YouTube may be more than 12 years old, but as a WikiProject, it’s still a newbie on the English and Simple English Wikipedia. Jamesjpk talked to the Signpost about how he got started in this new project, issues that they face and told us a little about the Simple English version!

WikiProject YouTube was first proposed by DerryAdama in April of 2015.^[1] The project was started up nearly a year later in 2016.^[2] One of the active users is Jamesjpk who also works on the Simple English YouTube project.^[3] Jamesjpk became involved with the English Wikiproject while working on a draft for a YouTuber, Aphmau. While working on the project he went looking for projects to place on the talk page. James found the proposed, but abandoned project and began working on it. He also created the Simple English project, although with Simple English Wikipedia, articles cannot be tagged with WikiProjects on the talk page, as all WikiProjects are still unofficial.

Working with YouTube articles presents a unique challenge. Even though it’s a huge video platform in which 5 billion videos are watched every day through YouTube,^[4] it can be difficult to show notability for individual YouTubers. Jamesjpk has estimated that 75% of all articles started about YouTube personalities have been deleted from Wikipedia. Editors writing these bios often fail to adequately source the bios with independent, reliable sources. Jamesjpk and other members of WikiProject YouTube want to see articles with better sourcing, less detail about YouTuber’s personal lives and a greater emphasis on their work as videographers or personalities online. He emphasizes to writers to “Explain why the YouTuber is notable!” The fact that a YouTuber might be reaching a large audience as shown by their subscriber numbers, downloads or other milestones is difficult to source outside of YouTube itself also makes it difficult to write about personalities on Wikipedia.

Another challenge is writing neutrally about controversial YouTubers and getting access to media for illustration purposes. Jamesjpk says that most YouTubers won’t answer inquiries for picture rights and most YouTube videos are licensed under the YouTube Standard License, or “all rights reserved makes it difficult to obtain media for Wikimedia Commons. “For the time being,” he says, “I’m not sure how our group would address this issue, as it is a hard one to crack.”