87
Excel at something good, beneficial to society somehow -
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
87 points (95.8% liked)
No Stupid Questions
42363 readers
1204 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
make documentary movie where you want to be on wikipedia page and interview random people what they think of it, add it to some amateur documentary movie festival, hope it's accepted, publish festival page from that year with movie list, add your movie to the list, add wikipedia page with your movie, add author page, the end
Much easier to self-publish some ahitty novella on Amazon, then make its Wikipedia page and your own author page.
Its more likely they'll add the movie page but not the creator page. I mean look at some movies or tv shows and find the list of cast, some actor names doesn't have a hyperlink on it.
Wikipedia requires you to be "notable" according to their definition. Here are some of the criterias that may be used depending on the category. Theoretically, only one is enough, but you also needs reliable and independent sources to prove it.
As others have said, making dumb records is probably the easiest ways. If you're music people, starting an obscure/local variation of another genre could be a thing. Making a randomly specific movie can be another relatively easy way. Books can be a solution too, if you get a way to get people to talk about it.
- Research having an impact (demonstrated by independent reliable sources)
- Receiving an award/honor
- Member of some scholar society with exclusivity
- Having a major position in the university (like a named chair)
- Being in the top members of an academic journal
- Being studied in detail by notable written sources
- Widely distributed
- Historically important (important reviews, elected in some professional poll, commercial re-release, part of a documentary on history of cinema, at least 5 years later)
- Major award
- Present in a national archive
- Studied in details in university with film program
- Represents a unique achievement (like "only cel-animated feature film ever made in Thailand")
- Has a notable person involved in
- Produced and distributed in a country that is not a major film producing country.
- Being studied in detail by notable written sources
- Have a single/album on a national music chart
- A record certified gold/higher or Win or be nominated for a major music award or win first, second, or third place in a major music competition.
- 2 or more release on major record label
- Ensemble/band with 2 or more notable musicians
- Be the most prominent representatives of a notable style, or of a local scene of a city
- Be placed in rotation on a national broadcasting
- Perform music for a notable work of media
- Being studied in detail by notable written sources
- Win a major literary award
- be considered by reliable sources as a significant contribution to sciences, humanities, art, political or religious movement.
- Has been subject of instruction in 2 or more schools/college/uni
- Being studied in detail by notable written sources AND not being notable only for a single event
- Have a well-known and significant award/honor
- Have an entry in a standard biographical dictionary
- Be widely cited by peers in your area of expertise
- Having originated a significant new concept, theory or technique
- Be a important criminal
- Have multiple roles/involvements in notable works of art (TV/music/theater/etc)
- Held international/national/province-wide offices or part of legislative bodies OR an important local political figure with significant press coverage
- Get rewards as a sport people
(edit : layout and spelling mistakes)
Start a YouTube channel where you go around trying to get people to sign your petition to give you a Wikipedia page. If you got big enough, eventually you would get a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia wouldn't even have to accept the petition; it might be a bad precedent to set that people can get a page just by submitting a petition. Instead, they could give you a page simply because you became mildly famous for trying to brute force yourself onto Wikipedia.
Write it yourself.
You can't edit Wikipedia pages on a topic to which you have a close connection/conflict of interest.
Also WP:Notability
Which is funny because it routinely happens as well as nation states hiring small teams that start edit wars occasionally IIRC.
I mean yeah, but people also regularly steal things despite it being against the rules. Like those, wiki rules are enforced (theoretically) as a best effort.
Won't last long, but it satisfies the requirements.
If you have a few or more references, then it has a better chance of surviving on Wikipedia. Otherwise, it's considered low quality/importance.
I mean that is a technically correct answer, but they'll just delete it because they can't have a bunch of wikipedia pages about every person in the world.
I did this and they removed it and I reposted it and then they threatened to ban me lol
Granted this was decades ago when I was a teen, but I doubt they have changed.
It’s much different now, you’d be banned without discussion.
There are 1,121,817 living people with Wikipedia pages. There are more than 8 billion people alive today. That means about 0.014% of people have Wikipedia pages.
But that's 1.1M living people with english language wikipedia pages, right?
I think a better comparison figure would be the ~1.5B english speakers or the ~400M native english speakers. So 0.073% or 0.275%.
Much more achievable.
Yeah, but Donald Trump doesn't speak Japanese (presumably, but come on; there's no way he speaks Japanese) but he has a Japanese Wikipedia page. Meanwhile Olympic soccer player Lionel Messi doesn't speak English, but has an English-language Wikipedia page.
A fair point. I would guess closer to 10% than 1% or 100% also have a foreign language page. I'd guess between 1-10% of those english language pages are non-english speakers.
But knowing English isn't a requirement for having a Wikipedia page about you
This is probably not the kind of response you want, and it's going to be a serious downer for everyone, but the first person I thought of was Kathy Change:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Change
Thankfully, I was not a witness to it, but I was working for Penn at the time, and I remember passing her dancing at 34th and Walnut many times.
Like almost everyone else, I paid no attention to what the dances were protesting. When I found out about her concerns after her death, it seemed like such a tragically doomed effort even back in 1996.
Of course, now we're all hopelessly burning the entire world down, and I still don't really expect anything to change.
What a badass.
You can get a world record for something super niche in which only you or only few people compete.
I'm in wikipedia because I was included in the special thanks category of a movie. (not a full page, but thought it was cool.)
LOTR?
You don't want one. But George S. Kaufman, when he worked for the NYT, had a thought on a similar topic:
Kaufman took his editorial responsibilities seriously. According to legend, on one occasion a press agent asked: "How do I get our leading lady's name in the Times?" Kaufman: "Shoot her."[5]
Any hobbies? How about breaking a record?
I didn't realize there were so many "largest collection of _______" records.
Some of these are clearly expensive collections but then some of them are like:
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/419867-largest-collection-of-spatulas
She looks so happy with her collection
Great thing about this is she actually uses the spatulas. Other collections are very often for show only
I had to look up wine cans. Lol Learned something new today.
Be a part of something major. This doesn’t have to involve something with legal repercussions.
If legal repercussions aren’t off the table, though, get arrested for something cool, like protesting ICE. Bonus points: try to get somebody to take at least one reasonably clear photo of you for the Wikipedia page.
The one person I've met IRL to have a Wikipedia page (as far as I know anyway) got one from writing books and arguing with people (as in like formal debate type ones), so maybe becoming an author? It's not exactly easy but it's not unattainable for the typical person either I wouldn't think.
The most obscure person I can think of on Wikipedia is a man called Edmund Trebus. He was a real person who was an (if not the) unwitting anti-hero in a British TV series about cleaning up a London borough. Trebus was a notorious hoarder whose lifestyle spilled out of his property, creating an eyesore and constant problems for the local council.
I'm not saying do that, but there may be ways to generalise from that. Also, that series was a while ago now and I fear Wikipedia might eventually remove his article for being insufficiently notable.
Alternatively, are you musical? A one hit wonder would ensure your fame (or infamy). Mathematical? Solve a famous theorem (What, like it's hard?). Programmer? Invent a hugely popular programming language and you're sure to get one. Artsy or extroverted? Become a "content creator" on TikTok or wherever the kids hang out these days.
Worst case, you end up a footnote in the page about your creation(s). But would that be so bad?
Or come at this from another angle entirely. Create an article. Or edit one. Not about you but about something else. No trolling. Be informative. Provide sources. Your work may last decades, and if you do it under your pseudonym, or - horrors - your real name, as a login, you'll be recorded that way, at least for a while, in the page history.
And if you create one that doesn't get deleted immediately, well then, no-one can take away you created that page even if your original work disappears over years of constant refinement by other people.
Lastly, there are other places for immortality. I frequently see the same (real!) names cropping up in entries in the OEIS, for example, most of whom don't have their own Wikipedia entry. Be aware that their standards are pretty high these days though.
Just create an user page.
Make your own and save it before it gets taken down lol. But they probably don't let new users add new pages to the main site without a review.
If you're autoconfirmed (account more than 4 days old with at least 10 edits), you can create new pages without going through the drafts/approval phase first. But they would still usually be swiftly deleted if not following policies and guidelines.
Do something stupid and entertaining that makes the news
Help make the world a better place. Like people on BBC "people fixing the world" Normal people fixing something small for a better world
-
Reality TV. Being young and attractive are key factors. Being a contestant on Survivor or something.
-
Combat sports, if your fights are on TV. Talent is not required, but being young and athletic are important (still not required). At the low end of the sport are regular people who drive cabs. If you can beat 5 of them, being 5-0 is probably enough to justify a page.
-
Stand up comedy. A few news articles and maybe an acting credit, and you're probably notorious enough for a page.
These are all things that are not typically full time jobs.
Go do something remarkable.