User:Scani/Personal articles

N.B.: This article does not claim any encyclopedic nature, nor should it be construed as WikiFur policy; it should be considered an essay and an essay alone.

As of November 2007 WikiFur has over 8,000 articles, of which almost half are articles about people - most of which, I imagine, are also edited by their subjects.

The more people that are involved in contributing to an article, the less of a claim that person has to request personal exclusion.

In a particular petition for personal exclusion, I made the following remarks (annotations, edits, etc. noted appropriately with square brackets):

When a player posts character articles, they really don't have a claim to notability, because clearly your own creations will have FAR more importance to you [than it will to anyone else]. We've established on [WikiFur] that this level of notability is okay for posting articles. However, if someone else came along and created articles on those same characters, that establishes a higher level of notability. In the former case, requests to delete are justifiable. In the latter case, this is less so, with the justification for deleting decreasing as more people edit the article and take an interest in the subject, establishing a public interest which WikiFur shouldn't interfere with; hence why I say that if there's been notability established by someone else creating an article, it's not their responsibility to argue with WikiFur admins. They need to argue with the fandom at large, an argument they'll likely lose.

However, having an article less likely to be excluded also has its advantages:

The credibility of an article increases significantly when more people above and beyond the subject of an article contribute to it.

Face it; we're not really good at assessing our own notability. If there's something that you've done in the fandom that's worth writing about, somebody will eventually get to it. If you're the only person in the world who thinks it's worth writing about, people who read it probably won't find it worth reading about, either.

I'd say that a lot of articles which their subjects contribute are seen as a great opportunity to network within the fandom and promote one's work. Myself, I don't see WikiFur as a primary source (much as no encyclopedia would consider themselves a primary, or even a secondary source); I believe it's the responsibility of the subject to place information on themselves in sources that they have complete control over (i.e. personal websites, NOT wikis), and in turn it's the responsibility of the average WikiFur editor to peruse through the publicly-available information available on that person and decide which of it is appropriate for a furry encyclopedia, obviously working through community consensus in the process. The more people that do that, the better the article can become, as we're not just looking at the individual through one lens. And on a similar note...

If you've posted a fact about you somewhere public before, it has the right to appear on this Wiki.

This is probably very much common sense, but still. 'Nuff said.