
How I Snuck Through Wikipedia’s Notability Test - steven
https://medium.com/p/how-i-snuck-through-wikipedia-s-notability-test-abfbd15127bc
======
nakedrobot2
The article could be titled "How I harnessed the cronyism that has paralyzed
Wikipedia and scored a free bio out of it, and Why you'll never succeed if you
try the same"

------
tokenadult
The key part of his article is a little more than halfway down: "I also
realized that my well-sourced biography can be attributed, in part, to the
fact that every word I’ve published is available online, and thus easily cited
as a reference. In the eyes of Wikipedia editors, my being a digital native
appears to be a distinct advantage: it’s much easier to link to existing
online sources than to visit libraries and dig through decades-old physical
media, such as books and newspapers."

I am a Wikipedian. He has that right. Wikipedia has a HUGE bias toward online
sources, as a practical matter, rather than toward print sources. That's not
official policy on Wikipedia. Wikipedia policy makes clear that it is
perfectly okay to cite a book that is a reliable source on other grounds, even
if the book is very hard for any other Wikipedian to find in a library or as a
used book. But the practical thing that happens on Wikipedia is that most
articles are based on sources that Google can find, and many articles that are
otherwise well sourced will be doubted if editors can't find any confirmation
of their content on Google.

Basically Google's ability to serve up what humankind has put onto the public-
visible World Web Wide limits the development of Wikipedia. I learned to do
research the old-fashioned way, at a university with a huge library, and began
using online databases there as a student job back in the 1970s. Today I can
look things up with practiced facility online, but I still find that looking
around in a library full of dead-tree books can turn up all kinds of
information that has never been online. It takes both kinds of research to
build a good encyclopedia.

Just for fun, take a look at how Wikipedia describes what Wikipedians should
be here to do as encyclopedia editors,

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_enc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Here_to_build_an_encyclopedia)

as well as its description of what Wikipedia is not.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not)

------
DanBC
> the minutiae of the universe (toilet paper orientation: 5,147 words;

I submitted that article to HN. It got a few of upvotes but was then flag-
killed.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047531](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6047531)

I submitted it because it's a pretty thorough article. It's not a stub of
nonsense; they talk about some of the research behind the intense arguments
that can result from hanging a roll "the wrong way".

I learnt to always leave a comment about why I submitted an article if I think
it's going to be flagged.

~~~
Retra
I see the TP debate as an example of a more general phenomena where people
consider themselves to be an expert on any subject they have even a single
direct experience with. ('Expert' is probably too harsh though; it's more like
"I want to share my knowledge, even if it's not actually useful.")

Edit: It may even be a biological instinct.

PS: This comment is probably a perfect example, now that I think of it.

------
cooper12
I'm sure you all know the phrase "with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow". The
same could be applied to Wikipedia and helps explain how the author slipped
through: People only contribute to things that are in their sight. The author
says this himself by noting that Wikipedia is human driven. His article wasn't
notability-checked after the initial creation because no editor probably saw
it. You see the opposite in the GoT article, where every detail is bought
under scrutiny.

He also probably got a pass because the article was created by an established
editor rather than a brand new user. Given enough time though, I'm sure some
editor might've seen it and would have put the notability template that exists
on the page now.

Dig into the depths of Wikipedia and I can guarantee you'll find tons of non-
notable articles that no one bothered to bring up for deletion, but is
headlined with cleanup templates. Heck, just the other day I saw an article
that tried to pass for notability by indiscriminately littering the page with
citations that just barely mentioned the subjects' name. All it takes is one
well-meaning editor to double-check any dubious claims by looking at their
citations and making sure they are reliable.

It's a bit silly to make it sound like he gamed the system. He didn't pass the
notability test; it just wasn't administered yet. The editors that worked on
his behalf were well-versed in the rules and they worked within them,
acknowledging that the article might not last. You either get a speedy
deletion of something obvious in the new queue or you get discussions for
deletion for things that aren't apparently notable to someone else.

~~~
ahelwer
Heck, just check out the "list of collaborative software" and "list of project
management software" articles; they're there more as a quarantine zone/chew
toy than anything. Every time someone makes a crappy productivity webapp they
apparently feel justified in creating its wikipedia article. These often
continue to exist for a year or two before an editor finally takes the time to
throw it into the delete queue. At least these are indexed in one place,
whereas biographies of obscure people have no such convenient referral page.

------
sparkzilla
One of the main problems with Wikipedia is that it is actually multiple
products in one: an encyclopedia, a biography site, an news archive, medical
reference and so on. If the site was an encyclopedia, McMillen would just have
a short page or even nothing. He probably wouldn't be notable enough. If it
was a biography site, say one specific to journalists, he would have a longer
page, and if it was an archive of news, he would have the kind of page seen
here. The lack of defined format leads to this kind of confusion here, for
both the reader and the writer. The problem for many of the site's writers is
that the "encyclopedic" stuff is done. There's only so much to say about
dinosaurs. When any news comes up they flock to fill in the page with minutae,
with the result that pages on pop culture topics are becoming so long they are
almost unreadable. See my blog post:
[http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-
sins/](http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/)

~~~
benaiah
From your linked article:

> There are very few Web 2.0 features. Social features are primitive: readers
> cannot make an easy list of their favorites, nor can they share to Facebook
> or Twitter with a single click. It’s as if the past ten years of progress
> had never happened.

Thank god.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Wikipedia is like Web 1.0, but _better_. It has a sophisticated templating
system, readable and consistent styling/formatting, more hyperlinking than the
old web ever had, citations and fact-checking, it's freely editable by anyone,
it's freely licensed, has full revision history, links never die...

~~~
sparkzilla
Web 1.2?

~~~
JetSpiegel
Web 0.999...

------
keithpeter
An example of 'business as usual'...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Neville_Nevill](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Neville_Nevill)

I wrote the first draft of this page in 2004 as a result of an interest in
Victorian lunar observers (long story). This minor Victorian astronomer
produced an important moon map and contributed serious work on celestial
mechanics that was rendered obsolete by Ernest Brown's major improvement in
lunar ephemeris computation.

The subsequent history shows a purposeful improvement in the page and adds a
couple of references. I think the current version of the page is better than
the one I contributed.

I'm wondering if the wikipedia process sort of mostly works but gets derailed
around notability/contentious issues?

------
moron4hire
He says, about a certain editor:

>> (He has since asked that I leave his Wikipedia username out of this story.)

But later:

>> That editor... had expanded my page significantly...

Linking directly to the page, with the editor's name on it, at that time just
after said editor had made those significant changes.

So yes, I guess he did keep the name out of the _article_ , but it was only
one click to find it out. Is this good? Unless the guy's reason for not
wanting his name in the article was just so this article didn't show up in
search results for his user name, and doesn't actually care that people
connect his edits to the page with personal interaction with the subject of
the page, then this seems kind of unethical to me.

------
dredmorbius
For what it's worth, I'm working on an entry for a media executive who I was
surprised to find _didn 't_ have an entry (while you might not recognize the
person by name, I'm all but certain you'd know the organization). Rejected as
"non-notable".

This despite NY Times, citations, multiple prior incumbents listed, and at
least one existing "red link" reference to th individual.

I've tossed in a few more buckets of links and noted various other bits as
mentioned above. We'll see how it works out....

~~~
GFischer
I had several rejections for the page of the former Finance Minister in my
country, because they thought I was him and was self-promoting.

After writing on the editor's page and showing him enough news headlines, I
convinced him it was legitimate.

~~~
dredmorbius
Mine finally got through. Jarl Mohn, the recently selected CEO of NPR.

But then, weren't they all (8 in 8 years).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarl_Mohn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarl_Mohn)

Adding another 8 references seemed to help. They actually trimmed that down by
a couple in the publishing process:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jarl_Mohn&diff=ne...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jarl_Mohn&diff=next&oldid=650172490)

------
GCA10
It's amusing to see that McMillen's entry is now tagged with "may not meet
notability guidelines."
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen)

I suspect that this belated effort to quiet everything down will just make for
an even noisier and messier debate.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Not really. Looking at its _Articles for Deletion_ page, it seems like most of
the citations were actually junk. This is just like how hoax articles have
stuck around: people are suspicious of citation-free pages, but pages with
poor citations are rarely checked.

By the sounds of things, this article didn't actually pass Wikipedia's
notability test - it's just that nobody put it to that test by nominating it
for deletion (i.e. nobody thought it was suspicious).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Andrew_McMillen)

~~~
GCA10
We're both right, TazeTSchnitzel. I agree with you 100% about junky citations
and the article's inability to meet true notability standards. But now that
it's become a publicized article, various pranksters and Wikipedia critics
aren't likely to let it disappear quietly.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, I see your point. Yeah, some people might want to _keep_ it, I hadn't
considered that.

------
hudell
If the information is verifiable, why can't wikipedia just let the page exist?

~~~
DanBC
Wikipedia is not about "correct" or "true", it's about "verifiable".

This leads to some distortions and a lot of frustration. It might be why WP
has a problem keeping technical editors around.

~~~
drostie
Well, it's also that it's not consistently applied across the board.

In the actual _definition_ of notability, it is made clear that the policy is
purely about verifiability: something is notable when we can say more than a
couple verifiable things about it. However, because the policy is named
_notability_ , the AFD (articles for deletion) threads very often contain
systematic mention of how noteworthy an effect is "within the [whatever]
community".

I never really followed up on it, but I wanted to see whether I could game the
system in the reverse way. Coming from a physics background, in college I
wrote up some drafts about a fake physics concept, including some thought into
using @cornell.edu emails to create a fake arxiv.org LaTeX article or two. The
idea was to combine this with links to 404'ed pages, some fake blog articles
across the Internet authored by me, and some

The actual concept was going to be something like "Tenacity (science)" which
was going to explain that NASA researchers had discovered some unexplained and
hard-to-causally-model (but extremely predictable) force which makes orbital
rocketry more energy-expensive than "the calculations" would give you. Models
would be proposed requiring, say, Kerr metric general relativity solutions to
Earth's gravity (hence trying to determine whether the core of the Earth was
actually a spinning black hole) or strange drag forces going like v^1.5 or v^3
or something. The joke was that the _actual_ genesis of the phrase was a 2005
Homestar Runner cartoon where a character named Strong Bad is sitting in a
foil-lines cardboard box pretending that he is involved in a space program.
"Got to... escape... Earth's... tenacity..." he says as if straining under a
heavy weight.

~~~
Dylan16807
>In the actual definition of notability, it is made clear that the policy is
purely about verifiability: something is notable when we can say more than a
couple verifiable things about it.

Someone is doing things very wrong then, because I've seen a lot of over-
specialized but completely verifiable information get removed from Wikipedia.
The reasoning was entirely based on noteworthiness.

------
tessierashpool
there was a good post about this, a year or two ago, where somebody couldn't
get Wikipedia to publish the truth on a topic because the inaccurate
information was very widely cited. editors basically responded "we know this
is false, but the true version isn't notable enough to mention."

(tried, but failed, to find the link just now.)

~~~
GabrielF00
You may be referring to the Philip Roth incident. (There are a number of such
incidents, but this is perhaps the most famous).

Essentially, the article on Roth's book The Human Stain (an excellent book by
the way) cited a New York Times critic as saying that the main character may
have been inspired by a particular person. Roth's agent attempted to remove
this (Roth says that he was not inspired by this person). However, there was
no published source that indicated that Roth felt this way, just Roth's
agent's communication with Wikipedia volunteers. So Roth published an article
in The New Yorker as a means of establishing a published source that could be
used to refute the claim.

I think the ultimate resolution was to say something like "New York Times
critic says Roth was inspired by... but Roth says..."

This is a case where both sides were partially right. It's perfectly
encyclopedic to note that a major critic believes that an author was inspired
by a particular person. However, there should have been a better mechanism for
the author to establish his own version of the story.

But it gets into complicated areas. Should Wikipedia just take anything that
an agent sends at face value? Isn't it possible that a person isn't the best
source on biography (plenty of people have self-serving and inaccurate views
on themselves). Wikipedia's general philosophy is to look at what reliable
sources say and summarize them rather than trying to make judgements about who
is right and wrong and I think the resolution of citing both sources and
letting readers decide was reasonable.

~~~
LanceH
The one I'm thinking of was more straight forward than that. A person's
incorrect age was taken from wikipedia and published elsewhere. Those pages
were then cited as reference confirming their age, completing an unbreakable
circle (by wp's rules anyway).

------
mikexstudios
His wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillen)

------
8hugs
There is a fellow writer and music journalist from Queensland by the name of
Andrew McMillan. His entry is a mere 398 words. I got a bit nervous when I
found it because he died in 2012:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillan_(writer)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_McMillan_\(writer\))

------
JetSpiegel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_McMillen#Of_note](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Andrew_McMillen#Of_note)

Not for long, I would bet.

~~~
DaFranker
Well, this whole situation just might be what makes him "notable" enough to
have this wikipedia page.

He is, after all, the only australian freelance journalist whose essay on how
his own wikipedia page bypassed the wikipedia notability filters spurred on a
debate on his own notability. The delicious (and unique) recursive meta here
is, IMO, more than enough to keep the page.

~~~
swang
Seems like it would be bad to encourage people to do this by allowing the
article to stay up.

~~~
insertnickname
Spite should be a valid reason for deleting articles.

~~~
JadeNB
> Spite should be a valid reason for deleting articles.

Should _not_ , right?

------
tdees40
A friend of mine once played an elaborate prank where I got a Wikipedia page.
He made me a Faroese cricketer. It was pretty great, but eventually things
spiraled out of control when I spontaneously combusted.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Timothy_Dees)

~~~
viewer5
Any way to view what the article looked like before it was deleted?

~~~
tdees40
Sadly I think it's disappeared into the ether. I also tried to find the Faroe
Islands News Service blog that my friend put together, but it seems to be dead
as well.

~~~
glass-
Here's an image of the last revision before it was deleted:
[https://i.imgur.com/mlip1D9.png](https://i.imgur.com/mlip1D9.png)

------
x1798DE
I'm not sure I understand why he needed to make an article to watch something
get deleted for notability "in real time". These decisions are made
_constantly_ and you can always watch the process by going to AfD.

I hate articles about Wikipedia.

------
MichaelCrawford
I am regarded as Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia for the specific reason that
I feel that no one should have to pay to read my essays and articles. Were
someone to pay me to publish in dead tree form rather than on my own website,
I would merit an article.

I've written mountains of highly regarded essays and articles, generally on
the topics of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder -
as well as software engineering.

My essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is on a reading list that the
California State Department of Mental Health distributes to its county
clinics.

~~~
cbr
"Will someone pay you to publish your work" is a much stronger filter than "do
you put your work on your website".

(I write this as someone who has written a lot on my website for free and not
published anything in a paid forum.)

~~~
Dylan16807
But the issue here is that "will someone pay to publish" is true but
unprovable. "has someone paid to publish" is a sloppy approximation at best.

