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by solardev 1421 days ago
Wikipedia's notability requirements are enforced very haphazardly. Broadly, editors and admins can be split into two camps: inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything. The life of your new article entirely depends on who happens to stumble upon it.

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!"

2 comments

>inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything

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.

I didn't make it up, but I did get the terms slightly wrong. It's "inclusionists" vs "deletionists" (not exclusionists).

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 know you didn't make things up and I didn't see correcting the terminology to be worthwhile. But most people don't think simply everything makes a worthwhile article while, at the same time, I for one generally don't think articles should be deleted even if they're a bit thin on detail and notability so long as they're reasonably sourced.
Maybe it's like politics, where given only two choices, people will just gravitate towards the extremes over time and become hyperpolarized?

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.

Often its related to people not finding sources when they start articles, if you do detailed research first rather than posting a stub survival rates are higher. However thats often not how articles come about.
I sourced an article from 5-6 major news sources and it was nominated for deletion within hours. It ultimately survived appeals but why the hell did I have to waste my time on that.
I think that's why I'm skeptical of the notability requirements. I know plenty of colleagues with Wikipedia pages where the notability aspect is sort of suspect, at least relative to many others I know. Sometimes it seems intuitive that someone would have a page, but other times it's just another form of marketing and SEO.

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.