In Defense of Inclusionism

https://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism

by Tomte • 10 years ago

178 162 10 years ago

cabalamat2• 10 years ago

I did an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, Includipedia, a few years ago, which failed due to inadequate execution on my part.

I still think the underlying idea of an inclusionist fork is sound, and I'm surprised one hasn't been successful.

sosuke• 10 years ago

Do you know if they still have the deleted pages? It would be nice to be able to recover stuff from before the deletions started.

cabalamat2• 10 years ago

Not as far as I'm aware.

lmm• 10 years ago

Wikipedia is "good enough"; they have the funding and it's too much effort for most people to switch (particularly now that e.g. Google integrates wikipedia directly into search results). It's a shame.

VLM• 10 years ago

As a deletionist organization they certainly won't get my money, meanwhile as more articles are deleted, there is less for google to link to. They're narrowcasting to an ever smaller group, and that can't end well. Eventually they have to close or change course. They won't change course, so ...

rsync3• 10 years ago

Every year something in my brain breaks and I think "I know, I'll finally get rsync.net a wikipedia entry".

This is somewhat important because the little-hitler that owns (yes, owns) the "cloud storage" wikipedia page refuses all additions of cloud storage providers that "aren't notable". So therefore, rsync.net has to have a wikipedia page.

This shouldn't be a problem - rsync.net has been mentioned in the press widely over the course of over 10 years - everything from articles about our warrant canary to articles about our ZFS support. In fact, other wikipedia pages mention and discuss rsync.net.

You know where this is going.

A perfectly well written article, well cited with 15+ citations from "respectable" journalist sources is nearly insta-deleted due to notability.

Every single time. I've tried 4-5 times over the past few years. Every time it's a different little-hitler that swoops in to bravely defend wikipedia.

Cthulhu_• 10 years ago

Is that something you can escalate to someone higher-up in the Wikipedia chain of command (if such a thing exists)?

Karunamon• 10 years ago

Theoretically he could exhaust the 3 revert rule with the delete-happy user (he creates it, guy deletes it 1, he puts it back 2, guy deletes it again 3), make a note on the talk page, and head to the edit war noticeboard where an admin can see it.

If you don't understand any of this, you see why WP is a bureaucratic pain in the arse.

bradleyjg• 10 years ago

First you need to spend months doing minor edits around wikipeida and participating in various social functions (like talk boards) in order to develop a reputation. Otherwise nothing you do will be taken seriously. Then you need to familiarize yourself with the all the nuances of the wikipedia internal policy guidelines both as written and as practiced, because you can be sure Mr. "This is my area, no one touches it without my permission" is an expert on all that.

Then and only then, will you have a shot at getting a change in that the tin pot dictator doesn't want. And you will need to be constantly vigilant that it doesn't disappear two weeks later.

I've never found it worth it to go through this idiotic process.

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

Add it to https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page

They started by forking wikipedia and have expanded the notability guidelines.

rokosbasilisk• 10 years ago

wow a wiki fork is amazing. its been needed for a while too.

akuchling• 10 years ago

The problem for forks is to get enough users to keep up with ongoing events. For example, according to Infogalactic, Leonard Cohen is still alive: https://infogalactic.com/info/Leonard_Cohen

The Chicago Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908: https://infogalactic.com/info/Chicago_Cubs

Without enough users, a snapshot of Wikipedia will quickly decay into unreliability. Most pages don't become inaccurate that fast, but you can't know if the page you're reading is one of them or not.

librexpr• 10 years ago

This looks interesting, but I'm a bit iffy on a few things.

First of all is the perspectives filtering by relativity rating, which, while not yet implemented, is on the roadmap and seems to be an important future part of this encyclopedia. This idea seems to be an attempt to be more inclusive of people with various political views. This looks like a pretty big gamble to me, because it's not at all clear that this solution won't cause its own set of problems, or even work at solving the problem it purports to solve. The relativity ratings being on a one-dimensional political Left to political Right scale doesn't help my perspective on this, either.

There also seems to be some stuff about advertising in the info pages I read, which does not sound like a good thing. And the "Corelords" being corporate sponsors who oversee the editing of pages in their industry sounds pretty dangerous for an encyclopedia. But it's not clear how all this will work from what I've read, so it might be innocuous. Does anyone know more about this?

Then there are more cosmetic things, like the name being "Infogalactic", and the non-standard names for editors and admins, who are called "Galaxians" and "Starlords" respectively. These are harder to remember, and it's geeky in a sci-fi sort of way that's a bit off-putting to those of us who aren't big fans of sci-fi.

I do like that it's gamified a bit with a level system, though.

Anyone care to share their own perspective on this?

pwdisswordfish6• 10 years ago

That fork by Vox Day? I'm not sure I want to associate with that.

lj32• 10 years ago

You could always submit it to Infogalactic and see what happens.

yetanotheracc• 10 years ago

What was the name of the article you created? The deletion log shows nothing for "rsync.net". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=...

Declanomous3• 10 years ago

I didn't find any evidence of Rsync in the Cloud Storage edit history, but there is evidence that Rsync was added to the Comparison of Online Backup Services article on November 11, 2015.

It was reverted less than an hour later with the comment "Thanks for the addition, but as wikipedia is not a directory, please limit the list to services with wikipedia articles." So it's at least plausible that he tried to create an article for Rsync.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_onl...

Edit: I initially thought you couldn't search for deletions older than a year. I was mistaken.

rsync3• 10 years ago

Yes, it was "comparison of cloud storage blah blah" that we've tried, several times, to be added to, but again, "not notable" since we're only discussed in wikipedia, but don't have our own page.

But more to the point, as I have described, we have tried to add a rsync.net wikipedia several times (I'm sorry - I don't know the exact naming that "rsync.net" generates in a wikipedia URL) and as I described - almost instantaneously deleted due to notability - even with 12-15 serious, journalistic sources.

schackbrian• 10 years ago

In order to look into this controversy, I searched for rsync.net on Wikipedia, and this is what I found. The user Kozubik submitted a draft with references, but the user Arthur Goes Shopping dismissed each of the references. Then when no one edited the draft for six months, the user JMHamo deleted it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Arthur_goes_shopping...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Kozubik#Your_submiss...

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

They don't include your offering because it's success is not notable enough. Strangely, they do include a list of failures in another segment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_failures_in...

Maybe you need to go belly up then rebound with all your customers data. You'd be a "commercial failure" plus a "significant event." That might qualify for Wikipedia. Or just keep doing business as usual. ;)

nikcub• 10 years ago

It's likely because of the conflict of interest rules which can go unmentioned in discussion threads

Get someone else with a mild level of Wikikarma to add the same content

tptacek28• 10 years ago

I can't find Rsync.net anywhere in the deletion logs, but one thing you might be able to remember is the username you used to add the article (or, really, to edit anything on Wikipedia). Could you give us that, and we can use it to track down the deleted article?

I would not be surprised to see that you had sufficient reliable sources to sustain an Rsync.net article, so it'd be interesting to see the logic used to speedy-delete your article.

One nice outcome of this would be that you'd end up with a functioning Wikipedia page. :)

mlinksva• 10 years ago

In the meantime, add references and statements to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q27998978 (item about rsync.net)

SaltySolomon2• 10 years ago

I think that the notability clause is doing a ton of damage, especially because it is enforced in a way that discourages any new users. My one and only try to create an article was shot down over it and I simply stopped trying after that.

PaulHoule• 10 years ago

Deleting links from Wikipedia to your competitors is a famous black hat tactic. You can get away with almost anything on Wikipedia if you are deleting.

I think the world needs a list of web pages categorized by Wikipedia topics, but the people who will appreciate it most are spammers and there lies the rub.

peterbonney• 10 years ago

This is a long but excellent article - well worth reading.

By coincidence, I became aware of this bizarre "deletionist" culture at Wikipedia recently when I was searching for information about a particular musician. This is someone who has a handful of popular-ish songs on streaming sites, all from television soundtracks, but hasn't really charted as far as I can tell - in other words, an artist I would peg at about 50/50 odds to have had someone bother to write a Wikipedia entry for them.

Lo and behold, I found that someone had written a Wikipedia entry for them, and that it had been deleted because they weren't deemed famous enough to have an entry! I was dumbfounded... This is someone that millions of people have probably heard in the background of primetime television, and information about them was actively deemed unworthy of Wikipedia!

It was a strange, depressing, and disturbing moment of realization about how Wikipedia had evolved from the early days when I was consistently delighted to find information on all manner of obscure topics, lovingly curated by people who cared deeply enough about them to invest their time in informing the world about them. Thanks to this article I now know that it wasn't just an isolated incident.

paulryanrogers• 10 years ago

Wikipedia had evolved from the early days when I was consistently delighted to find information on all manner of obscure topics

IMO, encyclopaedias aren't meant for obscure topics. And any products or services with a focus on curation have to discriminate. Of course the criteria for doing so will probably always be controversial.

protomyth3• 10 years ago

"encyclopaedias aren't meant for obscure topics"

I'm a bit confused by this reasoning. I can see space considerations in a paper environment, but not on a wiki. Why wouldn't Wikipedia try to be the home of all knowledge?

mattlevan• 10 years ago

That may be true regarding physical encyclopedias, which are, of course, limited by space and weight (ha!). With an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia, though, those limitations are gone.

I'm looking forward to seeing Infogalactic give Wikipedia a run for its money!

user59944612• 10 years ago

Anything that goes on the TV or the radio will be seen by millions of people. Just because it's on TV doesn't make it worthy of an article.

namlem• 10 years ago

Why not? It's not like having article costs anything. It's just a few kilobytes of text.

wolf550e2• 10 years ago

Wikipedia could have a rule that if a piece of media is notable enough to have an article on wikipedia, then everyone in the credits for that piece of media is notable enough to have an article on wikipedia. 99% of those people aren't famous, but why not?

tptacek28• 10 years ago

Can you reword this? I don't understand the suggestion you're making.

I think you might be making a category error. Notability on Wikipedia isn't a reward earned by acquisition of fame; it's a level of status at which sourcing about a subject is likely to be reliable. The problem Wikipedia has isn't that no-names might get articles. It's that articles will be written about subjects for whom reliable sourcing is impossible, because no reliable source has ever deigned to write about them.

This gets us to a fundamental principle of what an encyclopedia actually is --- and to a project rule that is as old as "NPOV". An encyclopedia --- at least Wikipedia's conception --- is a tertiary source. It's a roadmap that summarizes and points to other, more in-depth sources.

By definition, if you don't have reliable sources to back the subject of an article up, it can't be hosted in an encyclopedia. The project's answer to this challenge would be, first create the reliable secondary sources you'd need to support an encyclopedia article, and then create the article itself.

pwdisswordfish6• 10 years ago

So, every runner and key grip that has worked in production of a popular TV series is notable now?

Someone please formulate a 'notability' version of Schneier's law.

tptacek28• 10 years ago

What do you like so much about this article? What makes it excellent? What qualities of its analysis particularly appealed to you?

What I read was a piece that centered on a single --- and I thought dormant --- controversy about the purpose of Wikipedia: that, because the marginal cost of a new article on Wikipedia is zero, its charter should include comprehensive character-by-character breakdowns of fictional works. Not just of Pokemon, but of every fictional work in which its editors have an interest.

Reasonable people can disagree about this. But it's not the sweeping indictment of Wikipedia I'd expect from this comment thread.

The article offers two empirical studies to support its argument that deletionism is harming Wikipedia. In the first, it collects the "External Link" contributions of an anime-focused editor and records the (very small) percentage of proposed links that were ultimately accepted into the bodies of articles.

But the links he's highlighted appear to be of very low quality. I clicked through a random 10 of them, and most of them were 404'd. The ones that were alive all appeared to be UGC online reviews of individual episodes of anime films.

I'm not surprised that editors who watchlist anime titles were reluctant to stuff articles with tens of links to individual "mania.com" review articles (none of which appear to live today).

In his second experiment, Gwern selected a random set of Wikipedia articles and killed existing external links, to measure how long it would take for them to be restored. But by his own admission, the process of selecting random articles meant he was working primarily with articles nobody cares about. He suggests in the text that the median number of users watchlisting the articles he tampered with was 5 --- but links to the Wikipedia editor who informed him of that without noting that 5 is a very low number; by comparison, the Wikipedia article on Paul Graham (once notable on HN for being put up for deletion on WP) has over 125.

But the bigger flaw with the experiment is that it misconstrues Wikipedia's position on external links. The WP:EL policy Gwern cited in his external deletions is direct about this: Wikipedia is not a collection of links. The project does not view sprawling collections of "External Links" as a good thing: what it wants are links to reliable sources that back up points made in the prose article itself.

It's no wonder that article watchers didn't rush to add links back to stories; the links that he removed were marginal, at times totally disconnected from the stories themselves (as with the "nsplacenames.ca" link on Rockingham, Nova Scotia), or dead (as with the video link, unreferenced by the article, on the Shahrnush Parsipur article. This can't be surprising to Gwern: his methodology clearly selects for marginal links, by trawling for them in the disfavored "External Links" sections of articles far out into the long tail of interest on WP.

This article was written in 2009, and makes predictions about the future of the project. Were those predictions accurate? It doesn't look like it: article creation has grown steadily, and editor participation has been remarkably stable for years. Has the Wikipedia community moved away from its "deletionist" stance? This comment thread sure doesn't think so, and I agree. So: what gives?

saint_fiasco2• 10 years ago

I bet all those links weren't 404 errors in 2009. Which raises the question: How are external links in Wikipedia articles maintained? Is there some automated process that checks those links periodically to see if they are rotten?

Is that why Wikipedia hates external links?

redler2• 10 years ago

Perhaps Wikipedia should approach this from another angle: loosen their baseline criteria, and then treat "notability" like Twitter's "verified" tag. Let the debate be whether or not an article should have the notability checkmark, not whether or not it should exist at all (within reason).

tptacek28• 10 years ago

Because of the way Google prefers Wikipedia articles over other sources in its SERPs, this would ultimately have the effect of turning Wikipedia into a UGC version of AOL: it would be overrun with crud (because the Internet incentivizes Wikipedia articles), and the project would have to expend significant effort at retraining the Internet to look for "verified" stickers on the things that actually were encyclopedia articles. For what benefit?

Wikipedia's response to this problem is the right one: there's a whole big wide Internet out there, and if Wikipedia isn't the appropriate place for your article, surely there are many other places that are. UGC sites are falling over themselves to get people to write on them. Why force them on the one Internet project that doesn't want them?

pwdisswordfish6• 10 years ago

Something sort of like it already exists; it's called a 'Featured Article' badge. But since there is an expectation that every article should eventually reach 'featured' status (or at least it should be possible in principle), it doesn't have the result you'd expect.

And why wouldn't people have this expectation? Why keep an article at all if it's just going to lie there and gather dust, unmaintained and exposed to vandalism?

crdoconnor• 10 years ago

Totally coincidentally Jimmy Wales makes money from wikia, which is a convenient home for all of those articles deleted from Wikipedia.

Plastered in advertising of course.

ubernostrum3• 10 years ago

Wikipedia is currently -- for the second time -- trying to delete its article about the actress who voices/sings the title character of "Moana", on grounds that she's only notable for that one film and thus doesn't "deserve" to be written about separately from it.

Animats2• 10 years ago

This is someone who has a handful of popular-ish songs on streaming sites, all from television soundtracks, but hasn't really charted as far as I can tell

That's what's called "fails [[WP:MUSIC]]" on Wikipedia. The basic criteria are two recordings on a major label, or some major award, or charting on some well known chart, or historical importance. These criteria filter out the several million garage and Myspace bands that would like to be on Wikipedia.

Mithaldu• 10 years ago

Your kind of thinking is the problem.

You state the rule, state one positive from it, and don't even bother to consider why it could possibly be a positive (or not). You also failed to consider any negatives.

Amezarak• 10 years ago

Even aside from a biased editor wanting to control a subject, reputation, edit history, and voting on administrative decisions are all important parts of a Wikipedia editor's account and experience of Wikipedia. Enough 'good' participation can get you an administrator account and further privileges.

This turns Wikipedia into a game for these people which, inevitably, to arcane rules-lawyering. Creating content is hard, and when you want to increase your metrics and contribute to the community because it is the community and not because you have a passion for Subject X, creating content is not a sustainable strategy in the long-term. You can't know everything, you can't be an expert on everything. It's much easier to revert, to rules-laywer, to delete. So that's what happens.

jessriedel11• 10 years ago

Can folks link to the best defense of deletionism they know? Here is an OK one I've found:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LeilaniLad

To me personally, verifiability seems a vastly better criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. It's (a) a much less subjective standard than notability, (b) well-justified by the limitations of the medium (i.e., no original research), and (c) still prevents Wikipedia from being a "dumping ground" for everything on the internet.

The only general argument for deletionism I've seen that survives is that the editor resources of Wikipedia will be stretched so thin that the checking of verifiability itself is imperiled. But (1) Wikipedia survived fine back when it had vastly fewer editors and random people were writing on a bajillion then-empty topics and (2) there are much better ways to handle this minor problem, e.g., pages are hidden from non-registered users until they reach a critical mass of contributing editors.

Measured by pure prevalence, the dominant argument seems to be about status: that non-notable items just don't deserve to be in Wikipedia. It's very hard to argue against an emotional appeal like this.

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

Is this one of those situations where someone uses a proxy metric for something that is itself easily measured? "We must protect verifiability, non-notable articles aren't easily verified, therefore non-notable articles should be banned"?

Is there a name for this? I've been noticing (and being frustrated by) it a lot.

luso_brazilian• 10 years ago

It reminds me of the XY problem [1] that plagues both our field and any other field where one can devise a solution to a problem without formalism or thoroughly understanding what's being solved.

The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.
- User wants to do X.
- User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
- User doesn't know how to do Y either.
- User asks for help with Y.
- Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
- After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.

I'm sure that's not the name of the phenomenon you are asking but it is certainly a closely related one.

[1] http://xyproblem.info/

warkdarrior• 10 years ago

Is there a name for this? I've been noticing (and being frustrated by) it a lot.

Laziness?

pwdisswordfish6• 10 years ago

Can you tell me how do you 'easily measure' notability in a robust, non-gameable way? I'm not aware of any such measure existing. 'Substantial coverage in reliable, independent sources' seems the best possible at the moment.

tptacek28• 10 years ago

I don't understand how this is a "proxy metric".

I'll give you the shortest defense of deletionism I can write:

There are two problems with non-notable articles in Wikipedia.

The first is definitional. An encyclopedia is a tertiary source: a roadmap and synopsis of existing sources. Non-notable sources are by definition those for which existing reliable sources are absent. All such articles are, in a very simple sense, "original research". One of the most basic founding principles of Wikipedia, as old as NPOV, is "no original research".

The second is pragmatic. Wikipedia is committed to minimizing error. Entropy exerts tremendous force on the project, which occupies extremely valuable Internet real estate. Every article on Wikipedia is in a sense a commitment by the Wikipedia community to mount a defense against bias, advertisement, promotion, vandalism, and basic inaccuracy. The notability requirement, which is at bottom based not on "fame" but on the quality of sources available for a topic, is an extremely reasonable boundary to put on the expectations Wikipedia can have of its unpaid editors to combat that entropy: to wit, that we will do so only when available sources make the job possible to do in the first place.

_23sd5• 10 years ago

It's not a "proxy metric", it's the only possible metric for inclusion in an encyclopedia as I understand encyclopedias. I saw the example of a mildly popular band somewhere else on the thread, so I'll run with that.

What can an encyclopedia say about a band that has a website and a Spotify page, but isn't big enough to attract attention from the press or music critics? We can certainly say that they are a band, anyone can see that. We can say they have 10,000 plays on Spotify, and list their current members. Maybe we can dig up a newspaper article saying that they performed someplace. But beyond that, what is there? They've probably got a biography on their website, but it's in no way verifiable, and the only person required to believe it is the guy putting it on the Wikipedia page. Everyone after that will read it on Wikipedia and assume it's 95% likely to be true. And so on. We're left with barebones facts that are of no help to anyone looking for reliable information about the band. All of this applies equally well to little-known authors, random Indian corporations, and your cat. If all we have to go on is a couple of primary sources and maybe a passing mention in the press, what is there to say without giving undeserved credence to the primary sources?

When notability is assessed, don't think "is this topic something that will be googled by someone looking for more information?" Think about the role of Wikipedia and what we can offer by providing an overview and references to secondary sources. The notability guidelines are about ensuring that there is a baseline of quality facts that we can provide to readers.

But really, I'm just rewriting the ideas of the consensus based notability guideline, which is much better written and specific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

pwdisswordfish6• 10 years ago

Wikipedia's Verifiability policy:

In Wikipedia, verifiability means that anyone using the encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable source.

The general notability guideline:

If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.

The latter is little more than a restatement of the former, so I don't get the point about it being more 'subjective'.

cortesoft3• 10 years ago

It is probably the 'significant coverage' part of the second bit that makes it more subjective. The subjective part of verifiability is whether a source is reliable, while notability has two subjective parts; whether it has verifiable sources AND whether there are enough of those verifiable sources.

crooked-v• 10 years ago

"Significant" is the problem. There are more than a few editors who presume that this basically means "anything I haven't personally heard of".

tsukikage2• 10 years ago

"by (...) using software that makes undoing most vandalism far easier than doing it, the participation goes through the roof"

The bitter irony is that this cause of wikipedia's early success is the seed of its current rot: one person's contribution is another person's vandalism; if undoing a contribution is always less effort than making it, participation must decrease.

Ah, well; everyone who's ever sneered at the list of fictional starfish back in the day have what they wanted now, I guess.

s_kilk• 10 years ago

We talked idealistically about how Wikipedia could become an encyclopedia of specialist encyclopedias, the superset of encyclopedias. "would you expect to see a Bulbasaur article in a Pokemon encyclopedia? yes? then let’s have a Bulbasaur article". The potential was that Wikipedia would be the summary of the Internet and books/media. Instead of punching in a keyword to a search engine and getting 100 pages dealing with tiny fragments of the topic (in however much detail), you would get a coherent overview summarizing everything worth knowing about the topic, for almost all topics.

That sounds much cooler than what we've actually ended up with.

psyc• 10 years ago

That is what Wikipedia actually was in the early 2000s.

tptacek28• 10 years ago

The single most ambitious and effective single resource in perhaps the history of recorded human knowledge?

It's not cool enough for you because there isn't a totally separate independent article about whatever the fuck a Bulbasaurus is?

gluggymug• 10 years ago

You don't know what a Bulbasaur is? Maybe look it up on Wikipedia because as has been mentioned here already there IS an article on Bulbasaur! It is not a stub either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur

Wikipedia has righted the wrong eventually.

Others• 10 years ago

"Bulbasaur" != "Bulbasaurus"

phpnode• 10 years ago

I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon, where a small group emerge from a userbase, gain control of the platform and start applying their preferences to the detriment of the average user. It strikes me as very similar to the problems stack overflow faces.

sageikosa• 10 years ago

Plutocracy? You have to have a decent amount of free time and resources initially to value spending time working on Wikipedia articles enough to gain working knowledge and social connections in the system to advance enough to advance broader agendas, or enforce narrower biases.

Nursie• 10 years ago

Yeah, a decade and a bit ago one could share a bit of knowledge on wikipedia fairly informally and be sure it would feed into the article and help the project.

Fast forward to recent years and you can write a decent article with references and have someone come along from one of the 'patrol' teams and nominate it for swift deletion in under 5 minutes, regardless of whether they know anything about the subject area.

New users are unlikely to try twice, when the initial reaction is so hostile.

DanBC• 10 years ago

FWIW wikipedia seems to be aware that those patrol teams are more harmful than useful.

Vandal Patrol got shut down; new page patrol is now a user right and it's getting a lot more scrutiny and discussion - and the discussion is all focused on preventing the newbie-biting harms. Twinkle and rollback got a lot of scrutiny.

I hate wikipedia, but I'm glad to see some movement in the right direction.

jordigh• 10 years ago

I don't know how true it is that niche topics are unwelcome. I wrote this article about a year ago in hopes of getting this implemented in Python's statsmodels, and so far nobody has told me that this very niche topic shouldn't be in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple

I've gotten a number of helpful edits for it too.

I also referenced it from the much more mainstream Boxplot article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_plot#Variations

So, my experience has been positive so far.

(Btw, I'm still hoping someone will implement this in statsmodels.)

SaltySolomon2• 10 years ago

I think it depends a bit on the topic and area how easy and/or hard it is to add anything. I also think that it is a bit easier to add something than to start a new article.

TorKlingberg• 10 years ago

The key insight here is that you cannot drive quality in a project like Wikipedia at the expense of driving contributors away. When people leave, who will watch an maintain the articles? You can try to lock down even harder, but then nobody new will join, and the existing contributors will eventually churn and leave.

JBReefer2• 10 years ago

who will watch and maintain the articles?

Exactly the people you don't want - powerhungry, fiefdom building diehards.

The whole point of Wikipedia was to be a repository of our knowledge, even if there are flaws, but it just seems so pointless to contribute. I know I stopped bothering years ago.

Glyptodon• 10 years ago

I think everybody who isn't highly involved in Wikipedia has always hated the whole "notability" thing. Drives me crazy. If there's something more than a dozen people care about and they're not a family give them the benefit of the doubt.

And I think the author is right on point with the barriers to contribution thing.

My brother, for example, says he created the Wikipedia page for Cheescake (~2004) because he noticed there wasn't one so he started it by creating a sentence that defined what he thought cheesecake was. And he didn't register, sign up or even make a good article. He just saw something he thought was missing and created it with a single sentence.

And now there's an actual "proper" article.

Not sure if he could do that today. I imagine most people find a missing article, discover there are hoops, and don't bother.

cortesoft3• 10 years ago

Right? I feel like if I am clicking on a link to read about something on wikipedia, it is 'notable' enough to me. If no one looks at the wikipedia article, then you could say it isn't notable... but then, who cares? A few extra bytes on the server that no one looks at doesn't hurt anything.

tptacek28• 10 years ago

He couldn't do it today because there is a Wikipedia article already for pretty much every conceivable pastry, from Stroopwafels to Cronuts to Fudgie the Whale.

To me, this strongly suggests that if you just today realized that Wikipedia was lacking an article for, let's say, Red Velvet Cake, you would have very little trouble creating that article.

ubernostrum3• 10 years ago

Red velvet cake is simply a variation of chocolate cake, and not notable enough to have its own article. Also this article is low-quality and contains several non-encyclopedic/non-verifiable statements. Propose merging into a passing note in [[Chocolate cake]].

Xcelerate• 10 years ago

I used to contribute a lot to Wikipedia back around 2004-2005 (I did a rather large rewrite of the article on photon mapping). But in the following years, almost every edit I made or article I wrote was reverted or deleted, so I just gave up. Maybe a better version of Wikipedia will come along at some point, but until then I am no longer making any contributions.

wiggleboy• 10 years ago

Great article. Sad to hear there is a cultural shift...

Worth noting that there is definitely a Bulbasaur article on Wikipedia though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur

WhitneyLand2• 10 years ago

Could Wikipedia ever be forked by a group that wanted to compete by trying to win with a better culture and/or technology?

It's such a hostile culture it'd be nice to get rid of persnickety behavior, and indulgence of unproductive obsessive personality traits (like deletion binging, worrying more about rules than the spirit of the rules).

x1798DE2• 10 years ago

Everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA or free-er, and the software that runs it is GPL. If you think you can do better, feel free to try. I'm fairly certain several people have already tried. I personally find the "hostile culture" to be not too different from a culture with high standards, and high standards are exactly why Wikipedia is popular - you see exactly the same criticisms leveled against StackOverflow and other essentially "canonical" resources on the web. I would not be surprised if anyone who cares at all about quality will get a lot of people complaining that their contributions were ignored or that it's impossible to add anything to these resources.

WhitneyLand2• 10 years ago

There is a real difference between pursuing quality and being unproductively persnickety. One doesn't require the other.

Take your example of SO, the issue became so bad in 2013 they had to revamp the way moderation worked. They wouldn't have done that if it were just a bunch of people wanting to lower quality.

iso-8859-1• 10 years ago

It is fun to see how AfD debates that are closed with "merge", just never get merged, deletionists will not bother. Too much work.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucible_(software)

talideon• 10 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if the solution to this isn't just to add a second tier of pages to Wikipedia, alpha (canonical) and beta (non-canonical): with pages starting in the alpha Wikipedia, then being moved to the beta Wikipedia if they're not considered sufficiently notable, where they can be worked on and eventually promoted back to the alpha Wikipedia once they've reached a certain level and combination of quality and notability. Deletions could happen for straight-up junk pages, but at least 'notability' would be removed as a qualification for inclusion.

Animats2• 10 years ago

As someone else pointed out, this is a long, detailed critique of Wikipedia by someone whose main objection is that "by 2007 the water had become hot enough to be felt by devotees of modern fiction (that is, anime & manga franchises, video games, novels, etc.)" There are legitimate criticisms of Wikipedia, but that it now discourages "fancruft" isn't much of one. There are many other popular culture forums. If you want to write about anime, get an account on MyAnimeList or Daisuki or Wikia. (Daisuki, incidentally, is a project of the Cool Japan Fund, a VC fund to export Japanese culture, funded by the government of Japan and some big banks.) There's Pottermore and Wookiepedia and the Marvel Universe Wiki. There are places for that stuff, and they're big and active.

"Deletionism" is mostly pushback against the incoming tide of promotional articles. Here's an essay I wrote on dealing with conflict of interest editing.[1] Without considerable pushback, Wikipedia would read like PR Newswire. Too often, it still does. As I note in my essay, on Wikipedia, it's not what you have to say about yourself, it's what other reliable sources say about you. Wikipedia is one of the very few resources on the Web that's not choked with advertising and promotion. That's valuable.

Editor retention is a problem. Editing Wikipedia is hard. It's not like writing on a blog or forum. It's like submitting a pull request to a major open source project. It's not difficult for anyone who has published in a refereed journal, but that's under 1% of the population. It's painful for someone who's never had their writing tightly edited. So is submitting code to a successful project. It's one way to get better at writing.

Despite this, Wikipedia is dealing well with the hard problems. As the Trump administration takes power, many articles needed to be updated, and, despite controversies, that process is going reasonably well. The Washington Post comments that, over time, Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects approach a neutral point of view.[2] Few other places on the Web achieve that, or even try.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Hints_on_dealing_wit... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/25/somet...

clock_tower• 10 years ago

Good, someone's making this point!

I'd argue that it's specifically "modern fiction" that made Wikipedia hard to take seriously in the early years (was it that they had a biography of Pikachu but not of Charles XII of Sweden?), and that a hard line on fancruft but lenience in other areas would make sense.

On the other hand, I hadn't known about the PR issue, and I think I now understand why Wikipedia is so unforgiving towards Mittelstand businesses. If the only information you can get about the second-largest sprocket-maker in Topeka was written by the second-largest sproket-maker in Topeka, it might indeed be better to leave them off the site entirely...

emn13• 10 years ago

It's not just wikipedia that does this; it's not even specifically a problem of open communities. Organisations all over do this. People underestimate complexity and think that they can assign permissions and control access beforehand, and they invariably end up making things hugely complicated in some vain endeavor to solve largely imaginary problems.

Wikipedia, stackoverflow - but also companies with their crazy policies, and governments (which kind of inspired the word kafkaesque). Clearly, this is human nature.

Oh, it doesn't actually work, so any successful organization also develops an unofficial way to get stuff done, and those facing real risks need to develop an audit culture too. But the lure of just that slightly more detailed access control system stays, and rules proliferate.

Heck, our entire system of human self-organisation is one big cruft of rapidly growing rules, contracts, laws and treaties. It's everywhere. They only ever really shrink at any meaningful rate when the parties involved cease to exist.

Paul_S• 10 years ago

It hurts to be reminded of this. I quit wikipedia because of that.

Having your page deleted is an absolute slap to the face. It's like bringing a home-baked cake to a charity cake sale and having the other bakers take your cake, throw it to the ground and stomp on it while cackling maniacally and shouting "not notable" and other stock phrases.

I refuse to accept their excuses.

x1798DE2• 10 years ago

Seems to me it's more like bringing your home-baked cake to Wal-mart and being horribly offended that they don't just put it on the shelves. I think Animats' analogy in a sibling comment of making a pull request against a major open-source is very apt. Wikipedia is a huge and hard to manage project with extremely high standards.

Dowwie• 10 years ago

It's becoming a fairly common occurrence where a person whose personal contribution isn't accepted as-is by a community writes an emotional, novel-length post about why the community is failing and will die soon. Someone did this recently with Stack Overflow.

pvdebbe2• 10 years ago

Maybe because I grew up reading HHGTTG I've always thought that of course a freely editable internet encyclopedia should be as inclusive as possible. No, I won't buy the deletionist argument. Personally, I wouldn't mind if people started to cite other sources than WP again. The WWW as a whole will be the ultimate Guide.

dagw• 10 years ago

But HHGTTG was far from inclusive. It was only edited by staff writers, and they had a team of central editors that would cut down long, detailed articles to their bare necessities ("Mostly Harmless").

pvdebbe2• 10 years ago

Oh, true, true. The core idea stuck, still.

In Defense of Inclusionism

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