User:Lord Bob/Personal inclusionism

Suppose that Wikipedia were to take the position that every single human being is notable. I could write the following article on me:

Benjamin Massey (b. January 18, 1985 in Sherwood Park, Alberta) is a Canadian university student. He currently attends the University of British Columbia, where he is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree. He is afflicted with a club foot. His band, Aerial Stone Groundlings, play occaisonal shows at various pubs in Vancouver.

Now, what's the problem with this article (I mean, aside from the fact that it reads like crap)? The problem is that just about everything in it is a lie, and, at that, is a lie that would be difficult to disprove with ordinary effort.


 * 1) I was born December 24, 1986 in St. Albert, Alberta.
 * 2) I attend the University of Victoria
 * 3) I am pursuing a Fine Arts degree.
 * 4) My feet are fine.
 * 5) I am not in a band.

With this in mind, consider how easy it would be, on an enyclopaedia that boasts hundreds of thousands of articles with a few hundred editors that bother to hunt down hoaxes and articles worthy of deletion, to disprove these lies and get this article obviated as the hoax it is. Not easy at all.

Consider what those hundreds of editors have to do right now. In order for somebody to have an article on Wikipedia under current policy, that person must be notable. A biographical article must assert notability to avoid speedy deletion, and an article that inadequately asserts notability will often be gassed on AfD. Therefore, the hoax watch is limited to articles that assert notability.

Now, it is much easier for an editor to check whether somebody really holds a Canada Research Chair than it is for somebody to check to see if I'm in a band called Aerial Stone Groundlings. Canada Research Chairs are public figures within the domain of academia, and even ordinary professors are usually listed on school websites. Mere minutes of research would suffice to prove that somebody who claims to hold such a chair does not.

A band that plays every so often on one night at various bars in Vancouver, on the other hand, is a lot harder to check. Such things will often not be on the Internet, and they probably won't be available in any reference an editor in Toronto or New York City will have at hand. It would take an editor who was so comprehensively familiar with Vancouver bar music that they can say with certainty that the band Aerial Stone Groundlings does not exist to expose this hoax, and such editors are few and far between. Their claim would likely be challenged on AfD anyway!

How could you prove my date and location of birth are false? Get a copy of my birth certificate from the Government of Alberta? Even if you could, would you really go through that effort for every bio that would be thrown up on a super-inclusionist Wikipedia? Would anybody? Would issuing bodies bother throwing out dozens of copies of birth certificates, some of which may date back centuries?

How could you prove I'm not going to UBC? Could you get a complete and comprehensive student list? Could you do the same for the Department of Arts? Could you do all of these things in a reasonable timeframe with reasonable effort? And how could you possibly prove the truth that I don't have a club foot?

Remember: if Wikipedia became the encyclopaedia of everybody in the world, many hundreds of thousands of articles would no doubt show up and clutter the encyclopaedia (if you don't believe there are hundreds of thousands of people who'd like to talk about themselves to the entire world, consider the burgeoning personal homepage market. And even a Geocities page is a lot harder to make than a Wikipedia article). Almost all of these would no doubt be as hard to prove wrong as my sample article on me. Extreme personal inclusionism is, in terms of accuracy alone, like putting a big sign up that says "Please Post Bullshit Here".

In my opinion, there are other issues making "everybody-is-notable"-ism impractical and dangerous. But some of them are subjective. To me, verifiability is not. Allowing six billion human beings to post articles about themselves on Wikipedia runs contrary to verifiability in every respect. It's hard enough to detect hoax articles as it is, there is no reason to complicate the issue.