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On several occasions his edits had included references to and quotes from interviews I’d conducted with musicians over the last few years. Who knew?Īs I was poking around in the engine of Wikipedia, I discovered another prolific editor, this one a frequent contributor to Australian music articles, an area of my expertise. “For journalists, it’s less likely than if I created one about a band in your neighborhood.” It turns out that as a profession, we reporters are a lot less self-promotional than aspiring small-town bands. I asked whether someone might yet stumble across it and question why this barely known Australian journalist deserves a Wikipedia stub. “I happened not to create any ripples when I created the page,” he said. At the moment when Johnson clicked ‘save,’ his addition did not raise any alarms with the other logged-in editors, some of whom carefully watch the log of recent changes. “Sure,” he replied, explaining that he’d probably gotten lucky with his timing. When we reconnected via Skype again, I thanked him for his efforts. The guidelines for entries on people suggest that a person should be “worthy of note or notice remarkable.” Notability “in the sense of being ‘famous’ or ‘popular’-although not irrelevant-is secondary.” I presume this is why the article in my name is allowed, as I am neither of those two adjectives. This last point is sometimes cited during discussions around article deletions, as a reminder that the site represents a summary of accepted knowledge on a subject, rather than a complete exposition of all possible details.
#Notability online articles series
“I can stub out an article on you and we can see what happens,” he wrote.ĭeep within a labyrinthine series of prescriptive, encyclopedia-wide guidelines is a page entitled ‘ What Wikipedia is not.’ Among other things, it is not a dictionary, nor a soapbox, nor a crystal ball, nor an indiscriminate collection of information.
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Over email not long after, he proposed that we watch the process unfold ourselves, with a short article that he would create in my name. Our Skype interview ended abruptly after I noticed my apartment roof leaking above my computer. “As long as I don’t write things in too glowing a fashion, there would be no easy way to tell.” “If I wanted to go out and write a puff piece on you before this story came out, nobody would know that we were connected in any way,” he said. Yet he concedes that Wikipedia’s filters for spurious content are imperfect. “The converse is also true: sometimes people will have an axe to grind, and their username will be created just for some vandalism edits.” “If it’s written like a PR piece, it’s probably a PR piece,” he said. He’s a seasoned spotter of self-promotional articles on the site, with small-town pop bands and their associates as prime offenders. “I know it’s sometimes hard to believe, when you’re looking at all these lists of things that other people find very interesting,” he said, “because we’re all geeks on this thing.” Even the individuals seemingly most invested in the minutiae of the universe ( toilet paper orientation: 5,147 words list of sexually active popes: 1,738 words) have standards. “Deletions happen all the time,” he said. He explained how the editors debate over which articles to keep and which ones to remove. I spoke with Johnson the following week over Skype. Hunter Johnson’ article has been marked for deletion three times between 20 it has survived a voting process on each occasion. Its existence is an ongoing point of contention among the community. He works as a database programmer, but the 46-year-old is also a freelance game designer and author with a unique claim among Wikipedians: he is one of the rare few to have a Wikipedia article listed in his name. ‘JHunterJ’ has been an active editor since January 2006 and has amassed more than 66,000 edits, placing him well inside the top 1,000 most prolific contributors.