improvements to the English Wikipedia article on Kat Abughazaleh

April 15, 2025 7:18 AM

improvements to the English Wikipedia article on Kat Abughazaleh
I'm the contributor who has added most of the text so far in the English Wikipedia page about politician Kat Abughazaleh.

A few weeks ago, Kat Abughazaleh, a videomaker and media critic, announced she's running for Congress. I noticed that there was a draft English Wikipedia article about her, and added a citation. A little while after that, after the biography had moved to "mainspace" (the place regular articles live), an editor nominated it for deletion, asserting that the subject didn't meet English Wikipedia's standards for notability. Disagreement ensued in the deletion discussion.

I did some digging and added a bunch more information and citations to the article -- this included pinging the political campaign's press office and helping them upload photos of Abughazaleh to Wikimedia Commons, getting leads from a Reddit Ask Me Anything, and digging in paywalled news databases thanks to New York Public Library and the Wikipedia Library.

My edits helped commenters in the deletion discussion arrive at a consensus to keep the article. A previous new article about her got deleted in 2023 so "keep" was not a foregone conclusion, and it seems this article is now more likely to stick.

I've listed some open questions for further research on the talk page in case any of you want to help. Special opportunity for Chicago MeFites near the end!

Role: Wikipedia editor

posted by brainwane (3 comments total)

What a fantastic thing.

Thank you so much for taking on the task (tasks, plural) of finding and adding all that information, and especially for doing the difficult work of persuading against deletion.

This is admirable and much appreciated. Thank you.
posted by kristi at 9:08 AM on April 15 [1 favorite]

Thanks, kristi! I knew you would appreciate this.

I learned some years ago that, sometimes, when I don't feel like I have it all together, as when I'm in the stupor of grief, I find comfort in doing certain kinds of work -- repetitive, well-specified, medium-cognition work without much call for self-expression. Work that builds, pebble by pebble, into a cairn that helps other people live better, be more informed, or something like that. And the iterative, citation-by-citation work of improving articles on English Wikipedia* seems to fit. It feels a bit like doing a friend's dishes.

* I try to consistently specify "English Wikipedia" when I mean that site, as there are hundreds of other Wikipedias in other languages and I don't like treating the English one as an unspoken default.
posted by brainwane at 9:32 AM on April 15 [3 favorites]

And: shout-out to MeFite skoosh for starting this article!
posted by brainwane at 5:22 AM on April 17