Well, THAT'S annoying.

[seawasp]

My Wikipedia page, which has been up for quite a few years, was taken down in September. Apparently, while I was notable enough to remain up there since Boundary was published, now that I'm publishing more novels I'm not notable enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ryk_E._Spoor

Comments

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia has always been really strange with "notability" and "authors." There's a few authors I can think of who probably definitely should have an article by now (Rae Carson, for instance, since at least one of her books got nominated for an Andre Norton award and apparently she hit the USA Today bestseller list) and a couple of short-story only authors who by Wikipedia's "notability" standards probably shouldn't but slip through the cracks. My understanding was for awhile there at least the criteria was "published a book" (not that this was enforced); now it seems to be "got an award nomination" or "got talked about for whatever reason."

My impression has always been, however, that it's more often women authors who end up without articles or with deleted articles, which just makes this decision, even apart from the number of books you've published, all that more surprising.

[seawasp]

Yeah, that's my beef. If they'd never had me up, I wouldn't be annoyed. It's the fact that it was up for *YEARS*, obviously passing all their then-current standards, and suddenly -- a month or so before the release of Spheres -- it's gone, apparently for the fact that other people didn't supply links to reviews or whatever that met their standards.

I obviously can't get involved; authors are frowned upon as participants in their own wikis.

Well, at least I still have my TVTropes page.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

I was curious so clicked on the whole list of authors scheduled for deletion. It looks like the main person who said you didn't have enough links to reviews or whatever has been trying to delete a lot of authors and has deleted pages even after others have pointed out that the author is notable for x, y and z beyond the book. So at least you know it's not personal, even if from the outside the "notability" standards can look a bit arbitrary.

(still looking)

Interestingly, it looks as if several authors who would meet "nominated for a major award" notability standards (I'm classifying the Nebula in that category) don't have articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award_for_Best_Short_Story (scroll down)

And a couple of the Hugo nominees for best short story don't have articles yet either. (Nancy Fulda, E. Lily Yu.)

Maybe the issue is that Wikipedia editors/contributors don't think that many authors are notable.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

And just to clarify, my point is not necessarily that all Nebula/Hugo nominees should get a Wiki page, just if your criteria is "major award nomination" then you should have articles for all award nominees before taking the time to delete other articles.

[pedanther]

Just for the record, "major award nomination" is not in fact one of Wikipedia's criteria for author notability.

[mariness.livejournal.com]

Those specific words aren't used, no. But Wikipedia has used awards/nominations as proof of one or both of the following criteria:

"a significant or well-known work," (on the basis that if the work received a nomination/award it is therefore significant/well known)

"has won significant critical attention," (on the basis that awards/nominations represent significant critical attention)

If you look at the Talk pages for deletion/retention, a _lack_ of such awards/nominations is often cited as a reason for deletion, and a "well X got a nomination for Y" named as a reason for inclusion, along with arguments about whether or not any given award is actually a "major" award.

[pedanther]

I realised after I posted that there is actually an award criterion, which I missed because it's in the people-in-general section, not the specific section for authors. Sorry.

Winning "a well-known and significant award or honor" is considered evidence of notability, as is being nominated "several times". A single nomination apparently isn't. (I don't mean to imply that anybody in this discussion has said it was; just trying to cover all the bases.)

[julesjones]

I remember a few years back there were a couple of people whose hobby was deleting articles about sf people on the grounds that they were not notable.(*) Merely winning multiple Hugo, Locus and Nebula awards didn't make someone notable, because those awards were not notable outside sf. Maybe we're having another spate of that?

(*Or in the case of the one who targeted James Nicoll, first edited the article into complete incoherence, deleted all the links that demonstrated that he *was* notable, and then proposed the article for deletion on the grounds that there were no links to prove that he was notable.)

[lwe.livejournal.com]

You have a TVTropes page? Could you expand on that?

[seawasp]

I do!

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/RykESpoor

With additional pages on several of my works which are pretty good.

You have one, too:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/LawrenceWattEvans?from=Main.LawrenceWattEvans

[lwe.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. So I do. I spotted one minor inaccuracy (in "One-Shot" it's the FBI, not the Secret Service), but mostly it's pretty much right about pretty much everything, including correctly identifying many instances when I was deliberately subverting some tropes.

[kjn]

At least, or at least.

I've hanged around some on TVTropes, on an on-again-off-again basis, and what causes me to leave in disgust at times are the poor processes and the way that bad decisions or policy has a tendency to be perpetuated.

Right now, I don't view TVTropes as a healthy (as in well-functioning, able to recruit new members, and get them to remain there on its own merits) community

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Weird logic, that.

[seawasp]

Well, that's more my sarcasm. Reading the deletion page, whoever started the ball rolling apparently wanted more references that weren't from blogs or whatever, and no one involved could find them. (even though one could find at least two PW reviews, and a School Library Journal, and Digital Knight hit the Locus Bestseller list, etc.)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

An informed editor would Recognize those sources.

[terry austin (from livejournal.com)]

You should read their rules on sources some time. They say outright they don't care about facts, only about what is popularly believed to be facts.

And Ryk isn't consider a credible source on himself, and primary documents aren't allowed as citations. I get why he can 't edit his own page, but you or I aren't allowed to update, for instance, his date of birth by citing either him or his birth certificate.

Wikipedia isn't a credible source for anything.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

ONe more reason why wikipedia is nothing more than an interesting website. It is not in any way complete or authoritative. I rarely use it myself.

[hms42]

The fun question is how to get your page restored with the information provided here. As for wikipedia, its a good starting point to find information and NOT a good primary source of information. Trolls like the one who took down your page are a key problem.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I dislike people who censor or delete who do not use their real names. Like who died and appointed them?

I was also so not impressed by the "its usually women authors deleted" either.

Some of the best popular fiction authors neither win awards or self promote, they just write. Its not gender nor genre.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

Once again, a reminder that wikipedia is as authoratative as geocities.

[lwe.livejournal.com]

Huh. Your post here prompted me to check my own entry. It's still there, and at a quick glance no one's even added anything stupid to it lately.

[seawasp]

I never had problems in that area. I think you mainly get that if you're controversial in some way.

[lwe.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't get much controversy, but I get people entering misinformation from fast and sloppy reading -- wrong dates, over-simplified explanations, that sort of thing.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

How bizarre and yet more confirmation of why Wiki isn't a reliable source for information.

[kjn]

It's up when I checked now, and the decision-to-delete seems to have been quite poorly considered, from how I judged the discussion.

The great thing about Wikipedia is that they've managed to document lots of things that were usually very poorly documented before (like popular culture) and they act as a great enabler of finding information easily.

The good thing about Wikipedia is that you can see and influence the biases that evolve around this.

The bad thing is that you get to see all the dirty laundry.

(BTW, for those who say Wikipedia isn't "reliable" or "authorative", which encyclopedia and so on is? A case in point: only a few years ago it was realised that the formal and authorative collection of every Swedish word - Svenska Akademiens Ordbok, worked on from 1786 - had systematically managed to exclude entire classes of words. For most real-world purposes Wikipedia is more than good enough.)

[seawasp]

Actually, what's up there is a NEW one, put up by the person who first pointed out that the old one had been deleted.

As the new one also doesn't include "real references" and is written in a somewhat informal style, I suspect it's likely to be taken down too.

[kjn]

Yeah, the style and content felt quite a bit off (the things about your private life felt quite unnecessary, eg).

[niall-shapero.livejournal.com]

It would seem as though Green Cardamom has it in for you. Any idea why? (Other, perhaps, than jealousy?).

[seawasp]

Nope. Never heard of them, and as far as I know I never interacted with them.