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This brings up an issue related to Wikipedia's policy that requires substantial third-party coverage for new articles. It is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.

I don't think it's best interpreted as a test for the importance of a subject, although I'll admit that some Wikipedians do view it that way, and some policy pages (especially older ones) seem to do so as well. To me the more defensible line is just that it's a test of whether there exist sufficient sources for an article with its information properly cited to be written at all. If there are halfway decent third-party sources, one can be written, of some kind of level of quality, transitively dependent on the quality of those sources. If there are no decent third-party sources at all, then there is no basis for writing an article, since Wikipedia articles are supposed to be verifiable, i.e. everything they claim should be cited to something other than Wikipedia itself (and not the personal knowledge of the Wikipedian who wrote the article, either).

I wrote a longish essay arguing this in some more detail, that the 'verifiability' guideline has basically swallowed the 'notability' guideline in practice. But this leaves a gap of things that are clearly notable, but lack good sources about them. In that case Wikipedia is stuck between not covering a notable subject (bad), or covering it in an article that isn't properly cited (also bad). http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...

The reverse case, where a not-really-notable subject is covered because there are sources, I feel is less bad. If the external world is writing about a subject, then imo it's fine that Wikipedia summarizes what they have said about it. At the very least, many such things (like celebrity missing-child cases and vaporware tech companies and whatnot) are meta-notable for the media attention.

PR also makes it into Wikipedia through sanctioned channels -- namely mass media citations which are considered "reliable sources", even though the content of the citation comes from a press release or helpful PR person.

It it were just that then Wikipedia would be fine. I mean, this is how the trade press has operated since time immemorial. Companies issue press releases, and the trade journals publish stuff.

But Wikipedia has a serious problem with "competing interests". One high-profile occasion was when a Wikipedia admin with much clout was employed by some New Religious Movement and then proceeded to edit in favour of his employer. Another was when a BP representative edited the article on his own company. Also: Gibraltarpedia and Monmouthpedia. On all three occasions a substantial fraction of Wikipedia editors found nothing wrong with this.

Science found out why you can't have this when medical researchers were funded by the tobacco industry and proceeded to publish their findings without being open where they got their money from. Wikipedia needs to wake up, but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

"Take a look at almost any living famous person's profile and chances are you'll see a large amount of spin and fluff."

Citation needed.

According to recent traffic reports,[1] some of the most popular biographies of living people recently are as follows:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorde (449,871 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malala_Yousafzai (362,657 views) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miley_Cyrus (342,994 views)

Other popular bios include Barack Obama and Ted Cruz. Obviously popularity of these swings heavily toward recent news items in most cases.

Now, I wouldn't argue against the assertion that fans of these celebrities have written in some amazing fluff in these articles. But you'd really claim that these articles have been spun by PR people? Looking at the history and the content, I seriously doubt it.

Now, if you don't care for how Wikipedia's reliance on third party sources bends content... well, there's not much anyone can do to help you. That's a problem of the media environment Wikipedia exists in, and you haven't really proposed a viable alternative to relying on secondary source material. The way we correct for bias in sources is to use more sources, and be selective about ones we use, taking in to account the fact that some are highly unreliable.

In the end, if you have a problem with how Wikipedia relies on certain sources or what it says on certain articles, there's an easy solution: edit the damn thing. I don't particularly care about the Miley Cyrus article, but if I did, I'd be doing something about it. Wikipedia's best defense against fluff, spin, and PR influence is for smart people (like Hacker News denizens) to participate.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

> edit the damn thing.

TokenAdult makes a useful post to this thread about some of the problems of editing Wikipedia.

People pushing a POV really want that pov to appear, but other people just don't have the persistence to keep slogging through it.