User:KDS4444/WP:NAVEL-GAZING

Notability essay

You will never become Wikipedia-notable by editing Wikipedia. Writing a thousand articles, uploading a thousand freely licensed files to Commons, and completing your one millionth edit are laudable goals, and Wikipedia itself provides certain in-house recognition for such things. This does not, however, equate to notability, and there are no subject-specific notability criteria for Wikipedia editors. Even an article written about you in good faith by someone else on Wikipedia is likely to appear as something self-aggrandizing and self-serving: the Roman emperor Cato, when asked why there was no statue of him in the Roman Forum, once replied, "I would much rather the people asked, 'Why does Cato have no statue?' than 'Why does he have one?'" The same applies to Wikipedians. If other editors are likely to ask themselves why you, of all people, have a Wikipedia article, even an article that you had no part in creating, and while you may be flattered by such an article, Wikipedia isn't here to make its editors famous. In fact, a personal Wikipedia article is the very last thing any editor should desire, even those notable for events and acts unrelated to Wikipedia.

Jimmy Whales has a Wikipedia article. This is true, and few doubt the reason's for his inclusion here. In fact, there is almost nothing Jimmy could do to get himself removed, even if he wanted to, short of somehow shutting down the servers and disabling the entire website. Some people who happen to have been involved in editing Wikipedia and who are notable only in connection to it have received so much direct and in-depth coverage in so many reliable independent verifiable reliable secondary third-party published sources with broad public interest and international readership that their notability is unlikely ever to be refuted. Wikipedia has some high-level unpaid positions that often require years of experience and involvement to be considered for— how many of our Stewards or CheckUsers or Bureaucrats have warranted Wikipedia articles thus far? Precious few, and even those are sometimes nominated for deletion.

The reasons there are so few articles on Wikipedia about Wikipedians should be obvious: besides the obvious conflict of interest problems, there is the issue that being notable means you are held up to what is sometimes uncomfortable scrutiny. This is called the Law of Unintended Consequences, and it applies as much to Wikipedia biographies about Wikipedians as it does to other biography articles. It states that while an editor may create an article about someone notable whom they adore, any negative information coming from a suitable source and is directly relevant to the article may not be removed simply because it is negative, as doing so would violate our principle of neutrality and our desire for balanced content. Every "bad" or "embarrassing" or shameful thing every US President has ever done and which has been written about has often ended up in the Wikipedia articles about them.

Examples of deletion discussions about Wikipedia articles about Wikipedia editors

 * Articles for deletion/Steven Pruitt
 * Articles for deletion/James Heilman
 * Articles for deletion/James Heilman (2nd nomination)
 * Articles for deletion/James Heilman (3rd nomination)