A case study in Wikipedia failure

by Dahlia Raven (see also: Part One; Part Three; Epilogue)

Why does Nicholas Alahverdian have a Wikipedia entry at all?

The simple answer is that an editor named Tkfy7cf created it. Not as “Nicholas Alahverdian,” but as “Nicholas Alahverdian I” (note the “I”). It was started on 14 November 2019, fully formed and including a photograph. On Wikipedia, that in itself is usually considered suspicious, so it was only a matter of minutes before it was moved to the correct title, and then immediately nominated for deletion.

The deletion discussion was closed with a very lukewarm keep:

The result was keep. I see that there are concerns about sockpuppetry in this discussion, but on the substance it seems like the various GNG-based claims of notability have been only weakly contested even if the “Harvard University alumnus” notability claim has not gained much acceptance. The BLP1E point is somewhat less clear but it hasn’t received enough support to make a deletion consensus.

There will very likely be another deletion discussion and another chance to debate the merits of Alahverdian’s article, but let’s examine one of the non-sockpuppet comments, if only because it’s so terribly misguided:

Keep. He was also an author who attended Harvard University He wrote: Dreading and Hoping All He was also published in the Providence Journal. Seems to have non-trivial coverage. Quebec Tribune, and again Quebec News Tribune. My opinion is non-trivial SIGCOV exists. It is concentrated on the East coast, New England, but that is not a concern for our guidelines. Lightburst (talk) 21:42, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Alahverdian is an author; a self-published author.He did attend Harvard, and was “administratively withdrawn,” as covered in Part One of this series.He was published in the Providence Journal. It was

…continue reading The Nicholas Alahverdian Story, Part Two