Fred's not notable
Well, I'm really bugged about this one, having been a Wikipedia fan for the past two years (it's my homepage, God bless).
Fred WIlson, noted venture capitalist and blogger, is Not Notable according to the fellas ultimately in charge over at WIkipedia.
As someone with much better knowledge of the space and subject matter than those involved in deleting it on Wikipedia, I disagree.
As I protested to the Admin's page:
How was the determination made to delete Fred? I've been an avid user of Wikipedia for over 2 years, and, in the scheme of things, Fred is the level of business-person who qualifies under notability.In addition, the comments in favor, while from many newbies, were from educated, informed people familiar with the space. I agree we don't want sub-groups and communities polluting Wikipedia with vanity pages, but this is not one of those cases. And those arguing against displayed no notable knowledge, education, understanding of this category. So while a majority vote shouldn't carry the day, neither should the votes of those who are not qualified to pass on notability.
To take some of my own favorite entries, who, in my assessment would rank below Fred in notability: Yo la tengo Jeff Jarvis Cesaria Evora
I guess, on the positive side, this made me realize exactly how much I love Wikipedia, and has made me determined to participate more.
So I am going to participate more. Stay tuned....
There are some outstanding comments on his blog post, by the way:
In the past I have considered creating some resources on Wikipedia that would cover my speciality in computer performance and capacity planning. I've written books on the subject, have lots of hits on my name if you google it, but hearing about arbitrary decisions like this makes me feel that its not worth the effort. It doesn't feel right that Wikipedia should promote itself at the start as the place where anyone can create and share useful reference information, and then have arbitrary restrictions be placed on who and what can be described there. Its now a bureacracy that I don't want to deal with. However, the Internet has always "routed around censorship", so if someone sets up a new Wiki based on the original principles of Wikipedia, to hold all the things that the bureaucrats are rejecting, I'll support it....
Fred, are you protesting the that you are notable enough to be included but were unfairly excluded, that the notoriety standard is applied inconsistently and cluelessly, or that wikipedia should lower its standard to include less notable people?Or simply shedding light on Wikipedia's process? I had the impression you were interested in exploring the inner workings and edges of the process. Perhaps this post is not a protest after all, but simply a statement of fact.
(It was hard to resist making a snide comment about VC egos on this one, but I managed it)
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Why not get to the heart of the matter? The criteria for including people in Wikipedia based on their notability are here:
