Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Megan Smolenyak
Being new here, I have found this exercise to be instructive and have tremendous respect for all editors given the time this took to figure out.  In any case, I think my views are clear so this will simply be a comment.  I agree with the earlier commenter that a paid author is discouraged but not forbidden nor takes away from potential notability.  But I also sympathize with the other commenter about the promotional aspect.  But still ask yourself, ''would this article have ever been written if her likely PR manager had not started it?''  This is not a content issue or attempt to clean up the article more appropriate for Talk.  We now know the awards section and claims of finding “thousands” of soldiers by the original author was inflated.  The issue here is about what we, as a community, define as notable or encyclopedic.  This subject has done some good work with the family trees of a limited number of famous people and it should be noted that credit was given to her in those respective biographies through citations including Obama and his wife.  But is she, herself, really notable and deserving of her own article by ,  or  standards?  There are only a small handful of articles that covered her work.  Is that significant coverage?  Her own articles in Huffington cannot be considered coverage of her.  Her books were never widely reviewed (or reviewed at all) save for a mention here and there, the groups/websites she founded have been dormant for years and were never really significant when active and she has no major awards to speak of other than a single meritorious mention (even the “Bo Peep” award is from an old fringe Listserve group reborn on Facebook).  Furthermore, the number of citations does not establish notability.  None of this is to say that she has not contributed to the betterment of society because she has or takes away from her accomplishments. There are clearly “notable” genealogists including an entire https://www.ngsgenealogy.org/hall-of-fame-members/ National Genealogy Hall of Fame of which few members have WP articles (I’d actually work on those if I had time to continue learning how to edit) but I understand not everyone can be on that list.  Of course, not everyone should be on WP, either.  In the end, this article just looks like a fancy resume exploiting the WP platform
— User:Monteboat, 19:23, 8 January 2021 (UTC)
Stance: comment
Cited policy: WP:BASIC||WP:ANYNBIO||WP:AUTHOR (Wikipedia:Notability)