I am a non-admin who does a lot of work on Wikipedia primarily trying to add articles about notable women who somehow do not have pages about them. The tiny fiefdom thing is, to my mind, entirely correct. People who have specific perspectives or grudges, and a posse, and a lot of time, can often just outlast other people in Wikipedia arguments. There is so much reading and so many arcane fiddly aspects of knowing how to do Wikipedia "right" that it can be hard to get any traction in issues like this where someone (or some people) with an agenda decide they're going to go after someone, or an article about them. The good news is that since this article is a redirect (i.e. it points to Dragonball Z) it could, at some future point, be reinstated without the entire thing needing to be rewritten. Cold comfort but good to know, perhaps.
My Wikipedia page is full of lies, things that I have never said, positions that I have never taken. At one point someone tried to actually quote some of the columns that I have written on controversial subjects and these were rejected because the place the columns ran is not viewed as “reliable“ even though they were my own words that other Wikipedia editors twisted“ in from various blogs.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia is filled with entries for baseball players from over 100 years ago who did little more than get a single at-bat, struck out, went back to the minors, and did nothing else notable.
Or some politician in Turkey or Brazil who held a very minor elected office for a year or two in the 1950s and did nothing else notable.
Or some horse who placed 12th in a minor race decades ago and spent the rest of his life as a stud of similar caliber race horses.
"There’s no fair and transparent appeal process at Wikipedia." - actually there is, it's just complicated.
Wikipedia's BLP (biographies of living persons) policy has teeth, for quite a lot of good reasons. There is a 15+ year history (dating back to the Seigenthaler affair) backing this up, as well as the advice of WMF legal.
Claims about living people need to have references, they can't just be added unsourced. According to the edit history < https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&action=history >, some of them were added by a person claiming to be Bruce Faulconer; that still isn't good enough. (also, editing an article about yourself violates a different policy).
And "Bruce Faulconer is an American composer whose music was featured on Dragonball Z" on its own is not an article. Have any newspapers or magazines written about him? As far as I can tell, the answer is "no". You don't give any links or citations here, Google doesn't have any, the article didn't have any, the deletion discussion < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer > doesn't have any.
This is especially odd, because Wikipedia pages exist for probably tens of thousands of people who have accomplished nothing in particular. (I don't have one; don't want one.) The irregularities are so commonplace that in my second life as a college teacher, students are told never to use Wikipedia as a source; those that do are not only caught cheating, but cheating inaccurate information most of the time. Years of birth and death, if relevant, are mostly reliable, but not always.
Don't get me going. I agree with not only Ted's take, but Jessamyn below. Wikipedia, while not completely dominated by trolls, has a large troll problem - and it's most acute in places that you'd never suspect. I'm a physicist, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to correct obvious mistakes in a few technical topics (sometimes related to acoustics and the physics of music) only to have my correct work undone by trolls who sit on those pages. It's impossible for anyone with an actual life to do anything about it either. Right and wrong has got nothing to do with it. It's about the egos of a few people who have nothing better to do. If they actually had the qualifications to be editing the topics they sit on all day, they'd very likely have better things to do. It's just nuts. And it's the reason why I laugh every time they sent me a fundraiser. But it's not all gloom and doom. I once looked up Sigmund Freud to help a student who was in my office looking for some light biographical data and we discovered that some one had changed "Sigmund" to "Poopie" and "Freud" to "Head" throughout 8 pages of Freud's entry. Now that was good stuff!
The fundamental issue is that *there are almost no mentions of this composer in any media articles*, outside of a couple mentions about Dragon Ball Z. I tried searching myself, and also came up empty.
> People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.
By these policies, there is not sufficient references to justify a separate article about this composer. As a Wikipedia editor (but not an admin), I would have agreed with the request for deletion.
Note that as a result of this article, *the Wikipedia page has been restored* by an admin with the notice that it needs more reliable sources. It's now up to the author of this Substack newsletter and any other Wikipedia editors who want to get involved to find and add more appropriate references. If those references cannot be found, the article will most likely be deleted again in the future.
The process is misunderstood here. If Wikipedia were to keep all of the articles added every minute of every day, there'd be a never-ending backlog of crap to clean out. Few people are able to grasp the very easy-to-understand notability requirements these days (just have secondary sources from reputable publishers, easy enough) and just want to write about themselves or their dog.
I am a programmer, and have been one all my life. I think nobody had any business deleting any Wikipedia page, much less Faulconer's. I am going to quibble over a description you made, though.
The page recovery process is not "designed" to intimidate. It is done in a way that requires the least amount of work for Wikipedia programmers - who are not at all the same as Wikipedia editors. It is quite normal for these things, as page deletion is a very unusual think among wikis, and recovery of a deleted page is even more unusual.
So what you are seeing is more of a "nobody did the work needed to make this easier", rather than "some programmer is trying to scare you off". So, I can see that it very much has an intimidating effect, but I push back on whether that was its intention.
Nevertheless, the editors who do this - who are not at all the same as the programmers, or the Wikipedia foundation - use this to enhance their position. They enjoy the ability to separate "sheep" from "goats".
I would make the rule that no wikipedia page should ever be deleted, but that too, can be abused. This shows to me in yet another place, that human discourse must be moderated and moderated by someone with some point of view. There is no "objective" (though there is data!).
These category issues show up all over the place on the internet, just as they do in real life - American literature establishment types often turn up their noses at "genre" fiction, but the categories don't really show up in European bookstores, where, as I am told, fiction is just fiction.
They show up in music, too, as we've discussed before.
Why is Wikipedia important? What difference does it make if you are in or out? I've never used it so I don't know what the fuss is about. If I want to find someone, I google their name , whether well known or not, and that name usually shows up.
Twelve years ago I was an RA for an eminent scholar of Islamic art and architecture. A Wikipedia editor posted a flagrantly false mischaracterization of an argument he had made in a paper some years before, and he was profoundly upset by it. When my professor attempted to edit the posts so that they aligned to the truth his edits were struck down for insufficient justification. When he attempted again, and justified them with the fact that he was in fact the author of the paper under discussion, his edit was struck down again for being based on an appeal to authority. Kafkaesque indeed.
Wikipedia has received their last donation from me. With the seemingly endless pages on random citizens who’ve done nothing “notable” - the audacity to spike a page that’s been around for so long (and aren’t the people at Wikipedia anime fans? Sure seems like it) when the person CLEARLY is notable in the field is just insane.
This is a microcosm of what the computer age and the internet have become. Corrupt, malicious, and befuddling. Sad what it has become, makes me long for the days of paper, pen, and the human touch
The standard for notability is in part meant to be protective, particularly of living people. If there's minimal independent and reliable coverage of a person, it makes it difficult-to-impossible to ensure and maintain the accuracy and integrity of the content over time. That results in hoaxes, defamation complaints, and all kinds of other bad things.
And incidentally, the author went on a bit of a rampage - creating multiple fake accounts to gild the article, ignoring policies and advice about editing with a conflict of interest and circumventing technical barriers to continually and knowingly violate Wikipedia policies. That, as much as anything else, is a big part of why the article was ultimately deleted.
I am a non-admin who does a lot of work on Wikipedia primarily trying to add articles about notable women who somehow do not have pages about them. The tiny fiefdom thing is, to my mind, entirely correct. People who have specific perspectives or grudges, and a posse, and a lot of time, can often just outlast other people in Wikipedia arguments. There is so much reading and so many arcane fiddly aspects of knowing how to do Wikipedia "right" that it can be hard to get any traction in issues like this where someone (or some people) with an agenda decide they're going to go after someone, or an article about them. The good news is that since this article is a redirect (i.e. it points to Dragonball Z) it could, at some future point, be reinstated without the entire thing needing to be rewritten. Cold comfort but good to know, perhaps.
My Wikipedia page is full of lies, things that I have never said, positions that I have never taken. At one point someone tried to actually quote some of the columns that I have written on controversial subjects and these were rejected because the place the columns ran is not viewed as “reliable“ even though they were my own words that other Wikipedia editors twisted“ in from various blogs.
Meanwhile, Wikipedia is filled with entries for baseball players from over 100 years ago who did little more than get a single at-bat, struck out, went back to the minors, and did nothing else notable.
Or some politician in Turkey or Brazil who held a very minor elected office for a year or two in the 1950s and did nothing else notable.
Or some horse who placed 12th in a minor race decades ago and spent the rest of his life as a stud of similar caliber race horses.
Jimmy Wales has a lot to answer for.
"There’s no fair and transparent appeal process at Wikipedia." - actually there is, it's just complicated.
Wikipedia's BLP (biographies of living persons) policy has teeth, for quite a lot of good reasons. There is a 15+ year history (dating back to the Seigenthaler affair) backing this up, as well as the advice of WMF legal.
Claims about living people need to have references, they can't just be added unsourced. According to the edit history < https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bruce_Faulconer&action=history >, some of them were added by a person claiming to be Bruce Faulconer; that still isn't good enough. (also, editing an article about yourself violates a different policy).
And "Bruce Faulconer is an American composer whose music was featured on Dragonball Z" on its own is not an article. Have any newspapers or magazines written about him? As far as I can tell, the answer is "no". You don't give any links or citations here, Google doesn't have any, the article didn't have any, the deletion discussion < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer > doesn't have any.
And yet, Wikipedia is constantly asking for money...
This is especially odd, because Wikipedia pages exist for probably tens of thousands of people who have accomplished nothing in particular. (I don't have one; don't want one.) The irregularities are so commonplace that in my second life as a college teacher, students are told never to use Wikipedia as a source; those that do are not only caught cheating, but cheating inaccurate information most of the time. Years of birth and death, if relevant, are mostly reliable, but not always.
Don't get me going. I agree with not only Ted's take, but Jessamyn below. Wikipedia, while not completely dominated by trolls, has a large troll problem - and it's most acute in places that you'd never suspect. I'm a physicist, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to correct obvious mistakes in a few technical topics (sometimes related to acoustics and the physics of music) only to have my correct work undone by trolls who sit on those pages. It's impossible for anyone with an actual life to do anything about it either. Right and wrong has got nothing to do with it. It's about the egos of a few people who have nothing better to do. If they actually had the qualifications to be editing the topics they sit on all day, they'd very likely have better things to do. It's just nuts. And it's the reason why I laugh every time they sent me a fundraiser. But it's not all gloom and doom. I once looked up Sigmund Freud to help a student who was in my office looking for some light biographical data and we discovered that some one had changed "Sigmund" to "Poopie" and "Freud" to "Head" throughout 8 pages of Freud's entry. Now that was good stuff!
Before condemning Wikipedia based on this article, I would encourage people to read the discussion about deleting the page in question - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bruce_Faulconer
The fundamental issue is that *there are almost no mentions of this composer in any media articles*, outside of a couple mentions about Dragon Ball Z. I tried searching myself, and also came up empty.
Wikipedia has a very clear policy about the biographies of living persons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons - and that includes that there must be references from reliable sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
Wikipedia also has a very clear policy about what makes a person "notable" enough to warrant a Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people). The key part is this:
> People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.
By these policies, there is not sufficient references to justify a separate article about this composer. As a Wikipedia editor (but not an admin), I would have agreed with the request for deletion.
Note that as a result of this article, *the Wikipedia page has been restored* by an admin with the notice that it needs more reliable sources. It's now up to the author of this Substack newsletter and any other Wikipedia editors who want to get involved to find and add more appropriate references. If those references cannot be found, the article will most likely be deleted again in the future.
The process is misunderstood here. If Wikipedia were to keep all of the articles added every minute of every day, there'd be a never-ending backlog of crap to clean out. Few people are able to grasp the very easy-to-understand notability requirements these days (just have secondary sources from reputable publishers, easy enough) and just want to write about themselves or their dog.
I am a programmer, and have been one all my life. I think nobody had any business deleting any Wikipedia page, much less Faulconer's. I am going to quibble over a description you made, though.
The page recovery process is not "designed" to intimidate. It is done in a way that requires the least amount of work for Wikipedia programmers - who are not at all the same as Wikipedia editors. It is quite normal for these things, as page deletion is a very unusual think among wikis, and recovery of a deleted page is even more unusual.
So what you are seeing is more of a "nobody did the work needed to make this easier", rather than "some programmer is trying to scare you off". So, I can see that it very much has an intimidating effect, but I push back on whether that was its intention.
Nevertheless, the editors who do this - who are not at all the same as the programmers, or the Wikipedia foundation - use this to enhance their position. They enjoy the ability to separate "sheep" from "goats".
I would make the rule that no wikipedia page should ever be deleted, but that too, can be abused. This shows to me in yet another place, that human discourse must be moderated and moderated by someone with some point of view. There is no "objective" (though there is data!).
These category issues show up all over the place on the internet, just as they do in real life - American literature establishment types often turn up their noses at "genre" fiction, but the categories don't really show up in European bookstores, where, as I am told, fiction is just fiction.
They show up in music, too, as we've discussed before.
Why is Wikipedia important? What difference does it make if you are in or out? I've never used it so I don't know what the fuss is about. If I want to find someone, I google their name , whether well known or not, and that name usually shows up.
Twelve years ago I was an RA for an eminent scholar of Islamic art and architecture. A Wikipedia editor posted a flagrantly false mischaracterization of an argument he had made in a paper some years before, and he was profoundly upset by it. When my professor attempted to edit the posts so that they aligned to the truth his edits were struck down for insufficient justification. When he attempted again, and justified them with the fact that he was in fact the author of the paper under discussion, his edit was struck down again for being based on an appeal to authority. Kafkaesque indeed.
Wikipedia has received their last donation from me. With the seemingly endless pages on random citizens who’ve done nothing “notable” - the audacity to spike a page that’s been around for so long (and aren’t the people at Wikipedia anime fans? Sure seems like it) when the person CLEARLY is notable in the field is just insane.
This is a microcosm of what the computer age and the internet have become. Corrupt, malicious, and befuddling. Sad what it has become, makes me long for the days of paper, pen, and the human touch
I will never donate to Wikipedia. At best, they are the cliff-notes version of a true encyclopedia, at worst, a troll-owned pile of shit.
The standard for notability is in part meant to be protective, particularly of living people. If there's minimal independent and reliable coverage of a person, it makes it difficult-to-impossible to ensure and maintain the accuracy and integrity of the content over time. That results in hoaxes, defamation complaints, and all kinds of other bad things.
And incidentally, the author went on a bit of a rampage - creating multiple fake accounts to gild the article, ignoring policies and advice about editing with a conflict of interest and circumventing technical barriers to continually and knowingly violate Wikipedia policies. That, as much as anything else, is a big part of why the article was ultimately deleted.