Wikipedia:The more reason you have to want an article on yourself the less reason we have to give you one

Someone once said that getting a loan from a bank was like borrowing an umbrella from someone who would only lend it if you could prove to them that it wasn't raining.

If you're a rising star of some sort, Wikipedia can feel a bit like that too. We'll report your success, but we won't help you succeed. You need to do that first, without any help from us.

But we will try to explain to you why not.

Wikipedia is like this

How Wikipedia could help

A Wikipedia article bestows upon its subject a certain credibility, and in most cases a far better web presence than even their own website does.

So having a Wikipedia article can certainly help an organisation or a new product or a rising rock star to make it. We have a great global presence. And everyone knows this.

And why we can't

But that's not the idea of Wikipedia at all.

Wikipedia seeks to catalog all of human knowledge, but by that we don't mean everything that anyone knows. I know that one of my cars is white, and that's a fact, but not one that should be included in Wikipedia. It's accurate information, but not what we call encyclopedic information.

And until you've made it, you're not encyclopedic. Sorry!

Having a Wikipedia article is a sign you've made it. Get there, and you'll have a Wikipedia article. Someone will write it. (But meantime it's most definitely not a good idea to do it yourself.)

In theory we fail safe

Without sources, Wikipedia is supposed to say nothing.

In practice it doesn't always work. Journalists once relied on the morgue file for most of their backstory information. But now it seems to be us! Once something has been published in Wikipedia, however badly it may be sourced (or in some cases, however false it may be) it often gets repeated in other media, and almost always with no acknowledgement of Wikipedia as the source. But we then accept this as a reliable source (!), leading to circular reporting. It's an unsolved and perhaps insoluble problem. See Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents for times we know we've stuffed up. How many others have not been detected?

So we have good reason to try to keep unsourced material out of Wikipedia!

Notability

An encyclopedic topic is sometimes described as notable. It (most often) just means that the topic qualifies for an article.

Wikipedia is not like this

A hypothetical example

You know that you and a few friends have written some great songs and have played them at two small parties, to great acclaim by your girlfriends and the few other people there who weren't drunk or stoned or both. And one day, when one of these songs hits #1 on the charts, that will all be encyclopedic information. But not yet.

Where do we draw the line? It's very simple. If a significant number of complete strangers are impressed enough by your band to be writing and reading about you, then we want to include you too. In more detail: What we want to do is to report what these others say, with enough rephrasing to avoid copyright violations, and with references to tell everyone where we got the information. And these others who write about you are our sources of this information. (And keep that word sources in mind, it is the key here.)

And if nobody else cares enough to write or read about you, then neither do we. Sorry. We mean you no harm. It's just that this website, Wikipedia, has a particular reason for existing, and that means that information that we describe as encyclopedic belongs, and all other information doesn't.

There are lots of other websites that are happy to host this currently unencyclopedic information, and search engines are happy to link to it. But we are not. This is not an assessment of your band. We're not in the business of making any such assessment, either way. We just report what our sources say, and also let our readers know what our sources are so our readers can decide for themselves.

Primary, secondary and tertiary sources

This is confusing until you get the hang of it. But if you're going to contribute any information to Wikipedia (about yourself or anyone else), it is fundamental.

Tertiary sources

Wikipedia is itself a tertiary source. We base our content (both what articles we have and what we have in them) on reliable secondary sources. And ideally, on nothing else.

Wikipedia makes very little use of other tertiary sources, including other language Wikipedias and ourselves. It's not that we don't trust them. It's just that quoting them is not what we're here to do. We do occasionally just repeat what they say, uncritically, if copyright allows this and subject to some other stringent conditions. We copied a lot of material from the out-of-copyright 1911 Britannica in the early days for example. We translate well-referenced articles from other languages (and we include all their references, we don't cite the article itself but we're happy to cite their references, and in whatever language they may be; English sources are preferred but other-language references are perfectly acceptable). But it's unusual and not a lot of interest to us here. If you already have an article in the current Britannica, then probably you already have one in Wikipedia too, and if not please go to requested articles or articles for creation and follow the instructions. And in time (meaning, as our volunteer workforce find the time) it will appear!

Secondary sources

These secondary sources that we so value are written by people who research these topics, using primary sources and also other secondary sources. They include websites, print books (such as biographies written by independent researchers, data books, and lots of other books), even unpublished doctoral dissertations, and lots of other things but those are the main ones. We're very grateful for this original research, we could not even exist without it. But we don't publish it ourselves, and that's a fundamental policy here. It's one of the things that defines Wikipedia.

So, a Wikipedia article is ideally based entirely on the secondary sources which are cited in the References section of the article and linked using inline citations. Any material not based on these sources can be removed without further discussion and often is.

Primary sources

These primary sources on which the secondary sources are largely based are written by people who actually saw what happened. They include websites, print books (such as autobiographies, and lots of other books), press releases and lots of others. One of the least understood principles here is that anything that just repeats another primary source is still itself a primary source. For example if a news story just repeats some or all of the material from a statement by someone closely related to the article subject (and these stories often but not always state or imply that this is from a press release or something similar), this story is still itself a primary source. It just represents repetition, not research.

Interviews with the subject of an article are typically primary sources, but if the interviewer inserts their own opinions that could be seen as presenting the interviewer's research and those comments might just scrape in as a reliable secondary source. But the rest of the interview, including everything the interviewee says, is still a primary source.

Wikipedia makes some use of primary sources, but again subject to very strict conditions. (For example, if we already have an article on you but your birthday is wrong, please fix it. But please even then provide a source, so we and our readers all know it's accurate. Your own website, or an interview with you that was published, are both fine as sources for this information, so please do cite them.) Any article based entirely on primary sources can be deleted without further discussion and often is.

If you have trouble finding sources

The normal reason that people have trouble finding reliable secondary sources to justify an article on themselves is very simple: They're not there to find. Have you considered that dreadful possibility?

It may seem a lot easier to get a Wikipedia article to boost your career than to practice the guitar and making rejected demo after (adjective) rejected demo. It's not. You may succeed in getting a borderline-notability article there for a short time. You may occupy a lot of editor time in repeatedly deleting it. But it won't last, and it will make it more difficult to get an article accepted if and when you do start to make it. So it's a very bad investment.

So back to the guitar and the home studio. And maybe don't give up your day job just yet.

But what of these others

Wikipedia is a big place. There are likely to be other articles on people less notable than yourself or on organisations, bands etc. less notable than yours. Even articles with no supporting sources at all. It happens.

The normal reason for this is that nobody has deleted them... yet. And in the meantime, they shouldn't be there but they are. But examples of places Wikipedia has already stuffed up aren't going to encourage us to stuff up again. Are they?

Hey I have an article now for the others

Congratulations, you've arrived! Rolling Stone and Time have both run features on you, and now someone has created a Wikipedia article on you!

Now, you say to yourself, I can create articles on my band, my obscure record label who backed me and deserve it, all the other things that are now notable because I am. Um...

Not so fast

Notability is not inherited. And that's an even harder concept for newcomers to grasp than primary and secondary sources, from our experience.

What it means is, these other topics need to themselves be discussed in reliable secondary sources before they qualify for articles.

Tough, you say, so instead I'll just add sections on them to my article! They're important parts of my story, even if Rolling Stone and Time glossed over the details.

Not so fast again

Just remember, all of the information in "your" article needs to be supported by references to these sources. Do these sources describe your playing in your high school band Horrible Harry and the Half Headless Horsemen? If not, then the information that you played in that band is not encyclopedic. Even if the sources mention the band by name, do these sources list the other members? If not, then again their names should not appear in "your" article. The band name can go in if it's mentioned in the sources. The names of the members can't go in if they're not.

Do you see the pattern?

And beware of COI

And the other thing is, you should be very wary of updating your "own" article(s) at all. You have what we call a conflict of interest or COI for short.

Even with the best of intentions, it's very hard to be objective about yourself, and neutral point of view is a non-negotiable here. And in the extreme case, if you rewrite "your" article so that it reads like blatant advertising for yourself, your band, organisation, product, whatever, just as you've achieved borderline notability, you'll just succeed in getting it deleted.

And be back to square one? No, further back, because this history will now make it far more difficult for a new article on you to be created. There's a big and understandable risk that that people will say Ho hum, that pest Harry is back promoting his Half Headless Horsehacks again, why waste time on it?

And it happens a lot, sadly.

That's not perfect of course. But Wikipedia is written by volunteers. Our time is finite, and we prefer to spend it on writing articles that are clearly useful, rather than trying to sort out the signal from the noise and figure out whether a borderline topic that's being shamelessly promoted by its connections qualifies for an article despite them.

So beware of COI. Be very, very afraid. It simply ain't worth it.

If in any doubt at all whether an edit you propose to "your" article is a good idea, then suggest it on its article talk page instead. Or better still, create an account if you don't have one, and post a helpme on your own user talk page. Or visit the teahouse. These will often get faster results.

Conclusion

There's more to being an encyclopedia than just containing facts. There are some quite subtle issues in deciding just which facts and even which topics should go in.

And if you got this far (and take a deep breath, and thank you!) then we hope you'll now understand a little of that process. There's a lot going on.

And also why, if you're a rising but not yet risen superstar, Wikipedia is not at all a good place to be "discovered".