The Tragedy of Losing Your Wikipedia Page

Wikipedia removes dozens, sometimes hundreds, of biographies of living people each day when editors judge that reliable, independent sources do not establish sufficient notability. The standard is not whether a person is accomplished or whether claims about them are true, but whether those claims can be verified. Volunteers argue that limited time is better spent checking factual claims and preventing hoaxes than maintaining weakly sourced biographies. Yet a Wikipedia page carries status and practical authority: experts say it can reassure clients, lawyers, journalists, and others. Losing one can therefore feel like more than an editorial decision, even though Wikipedia treats coverage as an encyclopedia’s judgment, not a reward.

The account follows several people whose pages faced deletion, including nonprofit CEO Kimberly Small, physician Matthew Songer, adviser Maneli Mirkhan, and fitness executive Andrew Wyant. Their experiences reveal the tension between personal achievement and the requirement for substantial independent coverage; Songer, Mirkhan, and Wyant all lost their pages, while Mirkhan’s was later recreated with stronger sources. NASA analog astronaut Martina Dimoska’s biography became a particularly contentious case. Editor Kiril Simeonovski argued that it relied on promotional material and weak sourcing, while new accounts defended the page and added citations that he then challenged. The dispute shows how self-promotion, conflicts of interest, and uneven sourcing complicate deletion debates - and how a Wikipedia biography can help generate the media attention later used to justify its existence.