My dad is wrapping up the first monograph on a not too obscure New Deal artist who had a long career and plenty of notable works (at least in his niche).

The entire wikipedia page was written by my dad. If you search the artist there's plenty of hits on art for sale by him, but not much on the man himself.

My father who was a journalist and now a researcher has done several projects and he's been the first 'story' written for a lot of these projects.

When the Philadelphia Union started a feeder team named after the historical club in Bethlehem - they called him up and asked him if he owned the copyright! In fact, basically all of the pictures and details, later written into a book done by another local soccer journo type, was dug up by him. A lot of this information was either in microfiche or in dusty piles in the Bethlehem area library. Now it's diligently organized and stored online.

One of the things he's told me about his work is it's immensely difficult to put a story together that is cohesive. Even for someone who's relatives are still alive, and for the soccer club? He could probably have made up half of the articles and didn't.

All of these things to find out that wikipedia will delete your article for non-importance because there's a lack of recent news links online to it.

Someone has to actually collect it all up together. Go talk to original people. Then you write a book and wikipedia will happily take it. They might not be happy to quote your great auntie Margaret who said there was a bastard son, but until some biographer writes that into a book nobody thinks it's real.