From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Essay on editing Wikipedia
"
I think, therefore I am
," while a powerful philosophical statement, cannot be extended to Wikipedia. In other words, you cannot reword Descartes' famous quote to "I think, therefore I am
notable
".
You
do not qualify to have an article on Wikipedia simply because
you exist
.
Your dearly departed relatives
do not qualify to have an article simply because
they existed
.
Your bouncing bundle of joy
on the way does not qualify to have an article simply because they
will exist
.
Leprechauns
and
fairies
do not qualify to have an article simply because people think they exist ? but their place in the world's culture makes them notable. If any of those have articles, then there are other reasons why they are notable.
Being notable basically means people might actually care about who you are and what you do, enough to write an article of decent length in an encyclopedia. If you're pretty sure you wouldn't find yourself in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
,
World Book Encyclopedia
,
Encarta
, or any number of other
actual
encyclopedias
that don't just directly
mirror
our information, chances are you're
not
going to find yourself on Wikipedia anytime soon.
But my band's ready to hit the big time!
[
edit
]
That's great!
I don't care!
A zillion other bands across the world are making exactly the same claim, and only a handful of them are notable. Come back when you actually do, and in the meantime don't slap your MySpace/Facebook/Bandcamp/SoundCloud link on a Wikipedia page.
Social media
sites are
Bad Things
when trying to establish notability, because all it can say with some degree of reliability is that you exist. And even that has to be taken with a
grain of salt
unless you have something else to back it up, as just as
anyone can edit Wikipedia
, anyone can make a social media page about anything,
even something that doesn't exist
. Basically, having a social media page does not prove you are notable, and providing it as a source generally means you are not notable.
As a rule of thumb, in order to be notable, you need to have received coverage in more than one
independent reliable source
, such as two different unsolicited news articles, about something that is going to make you considered noteworthy. For example:
One really good way to see if you're notable enough for Wikipedia is if someone you don't even know wrote an article about you. Then you know you're known outside of your local community, and better yet, someone else has written the article, so there's no
conflict of interest
.
Exceptions to your being notable include your article violating
Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons#Subjects notable only for one event
or
Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not
(e.g.
WP:NOTNEWS
) .
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- Adminitis
- Akin's Laws of Article Writing
- Alternatives to edit warring
- ANI flu
- Anti-Wikipedian
- Anti-Wikipedianism
- Articlecountitis
- Asshole John rule
- Assume bad faith
- Assume faith
- Assume good wraith
- Assume stupidity
- Assume that everyone's assuming good faith, assuming that you are assuming good faith
- Avoid using preview button
- Avoid using wikilinks
- Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense
- Barnstaritis
- Before they were notable
- BOLD, revert, revert, revert
- Boston Tea Party
- Butterfly effect
- CaPiTaLiZaTiOn MuCh?
- Complete bollocks
- Counting forks
- Counting juntas
- Crap
- Don't stuff beans up your nose
- Don't-give-a-fuckism
- Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"!
- Don't delete the main page
- Editcountitis
- Edits Per Day
- Editsummarisis
- Editing Under the Influence
- Embrace Stop Signs
- Emerson
- Fart
- Five Fs of Wikipedia
- Seven Ages of Editor, by Will E. Spear-Shake
- Go ahead, vandalize
- How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
- How to get away with UPE
- How to put up a straight pole by pushing it at an angle
- How to vandalize correctly
- How to win a citation war
- Ignore all essays
- Ignore every single rule
- Is that even an essay?
- Mess with the templates
- My local pond
- Newcomers are delicious, so go ahead and bite them
- Legal vandalism
- List of jokes about Wikipedia
- LTTAUTMAOK
- No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
- No one cares about your garage band
- No one really cares
- No, really
- No sorcery threats
- Notability is not eternal
- Oops Defense
- Play the game
- Please be a giant dick, so we can ban you
- Please bite the newbies
- Please do not murder the newcomers
- Pledge of Tranquility
- R-e-s-p-e-c-t
- Requests for medication
- Requirements for adminship
- Rouge admin
- Rouge editor
- Sarcasm is really helpful
- Sausages for tasting
- The Night Before Wikimas
- The first rule of Wikipedia
- The Five Pillars of Untruth
- Things that should not be surprising
- The WikiBible
- Watchlistitis
- Wikipedia is an MMORPG
- WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!
- What Wikipedia is not/Outtakes
- Why not create an account?
- Yes legal threats
- You don't have to be mad to work here, but
- You should not write meaningless lists
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