The deletionists over at Wikipedia apparently don’t feel that people’s pets are “notable“, even when the owners of said pets are famous enough to merit a redirect to a list of people who did something once in an election somewhere. I cannot believe that they would dare tell me that my dog is not worth five to thirty paragraphs of virtual ink.
Harley Wolfrom
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Harley Wolfrom (disambiguation).
Harley Hemingway Artaxerxes McIntyre “Harles” Wolfrom (born December 16, 2002) is a champion watch dog and piano leg urinator in Canada. From an inauspicious start, Harley became an unlikely consumer of his own vomit. Harley has his own Twitter feed and his autobiography My Bad Breath, Myself is tentatively scheduled for a November 2013 release.
etc…
I didn’t bother arguing with the secret cabal of Wikipedia editors (secret participant list available here), who apparently believe that it would be impossible to maintain a consistent level of quality and objectivity if everybody starts adding articles about their dogs, cats, or school trustees.
They also whine and complain that it’s hard to verify an article when it has no sources cited or when the person writing it is the person in the article (or in my case, the person who follows behind the notable individual with a plastic grocery bag wrapped over my left hand).
As if there’s a problem if someone who self-publishes a paranormal romance novel were to write themselves an entry where they self-identify as a “gifted fiction author who loves spaghetti and sleeping in on weekends”. (Note: my debut novel, Skylight: Kinky Zombie Sex may be available soon.)
And as if people really take issue with any of the following articles being in Wikipedia:
- Charlie Ross (Auctioneer): no sources, one author (now deleted from Wikipedia) called Poziedriving who had many of their contributions removed and deleted and had been warned about vandalizing. What’s notable about Charlie Ross’ entry is that he might actually be notable enough for Wikipedia based on available sources. The problem may be that he isn’t notable enough for anyone to have bothered to cite anything on him… is that a Catch-22 of some kind? Hold on… I’ll check…
- Scott Gale: the entire article is “Scott Gale is the music composer and artist for Saved By The Bell.” For whatever reason, the deletionists at Wikipedia don’t believe in having one-line articles on every person who’s coordinated music for a US television show. Yet they’ll devote multiple paragraphs to this other music guy named Scott, and they didn’t even have television back then.
- Adam Smith (Actor): no sources on this actor (born 1994) who is mentioned as having several uncited amateur and theatre school credits and a web series, all information added to Wikipedia by a user named Asmith94. There is of course no confirmation that Asmith94 has ever met Adam Smith the actor, but whoever that is seems to know a lot about him. Can Wikipedia’s sky-high notability standards be met if you have a celebrity stalker with an eerily similar name posting an article about you?
Let’s be clear: these are all legitimate Wikipedia entries.
Anyone who doesn’t feel that Charlie Ross’ work as an auctioneer is so important that no sources are needed is a censoring fascist, plain and simple. If citing is so important, maybe Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales should personally show me the link on Wikipedia that proves there’s no truth to the rumour I’ve just started that Betty White likes to kill and eat adorable puppies. Oh, wait, you don’t have that source, Jimmy? Guess I’d better go make some edits…
Likewise for the Wiki-Nazis who believe that the one-sentence article on music coordinator and two-time theme music composer Scott Gale has no value just because it has no mention of a reliable source and reads like someone watched the credits on their favourite early nineties teen sitcom and shouted out “hey! that music guy should have a single uncited sentence written about him on Wikipedia!”
And why should young Scottish actor Adam Smith not be kept on the site just because he is studying to be an actor as opposed to already being a famous actor? Why should we all just sit back and wait until he’s famous? I did some acting myself when I was younger, so I know a little bit about the ol’ thespian game; I won a bronze medal for best actor, coming in third place among the three actors in contention at a French theatre festival for Manitoba students. Note to self: create a Regan Wolfrom (award-winning French-language actor) page.
You know why Wikipedia wants to censor these pages? Because Wikipedia is prejudiced against unsourced material.
Well sorry, Wikipedia, but not every contributor has the good fortune to understand concepts like citation,notability, or conflict of interest. Not everyone comes from privilege like Jimmy Wales does, sleeping on those bags full of money he made from the Babe Report and The Babe Engine. Some people were either too young or too ill-informed to make oodles of cash from soft-core pornography during the golden age of profit-free dot-coms, and very few people have enough cachet at Wikipedia to continually edit their own entry without fear of being banned.
Like most libertarians, Jimmy Wales hates freedom. And unsourced material. And based on what I just read on Betty White’s Wikipedia entry, Jimmy Wales hates puppies enough to join in with Betty whenever she’s chowing down on French Poodle pie.
So if you are as angry and disgusted as I am, consider donating to Wikipedia. Not only does it keep co-founder Jimmy Wales gainfully occupied, preventing future editions of the Babe Report, it also ensures that the only ads on Wikipedia will be the ones promoting Jimmy Wales.
And why shouldn’t he be the only one to profit from his not-for-profit “temple of the mind”? He is the exclusive one-and-only founder, right? Right?
Some people might wonder who I’m making fun of with this post. Is it people who are criticizing Wikipedia, or maybe Jimmy Wales? So I ask you, gentle reader? Why can’t I just make fun of everyone?
Regan Wolfrom 
Let me just say that the delitionistas at Wikipedia and the entire fascist regime therein along with the notion that Jimmy Wales can’t possibly be blowing that much money on bandwidth alone prohibit me from donating a single penny to Wikipedia.
If Wikipedia ran out of money from donations what would happen? It would become a business and they’d have ads. Great. I’d rather have an ad than Jimmy Wales with his hat in hand.
Wikipedia suffers from an insular culture of people scratching each others back saying “look at us, we’re in charge of wikipedia because we deleted over 9000 articles this month”. It’s a horrible state. Instead of deleting worthless articles, they’d be better off having an external review process that vets certain articles. Not to say that articles about pets shouldn’t be deleted, but the deleters have far more power than the contributers. And its a fact that less and less people are submitting articles to wikipedia. Those that do find the process overly complex and fraught with having to go through said deletion rigmarole.
The fact that Wikipedia puts itself on a higher level and thinks blogs and online journalism aren’t worthy of being considered sources speaks volumes for what kind of individuals they are.