Brendan Burke, son of Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke passed away after a tragic car accident last Friday. Brendan, an alumni of my same high school, was an inspirational figure who poured his life into educating others about diversity and was featured in an ESPN article late last year. I won’t go into full detail about his life because other bloggers/news agencies have summed up his life much better than I could.

Soon after his death, his recently created Wikipedia entry was nominated for deletion on grounds that he wasn’t notable enough to deserve a page on the popular site.

The exact text regarding the deletion read as follows:

Recommend for deletion as NON-NOTABLE I originally placed a Speedydelete tag when the article was first created, but noted in my edit summary after deleting the tag when the article was improved that I reserved the right to (nominate) WP:AFD (Wikipedia Articles for Deletion). Rms125a@hotmail.com (talk) 23:25, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Nominating an article for deletion requires a consensus of users to come to a democratic conclusion on whether to keep or delete a specific article. It serves as an attempt to create a fair arbitration process against spam and people putting up their own bios. While the idea behind the nomination was reasonable considering most major news outlets started their coverage late Sunday / early Monday and the article was just a day old, everyone became upset at the first commenter on the entry:

Delete. I did find some articles about Burke from before his death; here and here. They reference an ESPN article which I haven’t yet located. Brendan’s chief accomplishments appear to be (a) being related to a notable person; (b) coming out as gay, and (c) dying young. I have no doubt that he was a good person, well loved by his friends and family, but Wikipedia is not a memorial, and I’m not convinced that his accomplishments meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. -FisherQueen (talk ยท contribs) 23:32, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Within hours of the nomination, the article’s deletion page was flooded with angry readers who believed the deletion attempt was heartless and homophobic. The user who posted the comment then left an apology about his remark but was subjected to heavy criticism for his comments.

Wikipedia’s editors have to be gate keepers when it comes to content and most of the time they get it right. However when you give people the opportunity to create and remove content on one of the world’s most popular web sites, you begin to realize that people can really shape someone’s legacy with just a few clicks. While Brendan’s article has apparently been saved due to a number of news sources covering his death and the outrage of friends and community members, it begs the question about how many legitimate articles have been deleted.

The answer is that it could be more than you think. Reading into the tone of the first two commenters, you get a sense of disenchantment that is only natural when a small group of people attempt to manage millions of pages of content without pay. If you apply this sense of frustration to the entire site, odds are legitimate entries have slipped through the cracks because they didn’t have an advocate to say “Wait, can the article be improved? Are there similar entries that give context? Is there a precedent with similar articles?”

To give an idea of how many entries are currently up for deletion, here is the list for February 7 (119 articles). If you can imagine 100 entries a day are nominated, over the course of a year, Wikipedia could delete 36,000+ entries (not including ones that are deleted without discussion).

Makes you wonder doesn’t it?