Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-08-01/Community view


 * Opinion pieces such as this one reflect the opinion of their author(s), not necessarily that of The Signpost. – E

Technoblade – real name Alexander – was a Minecraft YouTuber who died in June this year. He was immensely popular, with a YouTube channel boasting over 10 million subscribers – a household name among the Minecraft community. That's no small community; over 170 million people play Minecraft at least once a month – if that was a country it would be the 8th biggest country in the world, with over 15 million people playing the game every single day. Technoblade was a very big fish in a very big pond.

Now it's fair to say that not all of Technoblade's 10 million subscribers watched every one of his videos. Some of them received as little as 5–6 million views whereas others exceeded 30 million. His live streams consistently attracted over a million viewers – not much compared to his pre-recorded videos but still much more than many television or radio shows that are considered notable enough to have a Wikipedia article.

And yet, Technoblade did not have a Wikipedia article before he died.

Attempts had been made to write an article about him, but these failed for a couple of reasons. One is that they were often fancruft – badly written biased, unsourced twaddle that wasn't worth the bytes of storage it consumed. The other is that Technoblade was not notable, according to our guidelines, until he died.

While he was alive, although he was very well known among that large community of people I outlined, very little was written about him, especially in what we would recognise as reliable sources. Whereas a conventional media show pulling in the numbers of viewers Technoblade did would almost certainly have widespread coverage in newspapers and magazines, the only substantial material you would be able to find about Technoblade in sources independent of the man himself would be in other people's similar content, blogs or discussion forums. He was probably one of the most notable non-notable people alive.

But when he died of cancer, aged just 23, it was big news. Big enough to warrant stories on news websites across the world, from publishers including the BBC and the Evening Standard to name just a couple, alongside just about every technology-focused publication you could think of. Only when he died was there sufficient coverage for us to create a well-sourced Wikipedia article and fulfill our own notability criteria.

Yet it wasn't his death that was notable. Yes, that's what the articles were about, because that's what the news was. But people die of cancer every single day; there wasn't anything special about Technoblade's death. His death was notable and received that level of news coverage because his life was notable. Because he was notable, as a person, when he was alive.

Notable, but not noted. At least, not by us here on Wikipedia.

So ... did we get it wrong? Is our notability guideline so harsh, so clear-cut, so strict, that it prevented us having an article on a subject that we should have had years earlier? Should we be looking at changing it, or perhaps having a different set of criteria for social media stars like Technoblade who had little written about him in our conventional sources until his death?

Personally, I don't think so. I absolutely think there was indeed a failing here. Technoblade was indeed notable while he was alive, but it was not a failure on Wikipedia's part that resulted in his article never materialising. The simple fact is, had sufficient material been written about him in the mainstream press, or indeed in academic papers studying the phenomena of social media, gaming content creation and youth culture, then we would have had an article on him. As it was, there was simply nothing for us to write about, because we needed others to write about him first.

The problem is not our notability guideline. The problem is not that we should have had an article on Technoblade before he died – we shouldn't. The problem is that mainstream media is still largely comprised of television broadcasters and old-fashioned newspapers who happen to have built websites for themselves, and those organisations are very much self-obsessed. Newspapers write about what's on television. Television news shows – particularly at the beginning and end of the day – devote time to telling you what the newspaper headlines say. It's incredibly rare for them to cover anything that's happening on YouTube or Twitch. And it's that failing of conventional media outlets to engage with modern youth culture – their failing, not ours – that meant poor Technoblade only became the subject of a Wikipedia article after his death.

I'll sign off with this final thought. You might think that I'm writing all this as a Technoblade fan and you'd be wrong. I didn't like him at all, I found his content brash and noisy and I couldn't stomach hearing it for more than a few minutes at a time. So I'm not writing this as a Technoblade fan but as a Wikipedia fan; a fan of our original mantra to "make the internet not suck". And on that note I have to say this: if it takes a clearly notable person to die of cancer at a young age to become technically notable, then the internet does very much suck.

RIP Technoblade.