What does it take before Wikipedia decides to delete someone?

I am currently trying to finish a book on twenty-first century avant-garde poetry.  Last night, I was doing some fact-checking.  In the fifth chapter, I list several books in an aside, and I wanted to make sure that I had parenthetically provided the correct publication dates for each of them.

One of these books was K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation (2003). Big surprise, one of the first things to pop up on a quick Google search was the Wikipedia.org entry for Mohammad.  I don't rely on Wikipedia, for obvious reasons, when nailing down dates and other facts, but I also find its frequently half-informed half-baked entries on living poets entertaining in a pick-off-the-scab way, so I clicked to the page to see what I would find.

The entry itself turns out to be a "stub," that is, a short author's bio of the kind you'd find on the back of a book.  The only link is to his blog, {lime tree}.  In other words, nothing much there, what I think of as a placeholder until someone, probably a graduate student, expends precious free time lovingly expanding the stub into something more closely resembling a conventional encylopedia entry. You will find oodles of stubs on Wikipedia if you look up names of writers who aren't Stephen King, Jane Austen, or Stephanie Meyer.

What you won't find--what I've never in fact seen before--is the angry red heading that appears at the top of Mohammad's entry, "This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy."  If you follow up on why, you'll discover that three of the four people to comment favor deletion.  The reasons:  "no reliable sources" are cited and he fails the "notability" test.  The final poster, the anonymous Chromancer, dismisses Mohammad as somebody who "looks like a small-press no-name with big-city dreams."

Mohammad is a central figure in Flarf, one of the most prominent American avant-garde movements in the new millennium.  His use of internet search engines in his poetry has been widely discussed online.  His poem "Mars Needs Terrorists" appeared in the anthology Best American Poetry 2004, and he has been invited to read and discuss his work at the Whitney Museum in NYC, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, and at the 2010 Associated Writers Programs conference in Denver, CO.  In addition to his appearances in numerous articles devoted to Flarf as a movement, Susan Schultz singles him out for special attention in her book A Poetics of Impasse (2005).  One can listen to many of his poems on the PennSound web site.  In short, he is not a "small-press no-name," as even twenty seconds with Google would verify.

I can understand a Wikipedia heading that requests revision or further elaboration--but deletion? That seems extreme.  His poetry can be obscene at times, and it is often in very bad taste period, so I suppose he could have offended someone with Wikipedia Mojo.  I wonder, too, whether his last name might have attracted more scrutiny to his entry than contemporary poets usually receive. No one accidentally looks up "Lyn Hejinian" or "Yusef Komunyakaa" or "Frank Bidart."

Instead of my mind tending in those directions, however, I'm left thinking about the so-called "notability" test.  Wikipedia is not limited by physical size.  Why exclude anything?

Wikipedia's guidelines for the inclusion of "creative professionals" are hilariously vague.  You basically need to be an "important figure," whatever the devil that means.  Curiously, the guidelines for notability (academics) are both more specific and more unsatisfying.  They clearly value prizes, election to prestigious societies, elevation to named professorships, and other signs of institutional recognition.  That helps to explain why so many Wikipedia entries on twentieth-century figures are deadly boring laundry lists of credentials (rather like mine re: Mohammad above, I must admit) instead of useful summaries of their true artistic accomplishments.  

But then there's an "alternative standard," namely, "the academic is more notable than the average college instructor/professor."  Does this mean half of my colleagues in the University of Washington English Department should have their own Wikipedia pages?  I assume not, but my goodness, we're talking about academics here.  One doesn't have to read David Lodge to wonder whether any professor would ever publically confess to being "below average."

I'm left feeling even more disturbed than usual about the capacity of crowdsourcing to generate reliable reference works.  My university has recently dropped its electronic subscription to the Encyclopedia Britannica because of the prohibitive cost.  An additional informally cited reason is the ready free availability of Wikipedia.  But wow. Debating whether to delete K. Silem Mohammad without in fact consulting a single authority on contemporary poetics.  Relying on awards and honors as a litmus test whether it's worth remembering a writer (see Foetry).  Creating notability standards vague and permeable enough to justify inclusion or exclusion depending on the biased whims and limited knowledge of anonymous posters.

I'm currently writing a chapter for a collaborative literary historical reference work that will survey American poetry from beginning to present.  The project involves a group of specialists, peer reviewing, editorial feedback, the circulation of chapters among the authors for further vetting and commentary, and multiple opportunities for revision.  The press aims for the book to last fifty or more years before needing to go through another round of modification.  I think the results are going to be first-rate.  But unless someone plagiarizes chunks and uploads them to Wikipedia (or its successors), I'm not sure students will ever benefit from all our hard work.  They'll probably be reading instead about, oh, a cat that learned to "type" and then won a first-book prize sponsored by Pets.com.  They'll then quickly find links to related material on YouTube and Amazon, naturally.  And maybe to "model" student papers on feline poetics to download for a small price from databases such as Directessays.com and Essayfarm.com.