Weakipedia and a Not-Notable Shaven Master

You can imagine my shock when I read that Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who predicts the start of Spring, by emerging from a hole called Gobbler’s Knob and then observing if he can see his shadow, is now married to Phyllis and has two babies. When did all this happen? His videos have over 800,000 views. He is popular! Like Aitana Lopez a fitness model with 300,000 followers does not exit. She is an AI-creation. Phil has a Wikipedia page. Aitana does not.

Wikipedia was built on the truth system, a peer network where one keeps the other honest. To write an article in it one needs to master a somewhat archaic “language” and then, when you submit your piece, a group of “editors” decide whether the submission is accurate, factual, “newsworthy” and so on.

The chances that an article being rejected is very high. If you are a private person who is super successful but do not do press articles or get interviewed a lot by journalists, you are effectively a nobody, if one assumes a somebody is a person listed on Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started Wikipedia and with their vast knowledge and intelligence it would seem like a simple tweak – have an expert group to add profiles of folks who may be private, do not posses the characteristics of “newsworthiness” but should be on Wikipedia. Larry founded Citizendium and he said it will soon attempt to unseat Wikipedia as the go-to destination for general information online. It went nowhere. Wiki says, as of July 2023, Citizendium's web traffic was 70,000 visits per month. Wiki had 2 billion! Ooof.

Canadian Donna Strickland, won the Nobel prize for her work on chirped pulse lasers in 2018. She has a Wiki page, but this came about AFTER she had won the prize. Some awesome Wiki editor had rejected her page on the grounds that she DID NOT HAVE “significant coverage (not just passing mentions)... in published, reliable, secondary sources that are independent of the subject.” A further comment – ““was about a person not yet shown to meet notability guidelines.”

A mere ninety minutes after she won the prize her profile was up!

The agency I founded, BORN, had a page and met all the criteria of notability but it was deleted after TechM acquired the firm. It appears when a company is acquired by another, the system selectively erases notability – I say selectively, because dozens of agencies that have been acquired by the likes of Accenture and WPP still have their pages alive and kicking on Wikipedia.

In 1875 Mathias Kampfe patented the first safety razor. He and his brother Robert were the first to create safety razors, but the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica went to print to say that King Camp Gillette was the inventor. They corrected course but the topic of razors brings the conversation to my name, Keshu. It derives from Keshavan, which can be broken up, if one wants to be perverse, into Kesh (hair) and Shavan (let’s tweak this to Shaven).  In short, I am the dream male model for every razor inventor.

 The irony is that I have a beard, am not notable and Wiki worthy!

Onwards. Upwards.

Keep Rising till Wiki finds your notability acceptable!