[adamrezich]

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.

[ghaff]

>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.

[_aavaa_]

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.

[adamrezich]

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.

[_aavaa_]

Yes, I am very familiar with that phenomenon.