Timothy Noah Is No Journalist

I don’t specifically go to Slate for the articles anymore. But, given our use of their forums, it remains in the background of my daily reading. So sometimes a word in their headlines will catch my attention. Today that word was Wikipedia. So I click on it and discover that Timothy Noah is using his column space to question Wikipedia’s Notability Standard here, here and here. Apparently someone over at Wikipedia market Timothy Noah’s entry for deletion. This caught his attention, and so he began to chronicle events. Of course, this raises the question of coincidence? Are we sure that Mr. Noah didn’t use an agent to question his relevance for the sake of a few good articles? It seems unclear.

Nevertheless, we’ll assume Timothy is on the up and up. What’s a good journalist to do? I’ll go out on a limb and suggest a little research is in order. First stop (or at least an early stop) would seem to be the Wikipedia entry for Slate Magazine. Once there, you’ll be hard pressed to miss the multiple links to something called The Fray. What’s “The Fray?” It’s Slate’s lowly reader’s forum. Now you tell me, if Slate’s reader’s forum warrants its own Wikipedia entry, certainly a Slate Writer does. Well, it seems that way to me at least, and I’m not even a Slate Writer, and so can only imagine how it must seem to one of them.

So you’re Timothy Noah. You want to call into question Wikipedia’s Notability Standard. Do you use yourself as the test case, or do you find that a little too easy, and instead do your job and discover that there is a very good example that’s still close to home, but not as asinine and cut and dry as the incident which spurred your interest in the first place? I think you go for the latter. I think you make it hard. I think you seize on the opportunity to do some real journalism and tackle the ambiguous example. You see, if Timothy were a real journalist, he would have discovered that the VfD on BotF was not only longer by a few thousand words than the AfD on Timothy Noah, but that the Notability censors who took issue with BotF succeeded in their efforts. There is no entry for BotF in Wikipedia. Instead, you’re redirected to its bastardized offspring, The Fray.

I really only bother to point this out because I find it a great example of the “professionals” once again bringing up the rear of an old debate that is somehow magically supposed to take on new importance because “they” just discovered it. And to be honest I’m bothered that Timothy Noah would dare question Wikipedia’s standards when it’s clear that all he’s really interested in talking about is Timothy Noah. Tim, Dude, you want Wikipedia without Notability Standard (the human factor)? Well you moron, it already exists. It’s called Google.