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I added the wiki page for Kamala Harris' dad (a professor) to wikipedia (shortly after Biden announced her as his running mate in the election), and within literally 2 minutes, two different people had flagged it for deletion. One reason given was that academics need to be especially notable to warrant a wiki page, completely ignoring his relation to her daughter, which was mentioned in the original draft of the article stub. All proposals for deletion have since been removed, but I was surprised at the ferocity at which users want to delete new articles.


There's definitely a deletionist cult within Wikipedia. While acknowledging that it shouldn't be a dumping ground for essentially individual web pages, it goes too far IMO for people who have clear documented credentials and public history. This favors certain occupations over others of course--including academics, journalists, etc.--who have public bios, papers/articles, and often articles about them. But deletionist tendencies in these areas tend to work against claims that it's all about verifiability.




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