical theatre of some sort (includes musicals, operas, etc.) that was performed in a notable theatre that had a reasonable run, as such things are judged in their particular situation, context, and time.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music)#C...
This observation is likely a good basis for an improvement to the Wikipedia policies on Notability in music.
It seems to me that erroring on the side of not deleting is probably a better policy.
And it seems to be that the opposite is probably a better policy. This is precisely the debate discussed in the link in the previous comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...
That is erring on the side of hosting spam, urban legends and pseudoscience. The opinion was made in the AfD that no quality sources for the article: without them, no worthwhile article can be written.
Normally I'd agree, but I think the opposite for living people in particular
> It's worth thinking about alternate policies you could set up
A reasonable alternative would be for the notability requirement simply to be that the general public may run into the topic/person (and presumably therefore be interested to know more) OR may ask a question to which the article would contain the answer.
Anyone who’s creative work is published or included in a movie or whatever should automatically be included under such a rule.
It would also be sensible for the default in the case of dispute to be to keep the article unless the actual content itself is completely unverifiable, as long as there is some half way plausible argument for doing so.
There should be no sense of achievement for or gratitude towards anyone removing facts from an encyclopaedia.
Any editor who makes removing articles on notability grounds their raison d’etre demonstrates only arrogance and smugness.
It was also restored since then, with a note it still needs improving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Faulconer
Further the guidelines on composers that are likely to apply to him are listed below. It is not at all clear that he meets the bar here.
From the info I have, the only criteria he may meet is #1 for in the first group, and it is not actually clear that "soundtrack for DBZ" is a notable composition. for a TV show soundtrack to qualify as notable, it would need to be something often written about. For example, if a show is discussed for its music almost as often as for its plot, then sure the soundtrack is probably notable. I don't think that actually applies here.
And even if so, if he is only really known for one work (which pretty much is the case), that would generally be merged with the article for that work. So he could be mentioned in the "Sound Track of DBZ" article if one existed, or the "soundtrack" section of the main DBZ article.
------
Composers, songwriters, librettists or lyricists, may be notable if they meet at least one of the following criteria:
1. Has credit for writing or co-writing either lyrics or music for a notable composition. 2. Has written musical theatre of some sort (includes musicals, operas, etc.) that was performed in a notable theatre that had a reasonable run, as such things are judged in their particular situation, context, and time. 3. Has had a work used as the basis for a later composition by a songwriter, composer or lyricist who meets the above criteria. 4. Has written a composition that has won (or in some cases been given a second or other place) in a major music competition not established expressly for newcomers. 5. Has been listed as a major influence or teacher of a composer, songwriter or lyricist that meets the above criteria. 6. Appears at reasonable length in standard reference books on their genre of music.
Where possible, composers or lyricists with insufficient verifiable material to warrant a reasonably detailed article should be merged into the article about their work. When a composer or lyricist is known for multiple works, such a merger may not be possible.
---
Composers and performers outside mass media traditions may be notable if they meet at least one of the following criteria:
1. Is frequently covered in publications devoted to a notable music sub-culture.
2. Has composed a number of notable melodies, tunes or standards used in a notable music genre.
3. Is cited in reliable sources as being influential in style, technique, repertory or teaching for a particular music genre.
4. Is cited by reliable sources as having established a tradition or school in a particular music genre.
5. Has been listed as a significant musical influence on musicians or composers who meet the above criteria.
From what I've seen, the key to keeping pages up on Wikipedia is to have a lot of verifiable references & citations. If you do this like you're writing a college paper, rogue editors have much less power. Challenges to their reverts & deletions are also more likely to succeed.
A good example of this is the article for the unloved Honda Ridgeline pickup. Jalopnik did an article about how the Wikipedia page for it is astonishingly detailed and (exhaustively) referenced.
https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-w...
> rogue editors [...] power
The problem is that this takes SO MUCH time and energy. Most give up.
Taking time out of your day to voluntarily improve a free resource is already energy intensive without also expending that energy battling with zealots.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying providing proper references takes too much time, I'm saying that having to fight with people to be permitted to keep content while building references takes much more energy again.
> Just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel, a Wikipedia editor had smugly insisted that she wasn’t a notable physicist.
I heard about this at the time, and it stood out to me as totally missing the point. It's completely 100% possible that winning the Nobel Prize elevated Dr. Strickland from not notable to notable. A physicist who has done work that could win a Nobel Prize is probably getting close to notable but it's hard for an encyclopedia that doesn't engage in original research to adjudicate that. Actually winning is that third party recognition that wikipedia's notability standards are supposed to rely on.
This isn't the case. I'm familiar with the standards applied for living philosophers, and they fall far short of the level of "future Nobel prize winner" (A quick glance at Wikipedia show I took classes from 7 such individuals while in grad school). Similarly for physicists: there are over 1000 21st century physicists listed on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:21st-century_physicis....
You misrepresent my claim. I said it is natural to assume that someone who has done work that will earn a Nobel prize is at least approaching notability. I did not say that is required for notability.
I'm not a wikipedia expert but many of those don't meet their criteria for notability. Taking the first in the Canadian physicists category, I get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abella The only non-primary source that isn't an obituary is Who's Who in Science and Engineering. He objectively doesn't meet the criteria listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
I can't find the original pre-deletion article, but the edit comments mention that Strickland was a past president of the Optical Society. The guidelines for notability contemplate this sort of thing when they say "The person has been an elected member of a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association (e.g., a National Academy of Sciences or the Royal Society)". There are lots of other criteria, but that's one of them, and we can recognize that the Optical Society is not in the same category.
You can say wikipedia's notability criteria are inconsistently applied. I'm not surprised. But most of these complaints amount to asking wikipedia to recognize inherent merit, which it doesn't do. Wikipedia correctly recognized Strickland's notability after the Nobel committee recognized her merit and accomplishments.
Interestingly, while responding to this I noticed that the article we are discussing here, when talking about Strickland, probably misrepresents things. The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel". The Washington Post article cited in the previous sentence doesn't support that claim either. So part of what we are discussing here includes supposed facts which might be fully invented or significantly distorted by the reporter.
> The edit history on wikipedia shows an article was created and then deleted in 2014, not "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel".
Gioia is referring to this page, which was created in March 2018 and rejected in May 2018, which is indeed "just a few months before Donna Strickland won the Nobel":
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=842614385
(However, the stated rejection reason was that the draft article did not provide the required level of independent reliable sources.)
I found Wikipedia most inconsistent when dealing with academics. Whether living academics are included or not has no relationship with whether they are prominent or influential. That is, May prominent academics do not have wiki pages, and many academics with wiki pages are not prominent.
Eg Donna Strickland did not have a wiki page until after it was announced that she won the Nobel prize. People who win Nobel prizes are not overnight successes and were prominent long before getting their prize.
Just adding wikipedia discussion links so people can get a bit of context
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductions...
I was making a Wikipedia page back in 2004 about Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators.
Both were summarily deleted.
So I started it again but under my User directory. That too got deleted.
So, Wikipedia editors are inherently anti-diversity.
This sounds like a bad experience. I find Wikipedia pretty daunting and I'm not surprised you got tripped up trying to edit.
But as a lay person reading your post, I do not know what "Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators" is. Is this a book? I tried googling for it but didn't find it. Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf culture (lowercase c): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture -- it was created in March of 2004. I am not sure about "Deaf educators", but Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education and on Dead studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies and on Schools for the deaf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf (this one is in notable need of expansion). It looks like the separate article for Deaf education sprung into being in the early 2010s and previously redirect-merged to deaf culture.
I think it's at least possible here that you were not discriminated against as part of an anti-diversity agenda, but rather that you misunderstood some of Wikipedia's needlessly complicated rules or maybe didn't present what you were trying to add in the right way.
I went back through the articles for deletion discussion for all of 2004 and could not find a discussion about deleting an article by the name you said. I went through the full list of deleted articles in 2001-2004 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log -- and searched for "deaf" and didn't find anything relevant ever. If your pages were deleted after 2004, they're only visible in the modern deletion log and that requires an exact title match unless you're an administrator, which I am not. So unfortunately I think without more information it's going to be hard to help you 18 years later.
But I'm pretty sure it was not because Wikipedia editors were anti-diversity.
Yeah, I was even more surprised that history log didn’t exist, much less its content.
It's clear that B.F. has been connected with Dragon Ball Z - until 2003. The name-link has been redirected to that page. IMDB knows he continued to write music for TV series a couple of times ... up through 2013.
So? Lots of people have jobs in the music industry. What makes each of them notable? He has his own website, if anyone has to know more.
There are thousands of people sure they oughta have a WP page. I'm glad WP doesn't always agree.
As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree.
You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life. Even if you have tons of credits on IMDV. You don’t “deserve” wikipedia article. It’s not a collection of everything that exists ever.
The criteria for notability on wikipedia are actually quite clear and documented.
It’s not a badge for a job well done…
And if you disagree with that - fine, it’s creative commons, you can easily get all the articles with all their histories (wikipedia helpfully dumps all that periodically every day as giant XML), and the software is open source; you can fork it and create article on every living human being that ever existed.
Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough.
The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedia is actually the good one in this category, the german is already completely broken because of this clientele.
You are right, it could be forked, but in practice it's unlikely humanity has the capacity to run two such projects. Thus Wikipedia - if it does not course correct - will sink slowly into irrelevance, be flanked with better wikis for specific topics (sadly often proprietary platforms/commercial projects) and then, hopefully, what you describe will really happen and a new Wikipedia will be forked, learning from the mistakes that are completely obvious to everyone outside of that current in-group of contributors.
Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year.
The rules are here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines.
But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good.
I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.
> A few days ago, composer Bruce Faulconer found that his Wikipedia entry had suddenly disappeared. This was surprising because his music is known and beloved all over the world—in fact, it has been heard in more than 80 countries.
Hmmm how do I already know from the first paragraph this article is bogus? Let me search this person I've never heard of. Oh, there's nothing. He's literally not noteable. "Heard in more than 80 countries" is something small independent internet artists did 20 years ago, and they didn't get wikipedia pages either.
Hmm, maybe we'd all learn something about this guy if only he had a Wikipedia page. Guess his life's work is too expensive for Wikipedia's hard drives.
I get why people lie sometimes. I get why people mislead, or fudge facts, or gaslight.
But it's genuinely hard to figure out why you'd post something like this when spending literally 3 seconds on a Google search shows that you just completely made it up and didn't do any kind of search at all. Why tell a lie that is so easily and completely disproven?
Dude he's the guy that did the music for Dragonball, a thirty billion dollar franchise. I'm shocked he was removed from Wikipedia.
Pretty sure much of the famous music for Dragon Ball like "Makafushigi Adventure!"[1] and "Cha-La Head-Cha-La"[2] was made by Japanese composers.
Did he do the music for the US dub maybe?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makafushigi_Adventure! [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cha-La_Head-Cha-La
Yes, the US (Funimation?) version and original has different soundtracks, both for the opening and for in the show. I'm not sure which was used in other regions where the show was popular, my guess would be south/central America got the Funimation music.
For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgJ1heSrskY
>my guess would be south/central America got the Funimation music.
The Spanish dubs used the original Japanese soundtrack afaik.
While I've never heard of Dragonball--and I'm sure it's really great--I'll make a wild guess that 100s or 1000s of people worked on it in one capacity or another and that doesn't really make them "Notable".
It's probably the #1 most well-known anime in the US.
That sounds great. I was actually thinking "video game" but didn't bother looking it up because it's not really that important, is it after all?
But I can think of some other musicians who've worked on cartoons--David Bowie, Roger Waters, Primus, uh, Art Garfunkel. One thing they have in common is their notability didn't really come from that type of work. Straining a bit through the mists of time, I suppose Frank Churchill is genuinely notable for his cartoon work. Matt and Trey, of course, but they are writing show tunes for fun, it seems.
I mean, it's incidental music, right? Hollywood has lots of people who do that. No one cares about them either.
Is this a different Bruce Faulconer? [0]. Google has 176,000 results.
I recognized the name immediately.
Unixbane Has Spoken!
It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process.
Considering that he doesn't want to learn what Wikipedia's policies are, or why they exist (and his calling people who disagree with him "trolls"), I am inclined to think that is a good thing.
Getting huffy about Mr. Gioia's choice of language doesn't really engage with the substance of his complaint. Is there a stated Wikipedia policy that composers must have an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music to be considered notable? I bet there isn't. If Gioia is correct in saying that Wikipedia editors are insisting on that, then those Wikipedia editors are applying an arbitrary standard.
They are, in a word, trolling.
And I am inclined to think calling them out is a good thing.
He's not correct. One editor of six in the deletion discussion mentioned that they had checked multiple sources (including Grove) and Faulconer wasn't in them.
It would be about 99% unfair. In my experience Wikipedia style moderation setups are a magnet for small minded petty martinets. Of course rules and some criteria are needed, but soon those people run over any shred of common sense while wielding them.
Wow. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be a public resource. I wasn't aware certain people were supposed to stay off the site.
I once tried to edit an article about a scientist who had developed a bit of surrounding controversy over his studies in parapsychology. Having no real knowledge of the debate, I didn't add or remove any information; I just felt the introduction had been written in an overtly non-neutral way by a past editor. So, I removed a couple of words like "hoax" and trimmed one or two sentences so that they didn't come off as a character assassination (they had contained unsourced editorializations). Specifics aside, the article had explicitly violated Wikipedia's policies on using NPOV language.
My edits were reverted within 24 hours, and the talk page was updated with an admonition to my IP address (I'd posted without logging in) claiming I'd been implicated in "unsavory" activities that could be found by Googling the IP (it was a dynamic IP, but of course I tried and found nothing) and making vague threats that I should not attempt such edits again. That's the last time I edited anything on Wikipedia.
That's editing. I mean, I can understand that certain people might not be great at editing.
But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.
I can't tell if you're suggesting that my edits were simply bad, and typically I would accept that is a possibility; but, even then, it was the fact that I was threatened essentially with being swatted. There was no feedback on the edits that I made. Just unfounded assertions that my IP address was involved in something "unsavory" and that I would face severe consequences if I continued such edits. It made me feel very unwelcome and I assume many other people have the same experience on Wikipedia.
I realize the futility of trying to convince you that my edits were warranted, I guess. The article has since been updated, however, and the non-neutral tone that I'd tried to fix has been removed, so apparently somebody else ultimately did succeed.
There are many things to discuss about that, first were your edits correct, secondly how can you make such edits and be accepted on Wikipedia. It doesn't seem like you care about reflecting why you failed at the second one.
I guess that is a field of research how does Wikipedia handle anon edits. I have done thousands of anon edits on Wikipedia and have very low deletion rate, but I guess I kept away from tone and opinion.
Regarding the topic of making edits that would be accepted, I assume it was subject matter that rubbed someone the wrong way because as I said it was basically a character assassination of the article's subject. I strongly suspect the writer of the original non-neutral content had a browser extension or bot monitoring the page for any edits. I reflected on it quite a bit (I'm not sure how you concluded I've no interest in that), but I just think it creates a bit of an issue with the community being unwelcoming to newcomers. On the receiving end of it there's not really any way to know why someone decided to make unfounded accusations against you in a public place without engaging them further, which seemed unwise to me.
I agree with you that it looks like a good field for some research, I don't know how the issue of anonymous edits could be handled to productively stamp out abusive edit behavior.
Wait a minute. I wasn’t questioning your editing at all. I was only pointing out that this guy is openly admitting not only that he doesn’t want some people editing, but that he doesn’t even want some people to have access to Wikipedia. That’s truly shocking to me.
I get you. I'm sorry that I got a bit defensive, and I didn't mean to detract from your point.
Sorry, but I think that composer is relevant. So this is not about knowing policy, it is about disagreement.
One of the reasons for the policies is so questions such as "should this person have an article" don't devolve into popularity polls.
I'm sorry, but "is this musician notable" literally is a popularity contest.
but that's not how Wikipedia works. their policies don't care how popular or well-known someone or something is, what matters is whether or not journalists, news outlets, and other such groups (who must themselves be "notable") find them "notable" enough to cover. the Philip Roth story mentioned in the article is one such example of this—it's a good thing Mr. Roth worked at The New Yorker (a verified "notable" news outlet) so he could set the record straight about his own article, otherwise he would've been shit outta luck!
it's really odd the degree to which Wikipedia's policies enshrine commercial journalism outlets as the Arbiters of Notability.
>it's really odd the degree to which Wikipedia's policies enshrine commercial journalism outlets as the Arbiters of Notability.
It is somewhat of an irony that notability probably is bolstered more by fairly small run periodicals and books than it is by things like fan websites.
Except they do care how popular the musician is. It's just that instead of setting the threshold themselves they choose to pass the buck and defer to journalists and other groups.
exactly. this also leads to e.g. "Controversy" sections of articles with sentences that make uncharitable statements about people or groups, sometimes outstripping the rest of the article in terms of length, and ending with [11][12][13][14][17][24][27] so you know it's a super accurate true statement instead of politically- and/or ideologically-slanted analysis from multiple sources (potentially all referencing a single source themselves) that "just so happen" to be completely identical. it doesn't matter that if it was something that happened years ago that's wholly irrelevant now and everyone's long forgotten about it—if a Sufficient Quantity of Journalists said that the thing was notably controversial at the time, well, it's notably controversial forever!
it seems like I encounter more and more of this exact thing all over Wikipedia as time marches on.
Yes, I am very familiar with that phenomenon.
Two different objections.
First, while the most written-about musicians are also generally the most popular, there isn't a strict correlation.
Second, there is a vast difference between a decision-process of "if the sources provided show that this person is popular, they are notable" and "if three of the four Wikipedia editors surveyed like this person's music, they are notable".
1. You are both correct and incorrect. The most well written about musicians are the most popular by definition within the group of people who write about musicians. A) This does not mean that those musicians are popular within some sizeable portion of the general population. B) The preferences of the people writing about musicians (that wikipedia will accept as a source) are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large, in fact I'd wager that essentially guaranteed to be not true at different points in time and for different genres.
Wikipedia is choosing to conflate the popularity of an artist amongst the writing group and the popularity in the broader public. And when the two groups disagree, they are choosing to go with those who write rather than with the broader public.
2. This isn't about "the sources provided shot that he's popular", it's do we acknowledge that their contribution is defined as popular. Dragon Ball Z is/was an incredibly popular and influential anime.
I guess all it takes now is for someone at WIRED who loved Dragon Ball Z to publish an article or two about them and they suddenly become notable.
I was about to post this.
Not exactly. A musician who is very popular but for whom there is not significant coverage in reliable independent sources would likely not meet the notability requirements.
If the policy is “you must feature in Grove’s”, Wikipedia becomes even more derivative than it already is.
As it was always intended be. Secondary sources only, no original research.
> It wouldn't be entirely unfair to say that Wikipedia's policies are designed to keep people like Mr. Gioia off the site and out of the decision making process.
Why? Who is he and what has he done that might make Wikipedia dislike him?
Ted Gioia is a prolific author on jazz musicology and history; I have several of his books and find them to be informative and entertaining.