A client called us not to build an entry, but to argue that his no longer belonged. His logistics company had made headlines for two years in the early 2000s, then folded quietly. The coverage, he said, was ancient history; nobody alive remembered it. Didn’t that settle the matter?
It does not. Wikipedia’s notability guidelines fix a moment rather than track a pulse. Once a subject has been the focus of significant coverage in independent, reliable sources, that coverage does not lapse because attention has since moved on. A biography is not renewed each year like a licence; it is built once, on a record that either exists or does not.
Notability, once established, is not temporary.
This surprises people in both directions. Clients who were covered heavily and briefly assume the fading of public interest works in their favor; clients whose company or campaign is currently generating coverage assume the opposite, that a thin history disqualifies them until enough time passes. Neither reading matches the guideline. The question is never how recently the coverage ran. It is whether, at any point, independent sources treated the subject as worth writing about at length.
So we say the plain thing. If a page contains errors or gives an unfair weight to old events, that is a content problem, fixed by editing. If the original coverage was too thin to have justified an article in the first place, that is worth raising through the community’s own process. But a fading news cycle, on its own, settles nothing. The record from years ago is still the record now.
