> A Wikipedia editor can tag an article for deletion, and unless satisfactory edits are made within a certain timeframe, the page will disappear. Simeonovski didn’t do this—he referred the article for debate among his fellow editors.

Only in uncontroversial cases. In most cases, there is a debate where consensus is formed on if there is enough information about a person / topic to warrant an encyclopedia article. Wikipedia is struggling as is with the amount of content. An article cannot be written for every person under the son.

> Wikipedia pages, for better or worse, matter to people. To be included is a validation of a life.

There are billionares without wikipedia articles. There are people who have saved thousands of people from death without wikipedia articles. The only thing that matters in getting a wikipedia article is sufficient coverage by reputable 3rd party sources, such that there is enough material to write an accurate, informative, and neutral article. You should not derive your worth by this metric.

Furthermore, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:An_article_about_you...

for a time I really enjoyed being an editor, but then the arguments with other editors felt territorial

> Every day, Wikipedia biographies of living people are flagged for deletion because the subjects are not “notable” enough. How do these poor souls take the news?

How entitled must one be to assume they are owed a page in Wikipedia?

It’s a not very well kept secret that many of these pages for less-than-notable people were created by the person themselves or their “publicist.”

I remember being in school and trying to update the school's page. Some greasy editor blocked it, because I didn't have a source. The source was the fact that I was physically inside the school. Not good enough for them, they left the wildly outdated article to rot instead.

I was subjected to one of those once. I nominated it for deletion myself. I'm glad it's gone.

I'd hate to be the last Guy Standing on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

>Beginning February 2015,[286] there was an ongoing edit war over the image caption for Guy Standing's English Wikipedia article. The debate was over if the word "sitting" should be added to the caption, since he was sitting in the photo.[287] A screenshot of the caption describing him as "Guy Standing sitting" has become a viral internet meme.[286] At one point in the edit war, the caption read "Guy Standing on a chair."[288] As of 2026, the consensus is to exclude the word "sitting".[286][287] In May 2022, Standing was invited to the American podcast Reply All to discuss the "Guy Standing sitting" joke.[286]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedia_controversie...

to desire and then mourn the loss of a personal wikipedia page constitutes a biblical amount of ego

Some great writing here. The irony of the guy campaigning to delete a personal page having had his own page deleted is poignant. It's hard not to read something like identification with the aggressor into this.