How To Get In Wikipedia: Get An Article Written About How You Aren't In Wikipedia
from the circular-logic dept
A Las Vegas-based Celtic band was the subject of a local newspaper article discussing how it wasn't listed in Wikipedia. A member of the band, Killian's Angels, noticed this when she checked the Wikipedia article about the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto IV video game, upon which the band appears. Every other band had a Wikipedia entry, so eventually one of the band's fans wrote one about them -- and it was deleted later that day because the band wasn't, according to Wikipedia editors, "notable." Cue the newspaper article... and then the follow-up, saying the band was back in Wikipedia, with an entry linking to the original story. A Wikipedia spokesman told the paper that "Sometimes furor over a deletion leads to a newspaper article, he said, which leads to notability that warrants a Wikipedia page." So a band isn't notable enough to be included in Wikipedia, but then an article saying just that makes them notable enough for inclusion?Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: killian's angels, wikipedia
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How about being all over the place online?
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Re: How about being all over the place online?
Their policy for "speedy deletion" really boils down to making it easy for articles to be removed if an editor agrees with the person who marked said articles for deletion.
This story really highlights the absurdity of bureaucracy (in all cases, not just at Wikimedia).
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Deletions at all make Wikipedia useless.
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Re: Deletions at all make Wikipedia useless.
Wikipedia, in theory, works off of consensus of authoritative sources and discussion. Left wingers, intellectuals, academics... They tend to use these items to prove their points.
Conservatives, especially those of the talk show host variety, seem to think that a minority of scientists, non-authoritative sources, and their 'gut' are all more reliable than those sources the left tends towards.
That's not to say that the Left is always right, and the Right is always wrong.. Simply that the Left tends towards sources that are easier to verify, where as the Right tends towards sources that are.. well.. not.
But go ahead on to Conservapedia and read about how Barack Obama is the first Muslim President, and note that the Tuskegee Experiments seemingly never happened, and you clutch onto that reality! Clutch onto it like it was a life preserver!
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This is a combination of mistakes but not a systematic flaw in wikipedia
The wiki method has worked fine for this article, and it will continue to be improved, especially with more citations. The incidental article about its deletion, while fun, would not be material to its inclusion in the long run, as such an article would not be written in a trusted source without some notability as it is. While I'm sure Jay Walsh (the spokesman) is an expert on many things Wikipedian, I feel he didn't convey the extra layer of what happened here.
Nothing truly surprising here, just a little roundabout way of the wiki method paying off.
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One more thing to clear up
This quote of the post above (which takes some ideas from the newspaper article) illustrates this inaccuracy: "it was deleted later that day because the band wasn't, according to Wikipedia editors". The quote needs a "some" before "Wikipedia" to be accurate.
Again, I don't think anything went wrong here, it just took a different path than usual to get to a good start of an article.
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Marketing
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wikipedia articles
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I wonder if this would work ...
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Wiki war
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Tell me about it!
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Furthermore...
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stop deleting
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Frustrated!
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New Band!
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wikipedia article
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Wikipedia
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Wikipedia
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Notability is clearly subjective in their eyes.
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