What makes a travel writer notable?

There's been a fascinating to and fro going on over on Wikipedia regarding the travel writer Tim Leffel. A Wikipedia editor marked it for deletion (which appears now to have happened) because the editor did not consider Tim (who I know personally) to be sufficiently "notable". You can read the full conversation here.

While the result is decidedly unfortunate for Tim -- (particularly given some of the other individuals who remain live on Wikipedia!!!), I found the arguments the editor used for the deletion quite thought provoking.

That the SATW awards are pay for play and were not widely reported outside of the SATW echo chamber and that many of the other supporting sources were primary, rather than secondary were a couple of the issues raised.