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.
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.
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.