Amy wrote:
For example, suppose a potential woman editor wants to work on an article
about Charlotte Ray, the first black woman lawyer. But there is not even a stub
for Charlotte, so our editor tries to create the article, but it is immediately
tagged for deletion for notability reasons. Having heard from many new editors,
it is incredibly common that the initial contact with Wikipedia is that their
article is deleted. I'm proposing that existing content is limited by the ideas
of what the majority of the current community believes is notable, and it is
difficult for new editors to earn the reputation within Wikipedia to influence
this. So in effect the current content is limiting what new editors can
contribute, and I suspect this is a major stumbling block for new women
editors
My comment:
I have noticed in occasionally reviewing people's
speedy tagging incident to doing username patrol that it seems too many newpage
patrollers, particularly those using Huggle or something like that, confuse
"unreferenced" for "non-notable". I've had to de-speedy a couple of articles
where the text did make an assertion which, if properly sourced, would
demonstrate notability.
Daniel Case