A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
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?
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?
You've got the chronology here backwards IIRC - Bulbapedia exists because Wikipedia got rid of "non-notable" Pokemon.
[1] https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_test
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.
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.
Fandom dot com is a commercial venture started by Jimmy Wales. Inferences are left as an exercise for the reader.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
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....
To prevent me having a Wikipedia page.
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.
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.
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...
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!"
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
Yeah, no. That's literally never cited as a reason to keep or delete a page.
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...
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.)
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)
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_...
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.
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.
Victors rewrite history, and now the article about it too.
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
If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.
Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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").
Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.
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.
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.
"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).
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...
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.
Can you expand on this? I wasn't aware Google penalized Wikipedia now.
Why?
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.
I joined long ago but have never used it.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARM_Cortex-M&type...
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I'm not sure what the policy solution is. Some suggestions are given on the linked page, but it's a continuing issue.
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...
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FaulconerProductions...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgJ1heSrskY
The Spanish dubs used the original Japanese soundtrack afaik.
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.
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.
They are, in a word, trolling.
And I am inclined to think calling them out is a good thing.
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.
But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it seems like I encounter more and more of this exact thing all over Wikipedia as time marches on.
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".
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.
Why? Who is he and what has he done that might make Wikipedia dislike him?