WikiAngela

“Who is this Angela person I keep hearing about?”

Posted by Angela Beesley on July 18, 2006 (Wiki, Wikipedia)

I hoped it would be third time lucky when trying to get the Wikipedia article about me deleted, but John Lyden closed the debate as “keep” today since there was no consensus to delete it.

I thought that my resignation from Wikimedia’s Board would be enough to sway the decision, not because I think resigning from a post makes me less notable, but because I didn’t think I was notable to start with and I thought that people might realise this if they were no longer biased by their desire to keep self-referential articles about current Board members.

A lot of the votes were simply based on whether or not I meet the guidelines at [[WP:BIO]]. A few of the reasons were patent nonsense (”Keep. As a Vice President of the Wiki Foundation…” - there’s no such thing as the Wiki Foundation and I wasn’t a VP of Wikimedia either, and “a co-founder of one of the highest traffic and most famous sites on the Internet” - from someone bizarrely thinking, and refusing to correct this false statement, that I founded Wikipedia). Other reasons for keeping seemed like exaggerations to me (”100 years from now, people would like to know more about her as one of the pioneers of [the] wiki-movement” — Bhadani or “In a hundred years, people are going to wonder about this “wiki” thing and want to know the key players behind it” –GreenReaper).

Comparisons were made with other people who wanted to be deleted (like Daniel Brandt and Seth Finkelstein, who both supported the deletion of my article), and some were worried about the precedent it might set (”it might not be good for us to set any sort of precedents regarding deletion of articles because the subject wants it.” — Dtobias). Some were opposing deletion on the grounds that I nominated it (”we can’t be having articles based on the desires of the subjects” — Badlydrawnjeff) though it did raise some policy issues about whether the subject’s view should be taken into account (”If the subject of a borderline biography does not want an article about themselves in Wikipedia, we should respect that.” — Eloquence).

Surprisingly, no one actually came up with anything new that might demonstrate more notability - like the fact I contributed to a book on wikis that was published earlier this year or my three television appearances. The only research people reported was in favour of deletion - I apparently have no citations in Google Book Search or The New York Times. Unfortunately, a lack of reliable sources wasn’t enough to convince most people to agree to deletion.

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See also the Wikipedia Signpost report on all of this: “Issue of article subjects requesting deletion taken up“. The title of this post was Mackensen’s question, made in the first post to the deletion listing.