Week 6: Who gets to exist

Deletion is the most consequential decision a volunteer community makes, and it is made by whoever turned up to the discussion

29 March 2027

A deletion debate is seven days long, decided by a handful of self-selected participants, and closed by one person reading for consensus rather than counting votes. There is no appeal that does not route back through the same population. The outcome determines whether a subject is documented in the most widely consulted reference work in human history.

Notability is the criterion, and it is a criterion about sources rather than about worth: a subject is notable if independent published sources have covered it in depth. Which sounds neutral, and is not, because coverage is produced by publishing industries that have historically attended to some subjects and not others. The rule launders an existing distribution of attention into an editorial standard and then applies it evenly, which is exactly how a fair procedure produces a lopsided result.

You can see the shape in the outcomes. Between 2017 and 2020 women were somewhere under a fifth of the biographies on English Wikipedia and over a quarter of the deletion nominations — and once nominated, their biographies were more likely than men’s to be kept. Nominated more, deleted less: the nominations were not finding a real notability problem.

This is the week where the course stops being about etiquette. Hold both thoughts: the process is legitimate, and the process is biased, and your job as a contributor is to work inside it while knowing which is which.

Outline#

• notability as a claim about sources, not about importance
• speedy deletion, proposed deletion, and the seven-day discussion
• closing for consensus: what a closer is actually weighing
• systemic bias, measured — who gets nominated, who gets kept
• arguing to keep: what works, and what only feels good to write