Look at the first thing on the page:
The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia’s notability guideline for biographies. Please help to establish notability by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond its mere trivial mention
I was just amazed that someone so young (28) could look so old. That’s the power of alcohol I suppose…
I think most adults in the US will remember the story instantly, if not the name. It was followed hour by hour on the news.
Dennis
It dropped out of the headlines after the Lincoln squirrel was assassinated, though.
I suspect that most people looked older in that era, in general. Harder life, more toxins in the environment in general, and fancier clothes.
I knew that link was going to be about Baby Jessica, so in this case: yup.
That’s not how the notability criterion works, of course.
It’s an interesting story at least. What a hard life. I don’t know how old she was in that photo but she died at 28, same as my daughter whose life seems to be just beginning.
ETA Oh wow she was only 25 in the photo. She looks older than me and I’m 48!
I swear I saw this image on CNN Sunday morning. They were interviewing an author who has written about women who are notorious. Juxtaposed against famous women who were skipped over in NYTs obits. One was Sylvia Plath, another was a Bronte sister. That’s all I remember.
Depends on who you are, as the author. I started a Wiki page on a friend of mine a few years ago, and it was rejected because, as I was told, he was not important enough. A year later, there was a boringly long and detailed Wiki page on him, created by one of his colleagues. Most of it praising the collaborative work he and the contributing colleague had done.
I have a friend who ought to have a wikipedia page, he’s a known entertainer in his country, and has done several medium-profile things on TV. I thought about making it myself, but I haven’t hung out with him in over 15 years, so my knowledge of his exploits are a bit thin. I figure I wouldn’t be the best person to do it.
But now I’m thinking maybe he’s not quite at the level he would have to be to have his page retained. He’d probably be marked for deletion pretty quickly.
Considering she’s been dead for more than a hundred years, I’d say time’s running out for her. She’d better get a move on!
This is related to the moving goalpost of the public domain. As one who is interested in various aspects of early twentieth century urban America, I have watched with dismay as books have stayed under copyright when, if not for recent changes in the laws, would have fallen into the public domain years ago. (This all has something to do with Disney not wanting Mickey Mouse to ever become public domain; the company was one of the prime movers of the new law). Given that much searchable text online is based on published works, the lack of public domain rights from about 1923 until today is one reason behind that “big hole”.
Google is terrible at finding old products, places, or companies that were bestowed with common English words for names, even if at the time of conception the names were understood in context by everyone. This happens with many old software products that may have had names like BASIS and STAIRS. Or companies whose names were simply what they did, like System Development Corporation. The fact that Elon Musk decided to call his tunnel drilling venture the Boring Company suggests that the strain may be getting to him. It’s as if Howard Hughes had decided to name his company just “Aircraft”. As for places, the L.A. community where I used to live is Palms, which again is nearly impossible to google. (If only they’d decided to name it Las Palmas!).
She’s not dead yet!
Oh, wait. Never mind. She is.
Well, Baby Jessica gave CNN something to create a 24 hour news cycle, before Gulf War I cemented it.
To be honest, I figured that Ms. Driscoll / Mrs. Lynch was going to have had her fame as the poor child who lost her father in a crane accident. But that was not the case. It seems that her wiki was done by family who knew the whole story. Or maybe some random person on the internet was able to piece together a persons life with searches of old newspaper archives. At the very least, the last article is interesting in how men were encouraged to ‘put away’ women who fell victim to the evils of alcohol.
Actually, i think Merneith is probably closer to the real explanation for how this article made it to Wikipedia:
Perhaps this came out of somebody’s master thesis research, or something similar?
ETA: Looking at the references, most of the data seems to be from Swansea’s ‘Bad Girls’: Crime and Prostitution 1870s–1914 by one Elizabeth F. Belcham. So the author perhaps wanted to share some of her research, or maybe it’s a publicity stunt for the book, or something like that.
Nevermind, now I see Merneith above already mentioned that.
I’m pretty sure that name is a play on words, and that nobody is going to have trouble finding information about it if they just use quotation marks to look it up.
The notability requirement is quite rubbery, as individual projects have their own guidelines, which leads to valid articles such as this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Allen