this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Yeah, I think what makes Wikipedia resilient is that you can’t just go there and say something subjective. You need to find the correct way to state the actual fact, even when it can have different interpretations. Cause that way, no group can contest it.
Or they'll just declare it non-notable and speedily delete it. They've lost so many newcomers to internal bullshit like that.
That's the resiliency part of it all. Resistance to change is the security.
It's not internal bullshits, it's whether there's enough neutral-schoursches-to-schoursche-its. That's all Notability's about.
It has a really bad name though, that guideline. I was a part of the editors who wanted to change it to "suitability" but there's the resiliency.
Oh no, I once had an article I contributed removed for exactly that, notability. Not sourcing or lack thereof. That was also the last time I ever contributed, obviously.
It didn't help that a couple years later somebody else decided it was notable after all and created the article.
Notability is sourcing: Articles generally require significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the topic. They even made a catchy name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_answer_to_life,_the_universe,_and_everything (well they borrowed it but you catch my drift). Even if every single claim is Verifiable, it will be deleted if there aren't enough secondary (independent of the topic) sources because it's dangerous and likely non-neutral to only hear the subject's view of themselves. Confusing Notability with something else is a pretty common pitfall for new article creators, so there's things like "Articles for creation" where you can submit article drafts for review and have conversations with the reviewer on what exactly is wrong with your article, as well as many other guides and forums like Help:Your first article, WP:Teahouse, and WP:Help desk.
The essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Too_soon is often cited to say "This might get the needed sourcing in a few years, but right no we can't tell, so it's better to create the article again when it has what's needed to align with our content guidelines rather than rush to make a misleading one right now." So either that's exactly what your situation was, or . I'd love to take a look at the article you're talking about.
It was about Leeroy Jenkins. Yes, I'm old. No, it wasn't about reliable sources or neutrality. It was literally because a bunch of folk decided it wasn't important enough to be immortalised in Wikipedia. It was very much reflective of the bias of the editors at the time.
Ooh, creating that article's a lifetime achievement!
Looking at the deletion discussion, I see why you would think everyone only looked at the fame, but none of the article's citations such as "Leeroy/Mortal Kombat Techno Remix" could've shown that it was actually a meme beyond someone's personal character. One editor mentioned hardly finding any Leeroy Jenkins results from Google back then, let alone reliable sources. I have to admit there were definitely some !votes that didn't look for sourcing, though It doesn't help that the article did look like something some random guy created for their OC:
Anyways, just five months later a year-old editor with just over 200 edits made a draft with plenty of good sourcing and took it to WP:DeletionReview, and everyone agreed it was notable enoug.