Latest Wikipedia Uproar Over 'Superprotection'

metasonix writes: As if the problems brought up during the recent 2014 Wikimania conference weren't enough, now Wikipedia is having an outright battle between its editor and administrator communities, especially on the German-language Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, currently flush with cash from its donors, keeps trying to force flawed new software systems onto the editor community, who has repeatedly responded by disabling the software. This time, however, Foundation Deputy Director Erik Moeller had the bright idea to create a new level of page protection to prevent the new software from being disabled. "Superprotection" has resulted in an outright revolt on the German Wikipedia. There has been subsequent coverage in the German press, and people have issued demands that Moeller, one of Wikipedia's oldest insiders, be removed from his job. One English Wikipedia insider started a change.org petition demanding the removal of superprotection."

bureaucracy in action

[turkeydance]

bigger is better and all that.

Mitre be a problem here

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Superprotection mandate

Call it Ex Cathedra and get it over with.

say it again

[slashmydots]

It's almost like the idea of letting everyone edit something actually does in fact turn into a crooked, biased shitstorm and wikipedia was wrong and everyone else in the world was right.

Can someone explain what this is about?

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped following what goes on with wikipedia and editing a few years ago. I was not as much annoyed that my edits would not survive long, it just started feeling a useless endeavor when I saw so many topics I would search to read about were deleted. I mean, if I and a few others search for something without having any connection to it, it is "notable" by definition isn't it? Otherwise I can just delete "Nigeria". Sure, a lot of people would like to look it up, but I, as a wikipedia editor and supreme being, think that country is not notable.

Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Anonymous Coward]

So I recently heard about a programming language called Nimrod [nimrod-lang.org]. It's relatively new, but it's very capable and even the venerable Dr. Dobb's Journal featured it recently.

I wanted to get a broader overview of it, so I thought I'd check out Wikipedia's article about it. After all, it's a language I'd managed to hear about, and I don't keep up to date with developments in the field very much these days. It was even featured by a widely read publication. So that should make it notable enough to have a Wikipedia article, right? Nope.

I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination [wikipedia.org].

I tried reading some of their justification for deleting the article, but it made absolutely no sense. It's a perfectly good topic to cover, and clearly I and others want to read about it! Yet these totalitarian shitbags feel the need to censor, censor, censor and then censor some more.

The harm these monsters do by getting rid of useful articles far, far outweighs any harm that could ever be done by having allegedly "non-notable" articles exist uncensored. I'd totally rather than the article about Nimrod stay, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off and visit some other web site.

Re:Agile can fuck off.

[Just Some Guy]

To be fair, Agile can be freaking awesome. I worked at a devotedly Agile shop and it was a developerocratic utopia. After the few meetings we had, all participants walked away with legitimate action items. You didn't just get called in to listen to something that didn't concern you - if you were invited, it's because you were specifically needed.

I've also worked in places where Agile was a stultifying cover story for "actually waterfall but that doesn't sound as cool so we'll never admit it". That might be the kind of /dev/hell you found yourself stuck in. But that's not Agile Done Right, and shops that Do Agile Right really do exist.

Media Viewer

[Mr 44]

I really don't get the uproar. The crux of the issue seems to be that an update to the software running all the various instances of Wikipedia enabled a new slideshow viewer [wikipedia.org] by default, and removed the ability for site admins to disable it by default (but users still can individually choose their preference).

Tempest in a teapot?

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[insanecarbonbasedlif]

I quickly found out that the notability idiots over at Wikipedia have repeatedly chosen to target it for elimination [wikipedia.org].

They've been doing this for years, and long ago burned out my interest in contributing. I've seen 3 pages I helped create/curate get deleted. Happily 2 of the three eventually were re-created by others a year or two later, but a lot of work was destroyed. Let them have their "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" slogan - I'll continue to be a parasite reading without contributing unless they clean up their practices to prevent the destruction of good articles.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Mr. Freeman]

People like to joke about how false information added to Wikipedia gets quoted in articles where are then used to justify the information in Wikipedia, but it's actually quite real. It happens amazingly often and no one seems to be taking any real steps to fix the problem. If you go to any article and start looking through the sources you'll find that most of the sources either provide nothing to back up their information, obviously quoted it from Wikipedia in the first place, or actually have the information in such a context that it contradicts what the Wikipedia article is saying.

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[Mantrid42]

I don't get notability deletions at all. What, are they going to run out of digital pages?

Re:say it again

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you read a lot of Wikipedia articles and history on them, the world was wrong and the system usually works.

[Citation needed]

The rules are there for a reason,

[Citation needed]

and contentious subjects have issues (cf. Abortion, Israel, Nazi, etc.) but for the most part articles grow and become better and more thoroughly fact-checked with time.

[Citation needed]

Part of this is the much-hated reference requirement -- all facts in a Wikipedia page must have an external source to back them up.

[Citation needed]

This rule alone causes a huge amount of strife among those who don't understand,

[Citation needed]

but it also creates the most harmony by requiring reputable citations.

[Citation needed]

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[BradMajors]

Notability is important for preventing a potentially slippery slope towards Wikipedia being expected to have an article on every shop, every street, every apartment complex, every popular teacher, and every creative work ever appreciated by more than 10 people.

What is wrong with that?

Re:Too much good content is deleted at Wikipedia.

[GrahamCox]

Exactly. Originally Wikipedia had a statement that "wikipedia isn't paper", so anything and everything was fair game for inclusion. That was one of its great attractions. I have no idea if that still stands, but if so it seems at odds with the whole notability thing. What they *should* do, if notability is an issue, is to have a little +/- thing on each article that rates the article for notability. Over time that will end up indicating the relative 'notabilty score' of the article, without having to have it actually deleted. Brainless fucks the lot of 'em, it's been years since I've contributed to WP, the attitude was just not worth battling over.

Notability cannot decrease

[tepples]

the person from a century ago might not be as notable to people today

That's not how it works. Something becomes notable when unaffiliated reliable sources have covered it. This notability, if established, does not decrease over time. Such a decrease would require the existing reliable sources to stop existing. The reason Wikipedia has a notability requirement in the first place is that an article about a non-notable subject has no reliable sources that it can cite about anything.