Are all people with Wikipedia pages truly notable?

Question

I have doubts as to whether we can take Wikipedia entries as 'guarantees' of notability.  Those Wikipedia pages that just regurgitate dates of birth and death should not be taken as 'proof' of Notability.  Should we not state those Wikipedia pages that provide the bio / story of notability are proof that one may be declared Notable?

Comments

Wikipedia should have a cull.  They have way too many articles that can't be finished because the secondary sources they would need don't exist.  But if not enough has been written about somebody, they can't be all that notable.

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I look forward to the day when Wikitree uses so many primary sources that it will be the source for Wikipedia and not the other way around.

Answer 1

In my opinion NO Wiki site is ever a good source for any other site, but we do need something to go by for the project and it was decided that Wikipedia would be the minimum standard. That does not mean that every Notable has a page there and some may not. For those a discussion about that person by the project would allow them to have the sticker on their profile. Even Wikipedia says that they should not be the only source cited and the only reason I use them as a source is to show where I determined that they were notable but I always try to add additional sources, and most of the time I do find and add other sources for them.

Comments

English Wikipedia has a "standard" for notability of people at [[wikipedia:Wikipedia:Notability (people)]]. Each language Wikipedia sets its own rules, so the standards that are linked to all the languages down the side of that page could well set different standards.

We can argue here whether that is still the appropriate standard for the Wikitree Notables project, but it what has been adopted for now.

If you find articles in Wikipedia that you don't think belong there because the subject does not meet Wikipedia's criteria for notability, it is possible to propose them for deletion, see [[wikipedia:Wikipedia:Guide to deletion]].

I agree with Dale that Wikitree and Wikipedia should not be used directly as sources for material in the other, but will add that it is quite possible that the articles, with quite different focus, could well rely on some of the same material, and certainly reading each other's articles could help us improve them both. A good article on either site should reference the sources that were used to write the article, so we can read the Wikipedia sources to help write Wikitree articles (and vice versa).

Scott

[confession - I have been a Wikipedia contributor for much longer than I have been a Wikitree contributor]

Answer 2

I suppose the point is that there has to be some "peg" on which Wikitree can hang the definition of what makes someone "notable". However it is a bit like beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

A case in point. By Wikitree's standards I am not notable but if you type any combination of my names into Google, you instantly get between 8.5 and 9.5 million results and the first line of images are almost all of me. Thereafter it always includes my distant cousins Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, the actors.