In the Future, Everyone Will Be Famous Until Their Wikipedia Entries Get Censored
Annalee Newitz is on a mission:
My experiences [editing the entries of obscure authors and publishers] have made me strongly question the idea of "notableness" on Wikipedia. I am genuinely offended by the notion that obscure authors, technologies, ideas, and events should be deleted from what's supposed to be a vast compendium of knowledge. It's not as if Wikipedia is running out of disk space and needs to delete stuff to keep going. And it's not as if an entry on an obscure writer will somehow undermine somebody's ability to search for less obscure ones.
Besides, who is to say what is notable or not? Lutheran ministers? Bisexual Marxists? Hopefully both. For me, the utopianism of Wikipedia comes from its status as a truly democratic people's encyclopedia — nothing is too minor to be in it. Everything should be noteworthy, as long as it is true and primary sources are listed. If we take this position, we avoid the mistakes of 19th-century chroniclers, who kept little information about women and people of color in archives because of course those groups were hardly notable. Yet now historians and curious people bang their heads against walls because so much history was lost to those deletions.
Katherine Mangu-Ward's profile of Jimmy Wales didn't get into the weeds here, so does anyone have an answer? Who selects whether a subject is too obscure for an entry? How would Wikipedia actually suffer if, worst case scenario, people created entries for their pets and camcorder-shot movies?