Comment by pie_flavor
13 hours ago
If you hear a name in an internet argument, and want to know who that person is, and one site is more likely than the other to contain it, that site is definitionally the better encyclopedia in the moment. If you arbitrarily define notability so as not to include the guy who came up with the seed oil craze presently informing the federal health policy of the United States, you're just giving away part of the game for no reason. Like Stallman deliberately throwing away GPL compiler share dominance by refusing to make GCC a library, and now we've got a million proprietary LLVM compilers. Wikipedia isn't the gatekeeper of notability, such that refusing to have an article on some niche topic will prevent it getting oxygen. All it does is ensure that your first search result will be sympathetic to his fringe views, instead of critical.
This seems like you should take up your concern about Ray Peat with Wikipedia directly.
For me, it seems obvious that Ray Peat is not particularly notable — even if his self-published manuscripts made him a sort of personal hero to a handful of niche micro influencers on one of the big four social media websites. A quick google shows that he did not “come up with the seed oil craze”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_oil_misinformation
If I had to guess what’s happened here, it looks like maybe some right-wing micro influencers tweeted that Ray Peat was more notable than he really was and those tweets weren’t convincing to Wikipedia editors.
It is good to have notability standards, even if somewhat arbitrary. It protects the site and its editors from being obligated to document and take seriously every silly thing that nano-celebrities and trolls try to will into existence through their tweets.
Especially since there is already a website for exactly that, grokipedia.