What is considered notable on Wikipedia, and why do the community standards for notability seem so arbitrary (and at times, biased down gender/racial/social lines)? Interesting Analee Newitz piece about it...check this out Alan!
What Does Wikipedia Consider Notable?
Ugh. The nightmares are
Ugh. The nightmares are returning! =)
That's a most excellent article, Paul. The Wikipedia article about ZineWiki has twice or thrice been nominated for deletion, and saved each time. It's hard to "prove" zines are notable because Time Magazine dosen't effin' write about them...
Wikipedia needs to change its notability guidelines for sure.
I used to be a huge contributor to Wikipedia, I've created a number of successful pages for them. Then they deleted my friend Alex's entry that I created because she wasn't notable enough. I knew then they had no idea what they were talking about.
I REMEMBER
That one piece she did for PP way back when, about infiltrating the Promise Keepers in drag, right? That was a hell of an article.
I am pleased to say that she is a fellow Metro Newspapers contributor, which means somehow I am two degrees separated from her brilliance.
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT, I THINK
"...19th-century chroniclers, who kept little information about women and people of color in archives because of course those groups were hardly 'notable.' Yet now historians and curious people bang their heads against walls because so much history was lost via those 'deletions.'"
Especially since the collective Internet memory has proven to be shockingly short, despite all the alarmist articles about Google remembering every retarded Livejournal post you made as a high-schooler forever. Big chunks of historical record online have already disappeared, and I think given the sheer glut of it, that's inevitable--why should a group of people purposefully declare things "un-notable" in an encyclopedia that theoretically has no barriers to size or content? Especially if that encyclopedia, for better or worse, is becoming an important document of record for this era.
Joined: 2006-08-29
Location: Chicago, IL