Julietteangelique
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editHi, Julietteangelique, and welcome to Wikipedia. I saw your question at the help desk, and understand that you want to have a Wikipedia page about yourself. I have some experience with the question. Last year a flute professor wanted to have an article about her on Wikipedia, and assigned a grad student assistant the task of creating one. The assistant put one up that was very laudatory, was anything but the "neutral point of view" tone that Wikipedia requires, and used "sources" for the claims made that didn't pass muster. She wasn't really aware of the encyclopedia's policies for inclusion, either, what we all refer to as "notability" here. The predictable result was that the article about her was proposed for deletion. It wasn't deleted, but it was cut back to where it's really just about useless, for any practical purpose, and is likely to be deleted in the future unless some neutral editor steps up to improve it by adding references to verifiable, reliable sources. Examining the history of that process might be instructive. You can find my attempt to help determine whether the prof is "notable" on the article's talk page, and can look at the article itself at Nina Assimakopoulos; it would also be instructive to look through the various versions of the article that have existed, to review the history, in other words.
I will say that it's pretty tough to satisfy all of Wikipedia's standards for inclusion as an academic. The particular notability standard that's relevant to professors can be found at Wikipedia:Notability_(academics). It's not enough just to have published a lot of papers, for example, or even books. What's needed is for those papers or books to have been reviewed in published reliable sources by a second party. Book reviews in mainstream publications count, as do review papers in academic journals that examine your work. The problem is very much further complicated by Wikipedia's conflict of interest policies; one is not supposed to write about oneself, in general, the theory being that if you're "notable" enough, under Wikipedia's admittedly rather arcane definition of that term, someone wholly unrelated to you will decide one day to create an article about you. I don't know how realistic that is - I know of one academic whose papers have been cited over 15,000 times by others, and no one has created an article about him, yet. Probably the best way to go about it would be to try to find an article about a professor in your area of academia, and take that as something of a roadmap. The help desk might be able to tell you how to find such an article if one exists, or you could spend some quality time with Google's "advanced search" facility to do a search yourself, as well... Oh, I don't know whether there's a "category" for professors that might help you narrow such a search; there probably is.
So basically, what I'm saying here is that unless you're already famous in some way, or at least "locally famous" (my term) within your field, it's pretty hard to get an article about yourself on Wikipedia in the first place, and even harder to keep it from being deleted by other editors as not meeting one of our (very) many policies. I'm sorry if that discourages you at all, but perhaps it'll be easier to take, if you find that you're not yet able to meet Wikipedia's very exacting criteria for inclusion if you allow me to observe that a Wikipedia page about oneself is certainly a two-edged sword. You can't control the content of the page about yourself, you know; this is "the encyclopedia anyone can edit", for better or worse, and there's nothing at all to prevent someone from adding anything at all to the article about you, so long as it can be cited to a verifiable, reliable-source publication.
It's a matter of personal preference, of course, but I certainly would not want a Wikipedia article about myself. It's true that it might help promote one's career in academia ( no, I'm not a prof, myself ) but it's also true that anything ill-judged that one might do can end up in such an article if it's reported in a reliable-source publication. There are a lot of people who initially wanted an article about themselves here, I'm sure, and who now wish it would just go away. ( You can request that an article about you be deleted, or that information in it which you dislike be removed, but if both are admissable under Wikipedia policies, there are no guarantees that such a request will be met. ) Most of them are politicians, though, now that I think of it. Academics are less likely to be at risk for that kind of a problem.
Anyway, I hope some of this helps. If you'd like to reply, you can do so right below this message. I'll keep this, your talk/discussion page, on my "watchlist" for the next couple of weeks to make sure I don't miss any reply. If it takes you more than a couple of weeks to respond, it'd probably be better for you to place a message on my own talk page to make sure I see it. Also, you should feel free to delete this message from your talk page any time after you've read it. Best regards, – OhioStandard (talk) 05:49, 22 August 2010 (UTC)