Debating "Deletionism" At Wikipedia 484
Ian Lamont writes "In a strange turn of events, the Wikipedia entry for Deletionpedia — an online archive of deleted Wikipedia articles — is now being considered for deletion. The entry for Deletionpedia was created shortly after the publication of an Industry Standard article and a discussion on Slashdot this week. Almost immediately, it was nominated for deletion, which has sparked a running debate about the importance of the Wikipedia entry, Deletionpedia, and the sources that reference it. For the time being, you can read the current version of the Deletionpedia entry, while the Wikipedia editors carry on the debate."
Sounds like Wikipedia needs competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately Wikipedia is going to the dogs (Score:5, Insightful)
I really love Wikipedia and I sure hope I'm wrong, but I think we've seen Wikipedia at it's peek. As with many ventures that become successful they move from innovation to stability and with that become widely popular which creates new pressures and brings in other interests, and then in turn leads to the degradation of the service as people squabble about how things should be done. I've seen this with special interest groups and clubs of all kinds. It can be particularly difficult to counter. An organisation either survives these things and becomes stronger for the learning the members have done, or else it succumbs to the storm of shite and fades into insignificance.
Self-criticism essential in community encyclopedia (Score:5, Insightful)
If the highlighted phrase is true, then it indicates that the high priests at Wikipedia are totally beyond control and beyond the pale.
There is no more important function in a community encyclopedia than self-criticism. It is part of its foundation, a self-referential examination of its integrity and transparency.
I am really hoping that that line from TFA is false, and that the discussion about deleting the Deletionpedia page from Wikipedia is unambiguously declared invalid by WP editors.
Deletionpedia Belongs On Wikipedia (Score:2, Insightful)
Deletionpedia is newsworthy, especially now that there's a controversy afloat. (See the Streisand Effect.) The appearance of impropriety is often worse than the scandal itself, so Wikipedia ought to just leave the entry be lest it be accused of censorship.
something to say != something relevant (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think there is any value in deletionpedia or any similar repository. Just because you/anybody else/I have something to say does not make it relevant or useful. There is certainly an argument to be made regarding the meaningfulness of that statement when applied to a 'crowd-sourced' and moderated compendium of information. However I am far more comfortable with the idea of a for-the-most-part-ok yet flawed system rather than allow every idiot a soapbox. The latter seems to affect MSM in this country quite a bit and we all know how that is going.
Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia's notability guideline (note it's not actually an official policy) has all sorts of loopholes built in to it to allow a clique of editors to kill something they don't like. In this case, they would argue that Deletionpedia was not really notable in and of itself, but was only notable because of some notable incident which might be worthy of having a separate article (but that article would likely never be written, or would itself be deleted on some other grounds).
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ugh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why doesn't it? The WP administration has said that space is not a concern, so what's the harm?
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs competition (Score:5, Insightful)
In most cases there are better quality pages available, however the Wikipedia page will be in the top 10 of search results, no matter how good or bad it is.
It's Google that needs competition. That will stop monopolies in a number of areas -- not just Wikipedia.
Re:Ugh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:something to say != something relevant (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
After that ridiculous incident, I stopped relying on Wikipedia for anything substantive. Its accuracy can not be assured due to the bureaucratic toolboxes that moderate the site.
Re:something to say != something relevant (Score:5, Insightful)
People like you are why Wikipedia is a failure if what it had intended to be.
How many people have to find something relevant or useful in order to stop it from being deleted from Wikipedia?
A hundered? A thousand? A million?
Nothing like that. Wikipedia is controlled by those what get off on deleting the work of other's, ignoring 'notability' or 'value' or 'usefulness' or 'relevance' entirely. If these few high priests of Wikipedia deem an article, whether it's about Pokemon or CNN, to be something they have a personal bias against, it will be deleted.
Frankly, it seems like Wikipedia has about as much credibility these days as Fox News.
So, that might be an interesting question: Given the fact that Wikipedia is controlled by a very few people with a very narrow view of what's notable, and use that to control what information is contained in Wikipedia, regardless of the truth, veracity, or notability of that information, should Wikipedia be regarded as a source of useful information, or as a propaganda machine to be avoided at all costs?
It's a painful question to have to ask - at one time, I espoused Wikipedia as, well, one of the best examples of the strengths of the internet.
More and more, however, I'm finding that, given the nature of those in control of Wikipedia... I just don't know anymore.
Re:Self-criticism essential in community encyclope (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a totally orthogonal issue. If you're suggesting that Wikipedia hides information critical of itself, that's not true, there are many examples in project space [wikipedia.org]. For article space though, it's proper to stick to the same criteria that's used for every other article. Otherwise you're arguing that Star Wars should mention how much it sucked in the movie itself (i.e. in its primary product) rather than just discussing it in the DVD extras.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'll admit, it might save them a few kilobytes of bandwidth or a gigabyte of storage, but honestly, bandwidth and storage are dirt cheap these days.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... it's not your statue, remember it.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:4, Insightful)
*Snap*
Artist: "But... those were arms..."
Deletionist: "NO U SUXORS I MAKE BETTR."
Re:Self-criticism essential in community encyclope (Score:1, Insightful)
It's not true. See the debate [wikipedia.org] for yourself. The vast majority of the arguments have to do with the scarcity of reliable third-party sources discussing Deletionpedia. The only people who even mentioned intolerance of criticism are people against deletion of the article, using it as a strawman [wikipedia.org] to undermine the opposing argument:
No one has a problem with criticism of Wikipedia; there is a massive article [wikipedia.org] on that exact topic.
But see what happened? The author said it, you repeated it, now suddenly everyone's going to assume it's fact, without even looking at the discussion. The ability for one person's random opinion to become fact is exactly why Wikipedia is so insistent on reliable sources and citations.
entropy (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you 100% that Wikipedia has peaked. The quality of most articles is dropping over time, because anybody halfway sane doesn't want to pore autistically over a watchlist of cherished articles to make sure they don't succumb to entropy.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that every dispute on WP is pointless, or that either side could be right on every issue. One bogus argument that's always posed by people who don't want their articles deleted is that it's not a paper encyclopedia, so there's no reason to keep the whole thing under a certain page count. Well, suppose Fred creates an article on his high school band, Fredsband, which only actually consisted of himself and his golden retriever. Every single time a user searches for "golden retriever," one of the hits is going to be the article on Fredsband. Also, when you have an article that's non-notable, it tends not to be linked to any other articles, and you get these little disjoint subsets of WP that are unhealthy. They can become havens for crackpots, or honeypots for spam links.
There was once a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I will end this post with a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Notable to you no. Notable to someone who lives in the town, yes. Wikipedia isn't to be judged by how it relates to your own small world. If it is irrelevant to you then leave well alone, rather than trying to force others to conform to your own standards.
If the size of Wikipedia reduces it usefulness to you then the problem is that the search engine you are using is broken. Don't fix a broken search engine by slashing and burning the target of the search until it fits within the engine's limitations. Fix the search algorithm instead.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
There seems to be a group of folks who like to "purify" a community website, and to be honest I don't even know what makes these kind of folks tick.
I tend to be an inclusionist/separatist in my attitude toward wiki projects and content. By this I mean that content ought to be given time to develop, even if it seems crazy and off the wall. By being a separatist, I think the mergist viewpoint is full of logical errors and that most calls to merge two articles together are mainly a variant of deletionists who think that such petty articles about obscure topics need to go... but with the "good vibes" that somehow the topic will be covered in some huge all-encompassing article.
There are some things that do need to go on occasion, but I've also seen some of the most creative applications of Wiki technology get developed when somebody pushes the edge of a project and develops something way out of bounds. Indeed some of these extreme projects have become out right independent Wikimedia projects of their own, including things like Wikibooks, Wikinews, and even Wiktionary that all had their origins on Wikipedia until some deletionist decided to kick them off.
This phenomena unfortunately isn't even limited to Wikipedia and the WMF sister projects either, but is widespread in nearly any wiki project I've been involved with. Indeed, I've found that the relatively flat peer-editing model of Wikipedia tends to keep the worst of these issues in check as opposed to much worse sorts of community editing models like the Open Directory Project.
Re:There was once a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Deleting ANYTHING from wikipedia is stupid. If something is PROVEN to be inaccurate, then that's another story.
Prove it's true. Otherwise it gets deleted. That's not deletionism, that's not fanaticism, it's intellectual honesty. If it's good enough for the last two centuries of scientific and historical academia, it's good enough for me. I don't want an article on how the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe just because no one can prove it's not true.
original research (Score:3, Insightful)
Another reason for deletion is articles that constitute original research [wikipedia.org] rather than encyclopedia articles. I have advocated the deletion of several articles that are really an original synthesis of ideas from unrelated sources. Such articles can be very interesting and perhaps there should be an originalresearchopedia for their bloody carcasses after a successful deletion, but they don't belong on an encyclopedia.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
i actually find all this scorn for Wikipedia and its mods/admins quite amusing.
there are lots of accusations of personal biases, clique-mentality, elitism, and other very human traits. but i wonder if those making these complaints ever bothered to ask themselves whether these problems are endemic to the Wikipedia community or if they're problems which are inherent with any editorial process and that it's only because of Wikipedia's community-driven nature that these problems of objectivity are actually exposed and open to public scrutiny & debate.
i guess with any kind of progressive movement there will be rearguard reactions to oppose it. however, in this case i think that the complaints being leveled are actually quite valid. it's just that Wikipedia is being unfairly singled out simply because of its open/collaborative nature.
if you only have 20-30 person conventional editorial staff these problems would be a non-issue simply because the people who disagree with the company's official editorial opinion would simply be fired or probably just would not have been hired in the first place. all of the editorial politics are handled behind closed doors and any issues would be solved by a simple executive decision from the chief editor.
but once you involve the public in the editorial process then you're opening it to infinitely many viewpoints and a greater diversity of opinions. this invites open discussion and eliminates the risk of corporate politics influencing editorial decisions. but the same virtues that make Wikipedia a great alternative to the largely consolidated mainstream media also give rise to controversy as its open nature is more likely to draw public criticism.
the more people that take part in a debate, the more disagreements will arise, and the harder it will be to satisfy everyone involved. but i don't see this as a flaw with collaborative publishing. it reveals an often missed (or concealed) dimension to print publishing, particularly that of reference works.
Re:something to say != something relevant (Score:2, Insightful)
How many people have to find something relevant or useful in order to stop it from being deleted from Wikipedia?
If these few high priests of Wikipedia deem an article, whether it's about Pokemon or CNN, to be something they have a personal bias against, it will be deleted.
It sounds like you're unfamiliar with Wikipedia's notability guidelines. They're clearly spelled out here [wikipedia.org]. If you read a deletion debate, you'll find that it's this guideline being used to judge articles.
Do you have an example of an article with multiple, reliable independent sources that got deleted? That has been the threshold for inclusion since day one. If you can find an article that got deleted despite meeting the criteria, it would prove your conspiracy theory. Otherwise, you'll have to accept that it's a simple, clear-cut standard that has been applied since the site's inception.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've written a couple of articles about places of interest in a notable city in England. They've been deleted each time as the "moderators" don't know the city and think the places are of little note. Talk to the residents and visitors though and it's a different story. While there are submissions worthy of deletion it should *not* be up to the elite, and quite often uninformed, few to judge this.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense. You're honestly arguing that because someone, somewhere, spent the 10 seconds to 10 minutes required to put up a half-baked paragraph or two on wikipedia, it must be factual?
We all place entirely too much faith in Wikipedia's accuracy. And that, in a word, is what deleting half-baked articles gains Wikipedia. Accuracy.
Not that it could ever truly be accurate, but still, if there wasn't a focus on deletion of Wikipedia articles, Wikipedia would be about as informative as a straight text dump of every post on Slashdot with moderation info removed. (Actually, Slashdot might win out.)
Re:Hmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
Who gives a shit what you think? Because it's not relevant to you personally it shouldn't be allowed to be relevant to anyone? Fuck you, you self centered douchebag.
As long as it's properly organized it's not possible to have too much information available. it's provincial assholes like you that make Wikipedia the cesspool it's becoming today.
In effect, editors delete (Score:3, Insightful)
When "Articles for Deletion" discussions work the way they should be, editors delete, admins only implement the will of the people. The major exceptions are borderline cases and cases when there is very little discussion.
I'm not saying things always work the way they should, just that when Wikipedians follow their own rules, the admin that does the deleting rarely gets to be a party to the decision.
Sure, there is that grey area between "delete" and "no consensus" and the occasional discussion where the "!vote count" does not match the strength of the arguments and the closing admin has to make a real judgment call on the strength of the arguments for keep vs. delete in light of policies and guidelines. It's these cases that separate a so-so admin from a good admin: A good admin will explain why he is deleting or not deleting and do so in a way that leaves most people satisfied.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does anyone even bother with wikipedia? No controls (except for a few politically driven, control freak, admins).
It is essentially an encyclopedia created and sustained through mob rule. Most universities won't allow it to be cited and woe be upon the scientist that cites it in a scientific paper. I suspect if anyone were to rely on it for business decisions, they'd be fired.
It's the Lord of the Flies of reference.
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs competition (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - you couldn't design a site to spam Google better than Wikipedia. Lots of offsite links, rapid updates, constant changes, and highly internally linked via keywords.
Even if, according to Google itself, the page isn't linked to from offsite - it still receives a high PageRank score.
Re:entropy (Score:5, Insightful)
But! Say the council of Anytown decides to compile a local encyclopedia. Fred may well make it in, being of local interest.
For both the Britannica and the Anytown-pedia, space was a limiting issue. What made Wikipedia so promising was the idea that it didn't have such space limitations- you could include articles on anything. Sadly, they seem to have decided that some objective standard of notability exists, and define it rather narrowly at that.
"garage bands" (Score:5, Insightful)
Leave those new band wikipedia entries alone.
I'm a music writer, and I'm also section editor of an online music/movie reivew website. The section I edit is the "new artist" section (we call it FIND).
My job is to find all the information I can about new bands. Here's the problem:
1. often press releases are insufficient or leave out pertinent, possibly negative information (understandable, that's what p.r. people are for)
2. band websites are often run by labels. labels don't give each artist the same ammount of attention, and often really good bands fall through the cracks because of it. many 'official' band websites are 'under construction' for years
3. myspace is unreliable...it's good to hear some tracks and keep up with show dates but like press release, sometimes important info that a journalist needs to know is left out
wikipedia is an invaluable starting point for the research I do...save the 'indie' band entries!
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've learned the best thing to do with Wikipedia is use it to get a general idea about something, and use that to find the facts yourself elsewhere.
Re:something to say != something relevant (Score:1, Insightful)
I do often wonder why individual summaries for every single Star Trek episode ever produced is notable.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:5, Insightful)
You're shirking your responsibility as an editor to actually edit pages, in favor of lazily deleting out of hand. That, right there, is what's wrong with the Wikipedia.
Re:A good wiki with a bad version control system (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhm, I've not dealt with a deleted article on Wikipedia, but we use media wiki on our intranet site and accessing a deleted article will allow you to view its history and restore it with little effort.
I used that feature just a few days ago to restore an article on our Intranet that I had previously deleted.
For example the deletion log for a page I created and deleted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=A_Deleted_Article_Example [wikipedia.org]
You'll have to wait for an editor to come along and delete it, but give it an hour or so and it'll probably be killed.
The point to all this is, I think you are pretty much completely wrong.
Re:Nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a huge difference between editing some online thing like Wikipedia in your spare time and paying for the roof over your head and food on your table with your job editing lexica.
Also; Wikipedia admins carry quite a lot of power, usually changing the history of a country was reserved to the ruling elite - now it can be accomplished by a disgruntled admin.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have to agree with you and the GP poster. Although it would be opposed by most, possibly even including myself, it might do good to have one's record of deletion/non-deletion votes in previous battles be indicated.
As, as I've already said on Slashdot, I can't understand the thinking of someone who would want to limit the amount available.
Further, Wikipedia has decided to prefer the bias of Western media over a search for the truth - including from 0those I agree with (eg the President of Cuba) and from those I disagree with (eg the President of Iran).
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also true that that sort of thing is present in all editorial processes.
My biggest complaint with Wikipedia(aside from the fact that there seems to be no official method of discouraging the worst of this behavior) is really that there seems to be a core group of Wikipedians who have a vision for what they think Wikipedia ought to be, and that this vision is completely at odds with what people actually use Wikipedia for.
Wikipedia is never going to be an on-line version of Britannica. This is mostly because the world doesn't need an on-line version of Britannica, and that if it did, Britannica would be perfectly capable of doing it themselves.
What the world needs is a place where you can look up all the stuff that doesn't get into encyclopaedia's. A lot of this stuff is trivial and non-notable, and of course there's some issues with reliability and truth, but that's what the citation system is for.
Wikipedia can be that place where you can find out all the alternate points of view, look at what they use as citations(if anything) and judge them. It can do this because realistically it doesn't cost them anything to host information no one looks at and any information people are interested in is fundamentally notable by the very definition of the word.
Wikipedia can, and should, host pages on pretty much everything that can't be proven false. Anything that also can't be proven true, should be marked as such, but there is no harm, and possible a lot of good in it being there.
Certainly some things ought to be deleted, or at least sidelined, but that should mostly be about crap writing as opposed to something not being important. If someone sends something in which is totally unreadable, and no one is sufficiently interested in updating it, by all means delete it, but if someone puts together a well written, well thought out article about something that you think doesn't matter, let it lie.
Re:There was once a time... (Score:2, Insightful)
Because we all know that all the "primary" sites your teachers always want you to go to never ever have misleading information and are always cited.
Thanks for the childish, juvenile strawman.
Now, I'm not sure if I would write a 100 page book about American History based on Wikipedia, but a paper about most software Wikipedia is going to give you the most information short of talking to the actual developer (because most of the time the project's site is no good and man pages only tell you the flags you can use)
The problem is is that on no particular article at any particular time can be trusted; maybe you can tell if something on the page is a lie, but people using it as a source of information cannot. The fact that you suggest this tells me you're probably the type of person that goes out and hunts for material that confirms what you already know when writing a paper instead of using it to support a thesis or argument; that, and that you would say "your teachers" indicates to me that you're probably still in high school, and thus not yet introduced to academic standards.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think he agrees with you, in that the notability guidelines are next to useless. If a perfectly useful and valid in all other respects page can be made, who cares if it is notable at all? One could argue that anything meeting the requirements for a source is notable, as the source proves someone somewhere finds it a topic worthy of being notable.
Re:Deletionism? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're not taking that analogy literally enough. Think of the point behind book burnings - to destroy and censor information deemed unfit to be in print or published. Deleting web pages fits this perfectly.
Re:entropy (Score:3, Insightful)
Every single time a user searches for "golden retriever," one of the hits is going to be the article on Fredsband.
So what? The hits are listed by relevance, I don't think Fred's little garage band is going to confuse anyone.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Article history and talk page history are oddly prone to being reset. Particularly by petty admins. Or, let's be honest, moderators.
>Also, there are no "mods" on Wikipedia. There are Administrators, but they don't moderate content except in very unusual circumstances
Read it. Then think about what you just wrote. You know, there is a reason why GP got a +5 and you rate at most a +3.
Public narrative on Wikipedia: always the same (Score:5, Insightful)
10 WHY IS WIKIPEDIA SO INACCURATE
20 "Well, let me just delete all the unsourced material to leave it with a balanced summ-"
30 NO STOP DELETING STUFF KEEP IT IN I CANT BELIEVE YOU EVIL DELETIONISTS WANT TO DESTROY ALL MY HARD WORK
40 GOTO 10
I was an editor there for a while until I just couldn't deal with the constant rehashing of "these are the rules/guidelines, they are displayed prominently on all relevant pages" on every single AfD, as well as the stupid drama and the infinite patience the community had with clear vandals ("*USER* IS A FAGGOT NIGGER" = "Please do not make test edits outside of the sandbox"). Users whine about having their 5 page manuscript on their cat's behaviors deleted as a ten second destruction of all their hard work but show total disregard for the infinitely more people patrolling New Pages, AfD, PROD, etc's time being wasted. This is mostly because the system has been built up to have multiple levels of redundant band-aid processes. For example, there are three ways to delete an article:
If it meets certain criteria that apply to a lot of unsuitable pages, you can "speedy delete" it - since you're not supposed to tag anything if it doesn't clearly meet those criteria, deleting the tag itself is an act of vandalism, you're supposed to copy paste a {{hangon}} template and then justify your reasoning on the talk page. This never works: editors misapply the tag repeatedly, users don't bother to read the template or don't have enough time to write out anything detailed because the article will be deleted quickly.
Then you've got PROD, which is speedy-lite: you tag it, give a short justification, and if the thing isn't "challenged" by the article's creator or anyone else by removing it, it's deleted after a set period. If it is, you're supposed to always take it to AfD, but many people will just give up because nominating something for AfD is a 15 step process which involves collecting rare plants and taking them to seven pillars, then casting a spell and defeating a goblin in hand to hand combat. People don't browse the PROD queue, so the only people that end up taking off the tag are...surprise! The original creator of the article! PROD is essentially just a series of bets that the original creator won't delete the tag and take it to AfD before the time expires, and the admin isn't tired enough from deleting crap all day that they'll agree with the justification.
And then there's Articles for Deletion, which consists halfway of stuff that should be handled through either of the two above processes (if they worked properly), short vanity articles that end up having one or two "delete" comments and then are closed, or spiral into large debates in which each editor's opinion is supposed to not be a "vote", but if the closing admin rejects a pure tally, always seem to agree with toward the most simplified, spoon-fed argument. As mentioned above, nominating one is a rather tiring and complex set of edits which involves making three separate template changes on three separate pages, putting in a arbitrary "category" that is never useful to anyone, and writing a hopefully detailed summary of why it should go poof at the same time. This is "Web 2.0", right? Why can't I click a box or a dropdown? Is this a modified "security through obscurity" thing where deletionism is purposefully put through so many different steps that nominating a sequence of articles (never try to nominate more than once at a time, the syntax is a nightmare) is discouraged with the time-wasting complexity of it?
Plenty of this relies on templates and user-mediated process that would be made completely moot overnight if the MediaWiki developers got off their asses and started working on and implementing features that go beyond "flagged revisions" such as tagging articles for deletion via a tab and dropdown menu, then putting "speedy" articles in a queue where one or two other editors give it a check to make sure it's properly tagged and the article goes poof (without an administrator needin
Re:Hmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
While this is of course feasible, it leaves a lot of openings for abuse by administrators (or moderators or whatever you want to call them). Its very nature is entirely subjective, in that what is notable to one person might be less so to another.
Even a vanity article is capable of being useful and informative, particularly if it happens to point to useful sources. There's nothing in Wikipedia's policy that defines a particular number of people to whom the article must be of interest.
I would prefer to see a system where nothing is deleted without VERY good reason. The actual policy as I understand it is in general not bad as it stands, but if pages are being deleted capriciously, there needs to be some method of oversight.
Re:Deletionism? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs competition (Score:2, Insightful)
As per the Great grand parent's post, the problem there is pagerank. Wikipedia is being given too much credence and influence by Google and has been for quite some time. Don't believe me? Cat [google.ie], Credence [google.ie], Conundrum [google.ie]. I'm willing to bet that a wikipedia entry makes an appearance on the first page or search results for 90%+ of Google searches.
Google has had a long standing love affair with Wikipedia, as has most of the internet. Just like when you first fall in love, you tend to overlook most if not all of the other parties faults. However, after a while the honeymoon ends, and you begin to settle down and realize that your perfect partner is indeed only human. Almost everyone has by now come across information on wikipedia which they know to be blatantly false, inaccurate or misleading. Many have experienced, first hand, the office politics and bureaucracy involved in deletionism, notability and general revisionist issues. It's safe to say that the internet's love affair with Wikipedia is over(Though we are still together).
Google on the other hand, is still smitten, and shows no signs of losing its infatuation with what is generally regarded as only an adequate source of information. Why the wikipedia article for eigenvalue [google.ie] should rank higher than the Mathworld one, I don't know. I was going to say that although I think the Wikipedia article is of higher quality, that does not mean that it should be ranked over the more specialized Mathworld one. But, as I went to check it, I see that the standard of the Wikipedia article has, in my opinion, gone down significantly since I last checked it. Regardless, Google still thinks Wikipedia is a better page than the alternatives, and will probably think so regardless of the quality of the eigenvalue article.
We've cut Wikipedia enough slack already. It doesn't need or deserve anymore from us, or from search engines. If wikipedia is ever going to grow up and deal with the issues that have been left to fester for years, then pressure is going to have to be applied. Pressure from users, pressure from competitors, and pressure from search engines. We have one and two, but step three is proving to be the missing link in improving user generated encyclopedias.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like Wikipedia needs competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
I agree. The notability argument is a crock. It sounds like the old publishers of print media making decisions for other people. That was not the purpose of Wikipedia.
We should have all the pages we want. If articles need to be cleaned up or merged or sources sited, then fine. But people making decisions that some subject matter is not notable is what is ruining wikipedia. As others have said, it no longer feels like a community you can contribute to, and so contributions have tailed off. It will soon become stale.
As a side note, my High School is on Wikipedia. I looked at it once out of curiosity and found it interesting. I don't see how it hurts anyone else to have that page there. It is a link listed in the section called "local schools" on the page for my home town. How is that damaging Wikipedia (a few KB on a server). In fact, it made me think for a moment "wow, wikipedia has everything"
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I love it - people criticise the reliability of Wikipedia, but are quite happy to believe random hearsay posted anonymously on Slashdot.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I second the call for links. It's funny how people whining about Wikipedia never cite their source.
I bet most the people complaining are the sorts of people who write some nonsensical or unsourced article, or one that does not even assert why it's important, and then whine about Wikipedia that it got deleted. For all we know, the creator of List of films with monkeys in them [dbatley.com] is on here, complaining how crap Wikipedia is that his masterpiece of an article got deleted.
The sad thing is that elsewhere, people are also criticising Wikipedia because "It contains so much crap", because of the very articles that the former set of people write. It wouldn't surprise me if there have been edit wars, which result in both sides of the argument getting annoyed and complaining "Wikipedia is full of idiots who rv anything I write" and "Wikipedia is full of idiots who write complete rubbish"...
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Deletionpedia&diff=next&oldid=239175544 [wikipedia.org] . Firstly, with only one short sentence, this is not an example of "pages that people have put a lot of effort into". Secondly, it got proposed for speedy deleted due to not asserting importance. You don't have to prove it, or even show it - just assert it. That's not much to ask, and helps trim out pages that people write about themselves or their pet cat. Even if that short sentence article had got deleted because it didn't meet it, who cares - there's nothing stopping someone writing a proper article that follows the simple rules. Thirdly, as you can see from my link, the admin soon realised his mistake, and took down the speedy delete request. So no problem. And now after the AfD, the decision has been to keep the article - so it looks like the system's working fine.
There's also nothing odd about how quick it happens - people can view new pages at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages [wikipedia.org] , so they can be reviewed quickly.
And since you think this is a bad idea, perhaps you should take a look at some of the new pages. At a glance, I see the article Dj_harry [wikipedia.org]. Are you going to complain about the proposal for speedy deletion on this article? (Perhaps someone can also complain that Wikipedia isn't as serious as Britannica ... funny, maybe it's got something to do with the fact that Britannica doesn't have articles on "Dj harry"?)
So some nerdy high school kid is allowed to nominate articles for deletion within seconds of them been created.
And you think that many of these pages aren't created by nerdy high school kids?
Re:the problem with wikipedia (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"garage bands" (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is not a repository of things that are useful
Why not? In a paper encyclopedia, there must be some criteria to keep the size down, but Wikipedia doesn't need such restrictions. If a page is well written and accurate, who cares if it meets some notability criteria - it's probably useful to someone, even if it it isn't useful to you.
I'm afraid I've seen far too many really useful pages be blown away for being "non-notable" over the years - so much so that I don't bother to contribute to Wikipedia these days. Why should I spend the time contributing to improve the articles and make them really useful if someone who isn't interested in the subject matter is just going to declare them to be non-notable and blow them away?
My experiences of AfDs is that the only people who participate in the discussions are the deletionists, the people who wrote the article and *very occasionally* a few of the readers of the article. The views of the people who wrote the article are usually swiftly discounted because they are seen as having a vested interest in keeping it around and the readers of the article are usually called out as sock-puppets, because as readers, rather than contributors, they usually have very little edit history.
Wikipedia was a nice idea, but it is slowly being destroyed by petty politics and posturing.
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
I tend to be an inclusionist/separatist in my attitude toward wiki projects and content. By this I mean that content ought to be given time to develop, even if it seems crazy and off the wall. By being a separatist, I think the mergist viewpoint is full of logical errors and that most calls to merge two articles together are mainly a variant of deletionists who think that such petty articles about obscure topics need to go...
I find that splitting off articles into what would essentially end up as stubs (*)often removes the context that would make the information more useful, without providing any significant benefit.
My preference is to split potential sub-articles into subsections and if necessary let them grow. Eventually, when and if there's enough information to make a good article and/or the size of the subsection is too in-depth and long for the main article, *then* it can be split off and the subsection summarised with a "main article" link at the top. I've done this to several excessively-long articles myself.
My dislike of excessive splitting is that (I get the impresion that) some people seem to do it because they want to do it for reasons of emphasis (of the sub-topic) or importance or for reasons of ego, rather than whether or no it's the best way to present the information. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.
(*) And, more importantly, what will likely never be any more than stubs.
Re:I'm a confirmed WP deletionist (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with that is, what does that gain Wikipedia? Nothing. It loses facts. Granted, they might be badly written, or some might be poorly-researched, but deletion doesn't gain Wikipedia anything.
Here's the nub, and two salient points that people sometimes forget.
1) For those that claim that all information is important and worthwhile even if it's badly written and organised, they seem to forget that (a) we already have such a repository that can- and always will- beat Wikipedia hands down. It's the whole World Wide Web and a search engine!. Oh, and (b) this is where the vast majority of information on Wikipedia comes from anyway! Wikipedia's strength is that it organises information into a usable and readable form.
2) Wikipedia itself has *always* claimed that it's not meant to be an original source of information; therefore, its job is to collate and re-present information in a more useful format- see (1) above. Otherwise, what's the point?
I'm not a rabid deletionist by any means, but the problem with the more extreme "keep everything" viewpoints is that they're essentially trying to redo the whole web. I'll take a readable and useful WP article over one that's "complete" but no more useful than what I could find with Google anyday. It has nothing to do with saving a few pennies of space on a cheapass Seagate HDD.
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Fuck you, you self centered douchebag.
And this is what passes for 'insightful'?
Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Same here, pissed off. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am unable to contribute to Wikipedia because of this. Great idea, great resource, but it is no longer the Encyclopedia that Anyone can edit. I maybe have time and energy to do spelling corrections, fix links -- stuff like that. I don't' have the time and energy to fight some admin for weeks to have a link go to a (more appropriate) article, or add something that should already be up there. I don't bother anymore.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly.
A lot of deletion discussions are a bunch of unemployed americans with nothing better to do discussing whether or not some monument, palace or person in some country they wouldn't find on a map, is "notable" or not.
And that's mostly because most of the adults don't chime in on a topic they know absolutely nothing about, so the whole "delete" supporters who essentially say "never heard of it, not notable" just in slightly veiled words, are the only voice speaking up.
"Notability" is a broken concept, because you can not falsify it. You can not prove that something is not notable. You can only prove that it is notable by citing evidence. But absence of evidence isn't proof of non-notability. Just because nobody who happened to stumble upon the AfD page in that particular week lives in Peru doesn't mean that the topic in question isn't on TV in Peru regularily, for example.
Re:Deleting ANYTHING? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
How does the Internet Meme "Happycat" which was deleted despite being very notable qualify as not notable.
There is a huge subjective component to notability. Sure, "x is the coolest person" is probably a good candidate for deletion, but time and time again I've seen these barnstar toting clowns delete perfectly good articles because they have pull and they think something isn't notable due to their unfamiliarity with a subject.
The same deletionists often have strange pet subjects , eg, an obscure record label of music they like.
Its basic: when a deletion causes an uproar its probably a notable subject.
Re:Public narrative on Wikipedia: always the same (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't contribute to wikipedia. I *am* however annoyed when useful stuff is deleted because it doesn't make somebody's list of notable or encyclopedic knowledge. This is particularly true of lists of things and often the distinction is perverse. There is an exhaustive list of every Doctor Who episode ever, but no list of cars for Forza 2 (although of course there's a complete list of downloadable content which presumeably will disappear into the ether at some point in the future).
Now, I'm not suggesting that having long, exhaustive lists on the main page of an article is a good thing, but having a separate page for "List of cars in Forza 2" doesn't inconvenience anybody. It's not as if there's a limited amount of space in the book or anything!