moritonal 7 days ago

I created a page, it got declined because the guy who two films have been made about didn't count as important enough. I kind of get it, but still, did kill the energy slightly.

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terribleperson 7 days ago

The notability requirement is a real bane, but it also kind of makes sense when there's really insufficient manpower for the articles they already have. But then, maybe they'd have more manpower if they loosened the notability requirement.

sedev 6 days ago

The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.

strogonoff 7 days ago

If you care about a topic and want to edit Wikipedia but do not want to deal with the process, you can simply talk about what you want to change on the discussion page. Is there an equivalent workaround when it comes to creating new pages?

sedev 7 days ago

You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.

bawolff 7 days ago

I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... is the closest equivalent but not really the same thing.

moritzwarhier 6 days ago

What's the issue with naming the person if you think there should be an encyclopedic article about said person?

If it's about anonymity / not wanting to publicly link your HN and Wikipedia profiles, well fine, but the fact that there are two films about a person does not say much.

People can make films about themselves, too.

moritonal 5 days ago

Oh, it was just because it didn't matter to the conversation. It was about Bernie Jordan who left his nursing home to attend a D-Day event. I created the article because both films imply the nursing home prevented him, but in actuality they went to great lengths to help him.

moritzwarhier 5 days ago

I see, thanks!

Reading the article about the movie, I can kind of see both sides here.

Probably a veteran Wikipedia contributor could draw the lines best, but it seems reasonable to say that the incident itself would not be relevant enough unless it had been made into a movie.

The article about the movie clearly states that it's a true story.

i mean, there are often "curiosity" stories reported by multiple newspapers that are still not really historical events warranting their own article.

I'd draw the line depending on the volume of coverage and publicity in such cases.

And this case doesn't appear to me as if it was a major cultural thing that everyone knew about when it happened (unless they were interested in the movie).

I'm not in the US though, so I can only tell what I see in search results and that the story hasn't really crossed the atlantic into any notable publicity here.