most academic peer review is at this point is a joke though. i know everyone wants to hold onto it as some kind of high standard but it really isn't all what it used to be, it functions almost identical to SEO for academics at this point.
this dated mentality combined with wikipedia's culture of inconsistent topical gatekeeping is the source of much strife.
If you take a reductive point of view, everything in life – school applications, job interviews, business deals, legal battles, courtship, .... – involves some amount of self promotion and every form of social proof can be gamed/hacked to some degree.
(For example, in 2005 Google made up a brand new prize to award to Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson expressly for the purpose of padding out his O-1 visa application to move to the USA. Does that mean the O-1 visa requirements/criteria are bullshit? Maybe.)
(a) Wikipedia notability guidelines can certainly be gamed to some extent by motivated self-promoters who are willing to jump through hoops to place their pet topics in newspaper articles, research papers, published books, etc.
(b) Sometimes Wikipedia ends up rejecting topics that should be included based on a lack of sufficient third-party write-ups in secondary sources.
But Wikipedia still has to have some kind of guideline to prevent itself from being flooded with self-promotion spam, and the current notability guidelines and reliable source guidelines work better than many suggested alternatives.
