Few grounds in the battle over the meaning of truth are as hotly contested as the edit wars which people wage on Wikipedia's biographies of living people. As you'd expect, the edit histories of polarising figures like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are an eternal clustershag of counterclaims and counter-counterclaims, but almost every sufficiently famous public figure has their detractors, no matter how benign they seem.

Even those rare ones who somehow manage to avoid upsetting anyone still attract vandals trying to insert whimsical libel into their articles for the lulz (who could remember the laughs we had way back in 2006 when someone asserted David Beckham was Chinese?), while there are dozens of examples of lies plucked unknowingly from the site being reported as fact in the newspapers, which is a battle without end in itself for libel lawyers.

However, at the other end of the endless struggle waged by keyboard warriors to prove that popular celebrities are all ultimately problematic, there's the fight fought by the marginally famous for recognition and notability. Who decides who is famous enough for their own entry on the encyclopedia of everything? It's inevitably a matter of degrees, of lines drawn in the sand. But where do we draw them?

David Beckham is obviously notable, as is his pal Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise's co-stars are notable, but the extras doing featured background in his big scenes typically aren't. Beckham's erstwhile teammates are, even those he played with in the twilight of his career at LA Galaxy—but what about the junior members of the squad who might only get onto the pitch once or twice a season? How far down the pecking order for footballers or actors do we go? How far down do we go for other semi-public figures, such as reality TV stars, academics, journeyman porn actors, or journalists?

This is a question I'm now able to answer, after I was forced to argue to Wikipedia's editors that I, a freelance journalist with a mildly unsuccessful career at various national newspapers and publications, was not remotely worth the mysteriously combative four-paragraph biography someone had written about me.

Like most journalists I have a healthy if brittle ego, and have always wanted a career successful enough to warrant a Wikipedia page through merit (a ship which has certainly, sadly, sailed). So I was briefly overjoyed when it was pointed out to me that I suddenly had one, apparently created three weeks previously by a Wikipedian called "The Almightey Drill." This joy turned to disappointment when it became apparent that the page had been set up to attack me as an unhinged left-wing agitator.

Now, as it turns out, I am an unhinged left-wing agitator, but my article was very clearly malicious in intent; it pointed out my upper-middle-class background, discussed a brief period of my career, and spent the rest of its space attacking me for a Modest Proposal-style article I had published but not written on the last day of a former job. The article, which suggested that white men should bow out of student politics for good in a show of affirmative action, had attracted a lot of hate among the alt-right of the Internet, especially on a number of white supremacist websites (where many shrines to my zionist cuckoldry still exist to this day). Before and since that day, I had from time to time poked the vipers' nest that is the right-wing Internet, winning me a few trolls and one serious attempt by GamerGate to have me sacked, but I've hardly been prominent enough to warrant my very own Wikipedia attack page.

I tried to edit the page myself for factual accuracy, as it had claimed I'd written the article. I was told by the editor himself that I'd made my bed and must lie in it, which seemed like a poor attitude from a neutral custodian of scholarship such as he, so I engaged a friend with a significant presence on the site to make edits for me. This friend's edits were also reverted, and he was accused of meat-puppetry, which is what the site calls one party acting through another. Because we'd openly spoken about it on Twitter, it seems as though The Almightey Drill was actively watching my Twitter page, which meant that I'd have to escalate my concerns, and prove to Wikipedia that I'm a no-one. Disappointingly, it didn't take long at all.

Over the years, Wikipedia has been stung by numerous libel claims made by anonymous editors about mildly famous people, and has been forced to improve its community standards to prevent lawsuits up to its eye teeth. The Seigenthaler incident from 2005 is a famously formative one, but as discussed, plenty of malicious falsehoods can creep in.

Happily, I got it all removed very quickly, after making my plea here, the page where people can apply to have biographies of the living deleted. The hardest thing about it was finding where to report the thing—Wikipedia's community guidelines are massive, sprawling, systematic, and irritatingly hard to find exactly what you want at any given time, though when you do find the Articles for Deletion page, it's fun for five minutes to wade into the hubris of strangers. The debate was troublingly brief, and I was all but unanimously agreed to be a no-one in less than a day. There were several dissents, all of whom were ascertained to be sockpuppets of the same guy. He was indefinitely banned, but not before accusing me of race-baiting and of being "one of the chosen people" on the discussion page, leaving Wikipedia forever bereft of his insights on lower-divison European footballers and the sequels to Crash Bandicoot.

I was left satisfied by the thoroughness of the Wikipedia machine, if, you know, kinda bummed that five years as a minor online section editor at the Independent didn't qualify me as a big enough deal. Still, I felt it had been worth it to protect my good name.

So now if you search for "Tom Mendelsohn Wikipedia," nothing's there to suggest there ever was a conflict at all, except a link to this project which archives every page deleted from the encylopedia, rather rendering the whole exercise useless.