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Wikipedia’s Pyrrhic Victory
(www.newyorker.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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If non-notable articles were never deleted, millions of people and companies would create articles about themselves for promotion.
A genuine question: Is a Wikipedia article supposed to be written from an objective perspective?
Yes; all content must be written from a neutral point of view.
Self promotion is a different rule that exists. Also, their threshold for what constitutes 'notability' is ridiculously arbitrary and bureaucratic, or at least it was in the past. I doubt it's changed.
It's notable if there are reliable sources about it. If there are no reliable sources about it, you wouldn't be able to write much about the topic anyway. Unless you conduct your original research.
In theory. I've seen firsthand the number of arguments about what constitutes notability and reliable sources. It's not for nothing that this is the biggest divide among Wikipedia editors.
So? If the information they provide is accurate, what's the big deal?
Because an encyclopedia with millions of promotional articles would lose not only its objectivity, but also crater the standard of quality of the average Wikipedia article.
The Cebuano Wikipedia is the poster child of a project expanding beyond its scope: millions of articles generated by a bot with no one there to edit them after they're created.