User:Curb Safe Charmer

This editor is a
Master Editor
and is entitled to display this Platinum
Editor Star.

Curb Safe Charmer
— Wikipedian ♂ —
Born	Jersey
Pronouns	He
Nationality	British
Current location	Jersey
Languages	English, French
Current time	07:56 GMT [refresh]
Personality type	INTJ
Family and friends
Marital status	Married
Account statistics
Joined	15 February 2007 (2007-02-15)
First edit	March 25, 2007 (2007-03-25)
New page reviewer	16 August 2017 (2017-08-16)
Edit count	48,000
Userboxes
This editor is a Master Editor and is entitled to display this Platinum Editor Star. Curb_Safe_Charmer has been active on Wikipedia for 14 years and 7 or 8 months. enThis user is a native speaker of the English language. fr-2Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français. de-1Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse. This user is a participant in WikiProject Articles for creation. You can help! This user has helped promote 3 good articles on Wikipedia. This user has written or expanded 1 article featured in the Did You Know section on the Main Page. This user rescues articles for the Article Rescue Squadron. This user is a member of WikiProject YouTube. This user uses reFill to expand bare references. This user is a member of WikiProject Abandoned Drafts. This user is a member of WikiProject COVID-19. This user participates in WikiProject Citation cleanup. This user is a member of WikiProject Jersey.

Hi, I am Curb Safe Charmer. My username is an anagram, in case you're wondering!

Organising information has been an interest of mine since I was eight years old when I volunteered in my primary school's library, helping make sure all the books were in the right order according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system.

As a boy I enjoyed the original Batman black-and-white TV series filmed in the 1960s. In particular I was fascinated by the Batcomputer. Batman could ask it anything, and a few moments later it would spit out the answer on a piece of paper. How did the computer 'know' all of that information? I guessed that at some point, a person must have fed the computer with information, some how. I didn't know anyone who did that for a job but it seemed like a really interesting thing to do. I gave up plans to be a doctor when I grew up, and instead wanted to be someone who inputted and organised the knowledge in a big computer system.

As a teenager, I became fascinated by computers, but when my friends were playing computer games I was more interested in databases.

It is not surprising that as an adult I spend time here, helping to build and curate the world's largest online encyclopedia.

What I do here

Wikipedia is 99% run by volunteers. I benefit a great deal from Wikipedia and feel I have something to offer in return. My main area of volunteering is Articles for creation where I help sift through new articles and consider whether or not they should be added to Wikipedia, based on my knowledge of the project's policies and guidelines.

Unfortunately, some people try to use Wikipedia as free advertising for themselves, their business, organisation or cause. It is not always easy to tell what is promotion and therefore not permitted, and what is acceptable. Some editors go to great lengths to dress up their promo article as being encyclopaedic. The references they give may be to news articles that are substantially based on a press release, for example. So far I have saved a couple of thousand inappropriate articles from being added to Wikipedia.

A particular frustration that I have is when people who work in public relations, marketing or SEO do not realise that they have to disclose the paid nature of their editing, as part of Wikipedia's terms of use, which they accept every time they save a change to a page.

My AfC stats
Overall AfC stats
Most active reviewers

At the same time, and this is a part of the work that I really like, even though strictly it is not part of the Articles for Creation role, is when I have come across a few articles which have real potential but needed some help, and I have worked with the author to improve their draft so that it is accepted into Wikipedia. The best buzz is from the articles that I've helped with reaching 'Good Article' status.

Deletion

When I come across an article that at first glance looks like it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, I will often set about editing it, such as running ReFill, trimming citations, removing spurious content and tagging issues such as citations that fail verification. Once the article is a bit more concise and readable, if it still looks like there aren't three good sources providing significant coverage then I'll go ahead and tag it for speedy deletion, propose it for deletion or nominate it for deletion. Hopefully the work I've put in will make it much easier for other editors to carry out their review and quickly come to the same conclusion. This process does result in a lot of my edits (about 30%) being deleted, though.

• Articles I have nominated for speedy deletion - there are many because I tend to do my AfC reviews from the back of the queue where I encounter a lot of 'quick fail' drafts
• Articles I have proposed for deletion
• AfD !vote stats - I tend to contribute to discussions about biographies and companies.

Articles for Creation

2+ monthsThere are 2,087 pending submissions pending AfC submissions.

Click this button
to review
an AfC submission

YouTube - citing the number of subscribers a channel has, or the number of views that a video has had

Background to my involvement

A page I have contributed to and have in my watchlist is List of people from Jersey. On numerous occasions, anonymous editors have added two YouTube personalities to the list, however as neither had a Wikipedia article about them they did not qualify for inclusion in the list, and the edits were reverted. This happened frequently enough that the page needed to be protected. Since then, a Wikipedia article about one of the YouTubers, Chris Dixon, was created. This then qualified him for inclusion in the list and he was duly added. I helped clean up the article, which had original research regularly added to it by fans. I tried to find more reliable sources about him, but eventually the Chris Dixon article was nominated for deletion and the discussion resulted in an outcome of 'delete'.

What's the issue?

Clearly there have been many articles about YouTubers proposed for deletion. If, as it seems, there is a recurring issue with editors arguing that a subject is notable because of their number of YouTube subscribers or the number of times their videos have been viewed, maybe there's a need for some specific guidance on the subject in the form of an essay or guideline? I am collecting precedent here regarding to what extent the number of subscribers that a YouTuber has can help demonstrate notability. If there's something useful I've missed, or if you'd like to comment about my suggestion, please let me know via my talk page.

WP:N says that "A topic is presumed to merit an article if ... it meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline" one of which is WP:ENT. However, in practice, editors involved in deletion debates seem to consider that a YouTuber needs to meet *both* WP:GNG *and* WP:ENT. At the root of this appears to be that the subscriber count on the subject's YouTube channel is considered a primary source and is also subject to change (there's nothing to guarantee that the x million subscribers might all suddenly unsubscribe, though that's perhaps a bit far-fetched). So editors like to see the subscriber count mentioned by a secondary source, which comes with the advantage of being a point-in-time record of that count.

Essay

I started an essay on the subject here on my user page, but have now moved it to Wikipedia:WikiProject YouTube/Notability.

Suggested way forward

WP:PEOPLEOUTCOMES could be updated to reflect the common outcomes for AfD discussions around Internet celebrities, or specifically YouTube celebrities.

Heavily promo articles to keep an eye on

• Taofik Adegbite
• Suddhasatwa Basu
• Samuel Aruwan
• ACE Charity Foundation
• Draft:Charles Wijewardana_1948-2005
• Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu
• Draft:Equistone Partners Europe
• Louise Mabulo
• P. Vijayan
• Legit.ng
• Draft:Winning Jah
• Rehabilitation robotics
• Design Worldwide Partnership