User:Robert McClenon/Internet celebrities

Internet Celebrities

There comes a point at which Wikipedia's definition of biographical notability fails, because it tends to exclude Internet celebrities who are famous for being famous. In deletion discussions, Wikipedians often discount metrics such as numbers of views. When the number of views is two-thirds of a billion (short scale, but still 6.67*10**8), the number really has no physical meaning, but really may indicate a sort of notability. There comes a point at which we should stop fighting the advocates of articles about Internet celebrities. Sometimes the deletion debate over an Internet celebrity, either a right-wing or left-wing commentator or a socialite or a nothing, results in large numbers of unregistered editors and throw-away accounts coming to vote (and we know that a deletion debate is not a vote, but they don't) be Kept. At some point we need to recognize, in particular if a deletion debate is being canvassed or brigaded, that maybe the course of prudence and pragmatism is to recognize that the fact that so many people think the celebrity is notable makes them notable. It is, to be sure, a sort of second-class notability, but with a lot of the English Wikipedia's six million articles have second-class or third-class notability already.