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Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

I am regarded as Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia for the specific reason that I feel that no one should have to pay to read my essays and articles. Were someone to pay me to publish in dead tree form rather than on my own website, I would merit an article.

I've written mountains of highly regarded essays and articles, generally on the topics of mental illness - I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder - as well as software engineering.

My essay Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is on a reading list that the California State Department of Mental Health distributes to its county clinics.

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"Will someone pay you to publish your work" is a much stronger filter than "do you put your work on your website".

(I write this as someone who has written a lot on my website for free and not published anything in a paid forum.)

But the issue here is that "will someone pay to publish" is true but unprovable. "has someone paid to publish" is a sloppy approximation at best.

There is no doubt whatsoever that my self-published work is notable; consider what I just stated, that Living with Schizoaffective Disorder is on a reading list that the State of California Mental Health Department distributes to its county clinics.

Despite that, the simple fact that I choose to self-publish - or rather, refuse to permit dead-tree publication - is regarded as making me non-notable.

There are lots of wikipedia articles about dead-tree writers whose work is arguably far less notable than my own.

Being published is not enough for WP notability, and someone who self-publishes can be notable enough for a Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...

> I am regarded as Not Notable Enough For Wikipedia for the specific reason that I feel that no one should have to pay to read my essays and articles

That substantially misrepresents the reasoning given in the deletion discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

It wasn't that your work was self-published that made you non-notable, its that there wasn't substantial outside coverage in reliable secondary sources that would justify a biography.

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