Notability on Wikipedia

Our favorite encyclopedia, Wikipedia, turned into the proverbial Rabbit Hole for the K-Landnews Random Research team (RR, pronounced Arr Arr).

As so often, it began with an innocent search, the query of which has now been utterly forgotten, buried under the pages that are the Wikipedia Notability Guidelines (English) and Wikipedia Relevanzkriterien (German).

The RR team collectively remembers that it started out with a German page marked for deletion because of a lack of relevance. The comment by the reviewer was unecpectedly bitchy.

The Weissbier queen, her handle, was not as nice in her statement as the "beer" username might indicate. She probably needed one.

Clicking on her link brought us to a feisty, heated debate about several pages marked for deletion, and from there down the Rabbit Hole.

Of course, there are cultural differences!

Don't expect to find Cricket in the German list of notable sports -- quite yet.

Other differences, however, made us laugh out loud.

The German "commercial products" section has a specific set of criteria for breweries, a minimum age of 100 years or a minimum annual output.
So, if you are looking for microbreweries, you are somewhat out of luck on the German site.

To be fair to wine drinkers, we checked the criteria for inclusion of wineries, and found, once again, very specific ones for the German Wikipedia, i.e. membership in one of two trade organizations. Nothing of the sort in the English version.

Now, the single notable item in the list of criteria for either language that got you this blog post is one criteria for the inclusion of living persons.

German humor must be responsible for the inclusion on the Wikipedia page of a photo of a rabbit jumping a hurdle to illustrate that  99% of people will never be notable enough as a living person to be eligible for their own Wikipedia entry. They added a statement to that effect - a lapse in the sense of humor, where less is more!

The truly vexing criterion, though, is this: you are eligible for an entry in the German version if you "have been named in several publications by the German domestic intelligence agencies" [our translation of "in mehreren Publikationen der Verfassungsschutzbehörden namentlich hervorgehoben worden].

That should be pretty darn easy these days.

P.S.: We are grateful to all the hard working Wikipedia volunteers everywhere! The world would be a much less intelligent place without your effort.