Category talk:Articles with connected contributors
Whom to include
I have some unease about some names that have been included in this category. There are a couple aspects here:
- I feel uncomfortable with having editors who have only edited anonymously (i.e. by an IP address) listed here (or rather, the articles they may have edited). IP addresses are changeable: some ISPs use dynamic IP addresses; even those that assign fixed ISPs don't necessarily (or ever) have lifetime contracts to lease a specific IP address. So even if Famous Person Jones really did edit with the IP address 172.16.54.21 at some point, there's no particular reason to suppose they have access to that address in general. And pertinently, there's no reason to think that some new editor won't have it (and not wish, presumably, to be described as being the same person described in an article).
- I'm also a bit unhappy about the standard of evidence used for some of these assignments. In many cases, an editors—but especially an anon editor—is said to be the same person as an article subject purely on the basis of having edited the WP article in a way that makes it plausible that the edit is autobiography. For example Sophia Lamar was assigned to this category recently, as an anonymous IP user. There was no comment provided on the talk page for why the category membership was added. However, looking through the edit history, there were some comments by that anon in the article, along the lines of "Sophia Lamar want the article to be this way!" Quite likely the subject was getting carried away with autobiography, and editing poorly... but I don't know for sure: maybe it was a friend of hers; maybe it was a vandal wanting to discredit her; maybe it was a stranger who was merely presumptuous. But absent a specific comment on a user page (or on some other citable source), I don't think we should just assume the personal identity.
- Additionally, I think "Notable Wikipedian" ought to mean that an editor is moderately notable on Wikipedia as well as meriting an article for their outside noteriety. Someone who made a very small number of edits ever, or who edited only the autobiography page, is kind of uninteresting to put in this category. The category text doesn't quite say that now, but I think it should. It's the folks whom you might actually have known as WP editors who are notable in the outside world that have a point for inclusion. I'm not aiming here for the "top 50 contributors" or anything as extensive as that: just maybe someone who has at least edited a couple dozen different articles during their WP career. I.e. they have a meaningful "Wikipedia presence".