The Tragedy of Having a Wikipedia Page—and Then Losing It
Wired · Duncan Fyfe ·
Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?
All three have had a biography on Wikipedia; all three of those biographies were considered for deletion this year on the grounds that the subjects were not notable enough to warrant a biography at all. Every day, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Wikipedia biographies—of child actors turned LA realtors, retired ambassadors, soccer players who have played less than 10 minutes of professional soccer—are purged from the world’s free encyclopedia.
It’s not as though Wikipedia, which hosts over 7 million articles in the English language, doesn’t have the space. But Wikipedia has only so many volunteers to monitor its contents. To this day, Wikipedia editors are discovering hoaxes that have gone undetected for decades. The time it takes to verify the release dates of Xav’s three singles is better spent—the logic goes—by asking whether the American Civil War officer Nathaniel Lyon really drank mustard during battle, as was claimed in his Wikipedia biography for 17 years. Wikipedia removed the mustard claim, not because it was proven wrong, but because there was no reliable evidence for it. “We’re not really looking for what’s true,” Britta Gustafson, who has been editing Wikipedia since 2001, told me. “We’re looking for what’s verifiable.”
Wikipedia editors do not themselves decide that a person is not notable, only that there is a lack of reliable evidence to support the claim. One person who recently lost her Wikipedia biography on notability grounds is Kimberly Small, the CEO of a Nevada nonprofit that supports survivors of sexual assault. The debate occurred in a public page on Wikipedia itself; it’s in that space that the really tricky decisions about what is and what isn’t good enough for the encyclopedia are made. One editor raised a question: “How should we judge not-for-profit executives? By the nature of their job, the focus is, as it should be, on the organization and the work the organization does, not them.” Another editor replied: “I don’t think there is anything wrong with not-for-profit executives being less often individually notable. Wikipedia coverage is not a prize.”