Ouch, dissed by Wikipedia

Somebody I know created a page for me on WikiPedia, which I thought was pretty interesting. I suppose I could have gone in there and fleshed it out some more, but it was one of those things i just never got around to.

After seeing a tweet by Darren Drapper regarding his difficulty getting a page created for Marc Prensky, I thought I’d look up the ol’ Dembo entry. Low and behold, it was gone.

I did a bit of research and eventually found a way to search their logs of deleted pages, which also happens to list the reason why my page was nuked.

A non-notable biography / article about a person, group, company, or website that didn’t assert the notability of the subject.

Guess the article didn’t make a good enough case for why they should have an article about me in there.

Ah well, if there’s no article about Warlick, Prensky, or Stager in there, I can at least consider myself in good company

6 Comments

Darren Draper
11/28/2007

Hello Dembo,

Yes, adding a Wikipedia entry can be a fickle process. According to Sylvia Martinez, “You have to follow the rules to the letter, and follow up for months defending it.”

The real question that we, as a community, have to answer is whether or not it’s worthwhile to write biographies for significant leaders/contributors to our field. Personally, I think it’s a shame for some people in our field to be represented, while others – equally qualified – go unrepresented.

This page ( http://tinyurl.com/2ec5hj ) offers, at least, a nice start.

sylvia martinez
11/28/2007

Hey, look, I’m quoted from Twitter in a blog comment – quick, someone put up a Wikipedia entry about ME!

But seriously, they are concerned about people using Wikipedia as a vanity site, so the rules about living people are pretty strict.

Any article has to have sources not written by the subject, so no blog, website or self-published book. I guess that might work in favor of academics, and against people who are just popular blogger/commentator/consultant types. Even though you might argue that their impact might be greater. But those are the rules!

Pamela Carr
11/28/2007

Very interesting. I’ll be adding this to my discussion notes for my students when we cover Wikipedia.

But I agree that the process does have a flaw, popular bloggers/speakers have a huge impact and should be recognized.

Ben
11/29/2007

Pam: Big impact or no, if Wikipedia is truly the egalitarian “everyone’s encyclopedia” that it claims to be, then there should be no restrictions on the creation of anyone’s personal page.

I repeatedly tried to get a local independent bookstore’s page started this summer, and it was continually deleted due to the same reason as Steve’s page was deleted. Of course, the large book retailers like B&N and Borders have pages on Wikipedia. What makes them noteworthy? They sell more books; that’s it. In a few decades time, they will be gone, and other large chains will ahve taken their place, or people will go back to independents. Either way, it’s a bit unfair for the editors of WIkipedia to deem what is noteworthy now and what isn’t as they can’t look into the future.

David Robb
11/29/2007

Over the summer I tried, unsuccessfully, to add “School 2.0″ to Wikipedia. It lasted for a few weeks and had a few edits but the entry did not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines.

Andy Allen
12/5/2007

I was going to create an entry once for the Andy’s Elevator Postulate…which states that the person who gets on the elevator after you will get off the elevator before you.

I didn’t want it to get deleted, so I just never created it.

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