Wikipedia's Notability Crisis: When Your Achievement Doesn't Count

Every day, Wikipedia editors face an impossible task: deciding who deserves to exist on the internet’s most trusted encyclopedia. Not physically, of course. Digitally. And by that measure, thousands of accomplished professionals are being erased.

Xavier Trudeau, the son of Canada’s former prime minister, recently started an R&B career. Evanescence’s Tim McCord has played guitar for a platinum-selling band. Rainer Holtorff won Yachtmaster of the Year. All three had Wikipedia biographies. All three faced deletion in the same year.

The irony cuts deep. Wikipedia hosts over 7 million articles in English, yet it operates on a scarcity mindset. The platform’s volunteer editors don’t have infinite time. That energy spent verifying Xavier Trudeau’s single release dates could instead be used investigating whether a Civil War officer really drank mustard during battle, a claim that sat unexamined for 17 years.

Verifiable, Not True

The distinction matters enormously. “We’re not really looking for what’s true,” Wikipedia veteran Britta Gustafson told the source. “We’re looking for what’s verifiable.” This explains why the mustard claim finally got removed not because someone proved it false, but because there was zero reliable evidence supporting it.

Wikipedia editors don’t personally decide notability. They determine whether reliable sources exist to prove notability. Kimberly Small, a Nevada nonprofit CEO focused on sexual assault survivors, lost her biography not because her work lacked merit, but because editors questioned how to judge nonprofit executives through Wikipedia’s framework. One editor pointedly noted: “Wikipedia coverage is not a prize.”

But try telling that to the people who’ve actually lost one. When I reported on hundreds of subjects facing deletion, my response rate to “how does this feel” was roughly 1 percent. The shame, apparently, runs deep.

Matthew Songer, a Michigan orthopedist with 30 years of experience, broke that silence. His Wikipedia page provided real value, he said. Expert witnesses in trials gain credibility from Wikipedia biographies. Attorneys trust that imprimatur. His page got deleted anyway.

The Promotion Paradox

Here’s where it gets genuinely twisted. Martina Dimoska, a NASA analog astronaut and science communicator, celebrated finding her Wikipedia biography on Facebook. “A few years ago, building a career in space from the Balkans felt impossible,” she wrote. “Now somehow, that journey is part of the public record.”

The next day, her page was nominated for deletion.

A Wikipedia editor named Kiril Simeonovski viewed her post as self-congratulatory and suspected she’d created the biography herself. The timing looked suspicious. But here’s the real problem Simeonovski raised: Dimoska’s biography sourced information from her own LinkedIn posts. It promoted her social media. It looked like a résumé pretending to be journalism.

What followed was a tech warfare scenario that reads like satire. Anonymous users appeared defending Dimoska, their IP addresses traced to North Macedonia. One claimed to be “Kiril’s mom.” Another adopted a coded reference to Simeonovski’s actual mother’s name. Both accounts got blocked.

Then new anonymous defenders arrived, citing sources like The Telegraph (which turned out to be the Albanian website Telegrafi). They confronted Simeonovski about his own sourcing standards, noting he’d used articles from the National Bank of North Macedonia. “Isn’t that where you work?” they asked.

Simeonovski threatened to involve Wikimedia Foundation lawyers.

The Wikipedia Catch-22

Maneli Mirkhan, a French-Iranian adviser on international affairs, had her biography deleted for reading like a résumé. But here’s the thing: when media outlets cite you frequently, you become notable. When you’re on Wikipedia, media outlets trust you more. Her biography eventually reappeared with new sources after French outlets quoted her on Iran.

The chicken-and-egg problem became self-evident. Getting media coverage requires credibility. Wikipedia provides credibility. But Wikipedia requires media coverage.

Andrew Wyant, a fitness professional who claims responsibility for building an entire industry category, admitted he’s “largely responsible” for growth in his field but refused to manufacture media coverage to prove it. His biography disappeared.

This isn’t about truth anymore. It’s about whether enough outlets have written about you. It’s a system that rewards self-promotion, punishes humility, and ironically, trusts media coverage more than actual accomplishment.

Wikipedia wants to verify, not judge. But in requiring verifiability, it has created a system where the most promotionally aggressive win, and the quietly accomplished lose.

Source: The New Yorker