Wikipedia - Are You Important Enough?
I am not sure why this sentence has stuck in my head all morning, but it has.
Please decide whether this indivdual is sufficiently important to warrant an article.
This is from a discussion taking place on Wikipedia about the entry for Fred Wilson; it is being considered for deletion. I know that Wikipedia does not want to become a repository of about pages for every Tom, Dick and Harry in existence and they need to enforce some standards. But that phrase: “sufficiently important,” it still gets me. It has to be odd to watch a public discussion regarding whether or not you are “important” enough.
As someone who watched their page get removed for just that reason, I can testify that it sucks. It did alter how I view Wikipedia, not from spite (although it did sting, I won’t lie) but because I saw the governance process at work and found it lacking. It came down to the decision that if I was the guy who not only podcasted but did the Reality Break radio show, they’d keep the article on me. It was decided that this fact was “unverifiable”, even though I link to the Reality Break website in the sidebar of my weblog. Not one person involved in this decision bothered to research a fact that would take 10 seconds to verify either from looking at my sidebar or searching via my weblog’s search box, and had the gall to call it “unverifiable”. At that point, I decided I’d never take anything I saw on Wikipedia at face value and I never have since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Geoghegan
I didn’t know you were British…
- dK