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Rescued by WikipediaIs Wikipedia's ticket to "notability" the writing of one published article about … Wikipedia?

By Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Feb. 26, 2007, at 6:51 PM ET

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I once was lost but now am found. Wikipedia, which previously tagged my bio for removal because I failed to meet the online encyclopedia's rather stringent "notability" guideline, has now reinstated me. What brought about this miraculous intervention? My publication (in Slate and in the Washington Post) of an article that described my misfortune and then went on to argue that—given the seeming infinity of cyberspace and volunteer expertise available to Wikipedia—the only plausible reason Wikipedia's gatekeepers would exclude anyone or anything as insufficiently notable would have to be the secret thrill of exclusion itself, as described in Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.

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I don't mean to suggest that the sheer brilliance of my argument suddenly caused the scales to fall from the eyes of Wikipedia's content guardians. At best, I seem to have stimulated further discussion among the Wiki faithful about whether to eliminate the notability standard (click here and scroll to the bottom), a source of controversy long before I arrived on the scene. (Harvard Business School, for instance, dedicates a case study to Wikipedia's notability-based removal of its article on the term "Enterprise 2.0," coined by one of its professors; the article was merged into a separate article on "enterprise social software.") The notability standard itself still stands, fortresslike, and (as of this writing) continues to threaten elimination of two other Wikipedia entries that I mentioned in my earlier piece: for a Japanese anime series called Final Approach and for a Finnish security consulting company called Secproof. A third topic that I cited earlier as being endangered due to insufficient notability—Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens—has since been rated sufficiently notable, apparently on the merits.

My rescue, by contrast, seems to be a case of jury nullification. Let's review the sequence of events.

As I reported yesterday, my Wikipedia bio was bumping along, minding its own business, when a Wikipedia user (identified on the site as REtwW) tagged it for removal on notability grounds. A Wikipedia "sysop," or administrator, named Benjamin Lowe (one of about 1,500 volunteers chosen to enforce Wikipedia's standards; his day job is homeland-security consulting) has since explained to me that REtwW didn't enjoy any special gatekeeping privileges and that the tagging was very preliminary. At this stage, Lowe said, the expectation was that some other user would come along and add material clarifying the subject's notability, and that would be that. If such clarification proved impossible—as it would in my case, because (as I explained in my earlier column) the language of the notability guideline pretty clearly excluded me—then another user would, at least in theory, initiate the process of removal.

Slate published my Wikipedia column. In the blink of an eye, one user removed my scarlet letter of non-notability. Then another user, one Kendrick7, not only restored the scarlet letter but initiated my removal process, which consists of five days of debate followed by a sysop's ruling on the matter. If no one chooses to debate, the Wikipedia entry automatically comes down. That was not a worry here; the appearance of my piece in Slate (and, the next day, in the Post) brought hordes of Wikipedia users to the site. They added and subtracted biographical details to my entry; added citations (my entry had also been tagged for its lack of citations, an easy problem to fix); argued passionately about whether the bio should mention the "Chatterbox" column about Wikipedia that had caused this ruckus in the first place; and, of course, debated whether Wikipedia should keep my entry at all. (I stayed out of the editing and debating processes because I didn't want to pollute the outcome, about which I was very curious.)

The pro-Tims tended to agree with me that the notability standard ought to be eliminated outright. The anti-Tims argued that the notability standard was a necessary bulwark against anarchy and noted that I myself had asserted that it rendered me ineligible. Eventually an administrator (handle: JDoorjam) cut the process short, which is allowed under a Wikipedia rule that says you can ignore all other rules when the site's basic health is at stake. JDoorjam decreed that I would be "speedy kept" (i.e., reinstated immediately), and he explained he had short-circuited discussion because it was inviting "troll magnetry" (i.e., lots of uncouth people logging on and saying rude things) and "edit warring" (i.e., people repeatedly doing and undoing the same edits). As I write this, the final entered comment reads as follows:

Wow. That's just shameful. A run of the mill columnist intimidated you into keeping his article by bitching in a public forum. If that's all it takes, Wiki has a long way to go before it can be considered at all legitimate.

Not my intent, but also not my concern. I continue to believe that Wikipedia should stop putting on airs about legitimacy and repeal its notability standard. In a future column, I'll consider the arguments against my open-the-floodgates position as readers have presented them to me over the last few days.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray Editor:

Ben Lowe, an administrator from Wikipedia, submitted a detailed response to Noah's article in our Chatterbox Fray. His reply is below. You can read Tim Noah's response at this link.

Remarks from the Fray:

I'm an administrator at Wikipedia, where poor Tim Noah has been rather battered this week. First he accidentally caused the Wikipedia article about him to be nominated for deletion, and then on the talk page about the article, he was called a "bitching, run-of-the-mill columnist," and, infinitely worse from a Wikipedia perspective, non-notable. So I'm somewhat reticent to kick Tim while he's down.

But every time the media interacts with the project in one way or another, it's as though they're drunken tourists stumbling through the encyclopedia we've been tending to, trampling inevitably over some poor article or another. It gets rather frustrating. So I thought that, as Tim had already gotten your attention, I would explain what it's like from our side when columns about Wikipedia are written criticizing half-understood facets of the project, and this way if you do come to visit, you have some idea of the lay of the land.

I suppose this is best framed with a bit of history. In the good old days, back in 2003, 2004, tech journalists would go on safari to the wild Wikipedia, and they'd write puff pieces about how impressive it was that thousands of articles had been written by volunteers, as though we savages were building great, rough-hewn stone pyramids in the jungles of the internet. They would gloss over its flaws, which were far more glaring then than they are now, and pat us on the head and that was that.

Ironically, it is only now that the content of the project has so radically improved that it's way edgier and more hip to criticize Wikipedia. I suppose that's because headlines like "Wikipedia: Still Pretty Cool" don't sell newspapers. Some go after the low-hanging fruit "Wikipedia isn't totally reliable," or "Look how easy it is to vandalize Wikipedia" (though Stephen Colbert more or less trampled that one to death).

Tim Noah was slightly more ambitious: he went with "Wikipedia's standards for biographical articles reflect that we, as a society, impose hierarchical class systems upon ourselves in the form of 'notability,' and are now bringing this normative system with us into the 21 st century and the digital age; also, some ass-hat is trying to delete me."

I am in no way saying the media should not criticize Wikipedia. Quite the opposite: like any other organized endeavor, Wikipedia relies on the guidance of well-informed criticism, and the perspective of those independent of the project is very valuable. I simply wish Wikipedia's critics would make sure they know precisely what they are talking about before leveling critiques.

For instance, Tim did not get in touch with anyone actively associated with Wikipedia to make sure what he was saying was accurate until after he had already published his first Wikipedia-related column. This is unfortunate: the crux of his column was that the article about him was nominated for deletion. It even inspired a dandy illustration of a Wiki-headed police officer expelling poor Timothy.

It was also completely false. Tim had misinterpreted a banner someone had placed atop the article as some sort of kiss of wiki-death (the death sentence anyone can edit!), and while he later issued a sort of correction, the talk page associated with his article is now aflame with angry messages from loyal, misinformed fans of Tim's. To quote one participant, the discussion is generating "far more heat than light." I was glad to talk to Tim before he published his second article, but I or anyone associated with the project would have far preferred the opportunity to clear these things up before they had ever gone to print.

Incidents like this one aren't detrimental to the project. They don't even really rise above the level of frustration (except the Colbert incident… that really sucked). But they are something of a headache. For some reason journalists feel they have free license to plunge into stories about Wikipedia without contacting those involved with the project to a far greater degree than they do about most subjects. So please, do your homework. We'll even help.

Now, I feel like I may have been mean to Tim, and so I'm going to do him this favor:

Timothy Noah lives with his two children in Takoma Park.

Tim had inserted this into his own Wikipedia article, but because there was no source citation – that is, because no trustworthy media source had mentioned these facts – this information is accompanied in Tim's Wikipedia article by an unsightly [citation needed] tag. Well, if you or anyone else with a byline picks up that comment and publish it, now you have your reference! There, never let it be said opinion columns about Wikipedia can't help the project.

--Ben_Lowe

(To reply, click here.)

I assume [Wiki has a notability requirement] to cut down on the amount of inaccurate garbage on their site. If you sabotage or muck up an entry on Albert Einstein, it will be flagged or fixed by lunch. If, on the other hand, your biography of your cleaning lady describes her as a Soviet mercenary, it will stay that way forever, or until your cleaning lady discovers it, which is probably close enough.

--VitaminTommy

(To reply, click here.)

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