Who Gets a Wikipedia Entry?
Allison Stokke, the 18-year-old pole vaulter who rejected her Internet fame in a front page article in The Washington Post, evidently has not made the cut at Wikipedia.
The online encyclopedia, whose editors and writers are drawn from the same internet mass that went wild over Ms. Stokke, decided to delete an entry about her after a long, completely transparent debate on the site about whether she was worthy of inclusion based on the site’s guidelines.
“She was a regional high school champion, which clearly fails notability,” a user going by the screen name Corvus cornix argued.
Roy Smith, a member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians, summarized the ruling: “This young lady is notable only for an Internet phenomenon, and a lewd one, at that.”
A blogger at AOL Sports rebutted the notability argument by noting that there were “less famous people than Stokke who have entries.”
He continued: “Face it: This is the world we live in, and if Wikipedia is going to reflect the world we live in, it needs an Allison Stokke page.”
Wikipedians have fought about this before, and the guidelines seem to back the ruling. The more inclusive faction embraces the Web site’s infinite space; another — those Deletionists — respond that it “is not a junkyard.”
Who’s right?
