Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash

http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1297662169.html

137 145 15 years ago

mquander2• 15 years ago

Let's put aside the insanely weird idea that one person has the ability to derail the creation of information unilaterally, without a vote, and without any oversight to focus on the real problem...

Jesus, does Zed Shaw live on another planet? I've never edited a Wikipedia article in my life and even I know that when an article is nominated for deletion, there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted.

Also:

It's sort of impossible to say that the Esoteric programming languages page should not have a description of every "notnotable" programming language.

I do not think "impossible" means what you think it means.

thristian• 15 years ago

Zed Shaw's personal hell: being given a laptop with an internet connection, a browser pointed at Wikipedia, and being asked to complete the article List of things which do not exist.

jacques_chester2• 15 years ago

He could call it "List of things registered in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

Uh, that makes no sense.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

Well, they would have to be very notable things that do not exist. (My next line wants very much to be a joke about God but I'll just leave that up to your individual imaginations.)

othermaciej• 15 years ago

How about "List of articles which do not mention themselves"?

mcantor• 15 years ago

Would the list contain itself?

Ohhh. Damn you, Bert Russell!

(I kill me.)

wnoise2• 15 years ago

> there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted.

And it's still often actually deleted, even if consensus isn't reached.

mquander2• 15 years ago

That's true, so maybe it shouldn't really be said that people are "voting" after all. But at least an administrator has to actually agree and delete it; I guess that's what passes for oversight.

Elepsis• 15 years ago

Perhaps more experienced Wikipedians can correct me, but my understanding is that the vote for deletion isn't actually a vote. At the end of the day, a Wikipedia admin decides based on the arguments presented, not the number of opinions in either direction.

Osmose• 15 years ago

This is true, but there's deletion review for you think the admin made the wrong choice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review

Alternatively, if you wish to remake the page and improve it, there's nothing stopping you from re-creating it with new sources and information added[1]. The "Be Bold" guideline exists to encourage people to do things like that if you think you can improve it.

[1] Not entirely true, controversial pages that get recreated and deleted back and forth can be blocked from being recreated. At least in the case of Nemerle, it appears that that has yet to happen.

Ras_2• 15 years ago

In en.wikipedia it is not. But in some others, like fi.wikipedia, it is.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

No, I live on the planet where some random dude can "elect" to have a page deleted and poof page gone. I don't care about the bizarre bureaucratic process involved, all I care about is that there's no review process or delay to it.

Also, I do mean "sort of impossible". If you're going to use bad grammar to correct my writing, then at least use quotes properly.

redthrowaway5• 15 years ago

Zed, seriously, calm down. I know this persona gets you a lot of views, but it's seriously grating.

The "bizarre bureaucratic process" is this:

1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here.

2) We talk about it for a week.

3) If, after a week, the consensus is that no, we shouldn't have the article, then it gets deleted. If not, it stays.

That's not bizarre, and it's not particularly bureaucratic. Is it flawed? Absolutely. Do we need to fix it? Sure.

Are you helping things with your rants?

No.

erikpukinskis2• 15 years ago

You can literally read these requirements as "some big mega corp my grandma might encounter has mentioned it."

This is spot on. I had to engage in a battle on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things.

What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count".

The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem.

There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one.

I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.

knowtheory9• 15 years ago

If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped... )

they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons.

I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P

† upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

> If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.... )

When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.

arethuza2• 15 years ago

I'd never even heard the term "deletionist" before this morning, but the tone of the comments from the administrator on the comments for the dream hampton page reminded me of some petty minor bureaucrat.

My reading of the relevant Wikiepedia rules/policies suggests to me that there is a fair amount of leeway in these decisions and I would have thought that a reasonable approach would be to err on the side of inclusion, not on the side of deletion.

JanezStupar• 15 years ago

This year I donated 50€ for the worthy cause of Wikipedia. One of my arguing points was that there is a lot of obscure information I am sometimes looking for that there is no reference of - except for Wikipedia.

Jimbo put your dog on a leash, or next year, when your bambi eyed face gazes into me from my monitor, I will send a turd in a bag instead of a donation.

Does anyone know what address I could/should send my complaint to for maximum impact?

baddox• 15 years ago

I think the key here is that Wikipedia's notability requirements really only apply to people, publications, and events. For some things, for example the article on esoteric programming languages, it doesn't really make sense to talk about notability.

owyn12• 15 years ago

You could always create an esoteric languages wiki of your own if you were all fired up about it (I work at wikia, and that's the service we provide, we have 170,000 wikis on various subjects, using the same software! Founded by the same guy!)

But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.

angus772• 15 years ago

It's rare that I can't find some article about the "rest of the world" on Wikipedia that I'm looking for. What part of the world have I been overlooking?

carussell10• 15 years ago

I realize your question was mostly flippant and not directed at me, but to answer the question seriously:

The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.

carussell10• 15 years ago

It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge

...:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. —Jimmy Wales. Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Slashdot, 2004. http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/07/28/1351230/Wikipe...

owyn12• 15 years ago

The focus is changing, 2011:

“It’s about diversifying the community. At the moment we’re really male, geek orientated, which is great, but there are lots of editors that we don’t get who are geeks, but not tech geeks. So they may be real experts in, say, ancient Chinese poetry but if they go to try to edit Wikipedia, then they find it too intimidating and we lose them and that’s just silly."

I think this whole explosion of whatever-it-is-itis is a perfect example of that.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

Why is it "way too many"? Seriously, that implies that some harm is being done. What harm?

owyn12• 15 years ago

It's not harmful, just silly. There are N articles about star wars and M articles about africa. When N > M to a ridiculous level, I'm okay with pruning stuff. I've never made a single edit to wikipedia though. Looks like I'm encountering some nerd rage.

chc5• 15 years ago

You have a funny definition of problem. "This base of information is too useful and too widely applicable! It's only supposed to contain generally useful knowledge!"

In all honesty, do you think allowing something with Nemerle's level of notability would be bad for Wikipedia? Is it somehow crowding out articles about these "other parts of the world" you mention that would otherwise exist?

owyn12• 15 years ago

It's just an encyclopedia, not a replacement for the internet. That's all I'm trying to say. I've never heard of nemerle, and I'm not a wikipedia editor, so I have no opinion about it's notoriety. In general, the categorization of knowledge is a hard problem, and a lot of people prefer to spend spend time organizing things rather than writing new content, and this just seems like one of those examples.

knowtheory9• 15 years ago

How does deleting nerd topics help you produce more information about the rest of the world?

And, if you have 2nd class citizens riding in the back of the wikipedia bus via wikia, i fail to see how interlinking them into the main Wikipedia makes things worse in any way shape or form.

steveklabnik• 15 years ago

There is one: http://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

carussell10• 15 years ago

Plan B ¶Put out a yearly publication on Lulu.com … This publication is then a legit secondary source by a real publisher…

Uh... nope.

Hey, I have an idea! Let's publish suggestions like this to a blog and purport for it to be sound, so then it can be picked up by quacks who have an agenda to push in a bunch of completely unrelated situations. (Think vaccine scare pushers or those looking for self-promotion, who already exist in abundance on Wikipedia). Yeah! Let's all eschew with stuff like a "nuanced understanding".

Whether you are for or against this instance of deletionism, Shaw's plan B here wouldn't successfully legitimize anything of any subject matter, and that's a good thing.

carussell10• 15 years ago

I've seen this get voted down by a non-trivial amount, then upvotes bring it back up, and now it's voted back down. Anyone care to, you know, comment about whatever you're finding in my words to be an assault on your faculties of reason?

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

It's hard for Wikipedia to say that other publishers are not legitimate because they're online, when Wikipedia itself had to fight for legitimacy because of it's online nature. Doing that means they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers and not even close to their original purpose. Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites.

Another thing to note: People say that Lulu doesn't have an editorial process but they do. Once you publish a book they review it and if it meets their standards they put it into Amazon and other sellers for you. Considering that editorial standards at all publishing houses is damn near zero except for copy-editing and slapping a cover on, I think it's fair to say Lulu is just fine as a source.

starpilot• 15 years ago

Wikipedia has not [sic] problem paying for storage

What do the near-constant donation drives cover then?

Lewisham• 15 years ago

Bandwidth, servers and staff. Storage is most certainly not their problem; the English language Wikipedia is only about 5TBs of text. That's cheap.

natep• 15 years ago

Actually, it seems like a roughly even split between salaries+wages, internet hosting, in-kind expenses, operating, travel, and deprecation (in 2007, at least, because it was easiest to find)[1]. Wikimedia may not be a publicly traded company, but they do release their financials.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikime...

ugh5• 15 years ago

The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets.

I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.

knowtheory9• 15 years ago

But the argument from maintainability is stupid too.

Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not.

Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification.

They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.

bdonlan• 15 years ago

The point isn't to delete bad content. The point is to delete content that is known by so few people that it is unlikely to get the attention needed to become a good article.

To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

Well, then if there is no technical reason, then it's a usability flaw or just stupidity. If it is possible to create meta-pages that could house sub-cultures and esoteric information, then they aren't doing it and using these rules for no reason. If they can't create one more level, then it's a technical problem they should solve.

Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed".

Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.

ugh5• 15 years ago

As I said, the official reason for the notability rules is maintainability – to keep the amount of articles low and relevant so that they can be maintained.

bambax• 15 years ago

It seems the notability requirements really serve Wikipedia's own notability. It can't say "we'll take our list of topics from Encyclopedia Britannica" but it's what it would like to do.

In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat.

But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.

mukyu4• 15 years ago

Plan A doesn't work. It is actually easier to delete things from pages than deleting pages themselves. If you edit war over it you will lose.

Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is.

Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work?

Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki.

This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it.

On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.

knowtheory9• 15 years ago

You've given a very Lawful Neutral response (and are correct on those grounds).

However, that still doesn't make deletionism a good or sensible or internally consistent idea.

mukyu4• 15 years ago

My actual thoughts on the issues related to inclusion and deletion are not what I was trying to address. I contributed to Wikipedia for a time and saw and was part of deletion sprees on both of the sides. Something like this happens every three months I would guess. Mostly, my thoughts on it at the moment are 'not this shit /again/'.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

Plan A is a DOS attack. It's not about getting the information there, it's about putting so much there repeatedly that they have to admit that those topics need their own page.

Plan B wouldn't be "self-published". It would be published by me as a record of the languages that came out that year. Since no language I have is in the book, it's not self-published. If what you're really saying is Wikipedia doesn't recognize Lulu.com, then they're gigantic hypocrites. My book, "Learn Python The Hard Way" is published there, and has an ISBN and Lulu is my publisher. It's just as legit as my books published by Addison/Wesley, especially given their size.

You say Plan C doesn't work, but then here you are debating the topic, and Wikipedia's primary supporters are probably all over this. As many other people say, it's all filled with white nerdy males. If Wikipedia goes around deleting the things they like in order to "de-nerdify" the content, then eventually people will stop donating and go after them. I plan on doing it, and maybe some others.

Plan D is mostly a joke, but it might be good to create a record of the "great nerd purge" that seems to be hitting Wikipedia lately.

I also find it sad that you say people write things like this when Wikipedia deletes content they care about, and yet nothing is done. In fact, you sound powerful and proud of this fact, like it gives you a sense of pride, which is really really scary.

mukyu4• 15 years ago

Plan A only bothers whomever tries to maintain [[List of esoteric programming languages]] or wherever you pick as a battleground. I know it sounds to you like you can really "stick it to the man" and they will swoon over your brillant tactics and relent, but you will only bother people that actually care about esolangs in the first place and Monsanto certainly isn't going to be around. The best you can hope for is some people get blocked and pages protected.

Wikipedia's policies would consider it self-published. It does not matter that you would be writing about languages that you are not affiliated with. Again, you are not going to change Wikipedia's policies by pointing out that Wikipedia itself is self-published in their eyes.

I think you are vastly overestimating the number of people that have even heard, much less care about these esoteric languages.

I do not know why you ascribe these emotions to me, but they are not in the least accurate. I do not think my personal opinion on this set of articles is at all significant. I do not care about them, either way.

Frankly, what disturbs me is how you have very strong opinions about how Wikipedia does or should work with an incredibly superficial actual understanding. For example, why do you argue over how Wikipedia sees Lulu? Have you even read Wikipedia's policy on Reliable Sources or Verifiability? It is not as if Lulu itself or other things like it are new. It has been debated a number of times and at length. You have no knowledge of the issue and provide no insight.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

puts on conspiracy cap

wikipedia was a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.

neilk10• 15 years ago

Thanks, Zed. A typically balanced, well-researched and well-thought-out solution to a complex problem. I especially liked the part where you blamed all of Wikipedia for the actions of a single user.

I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable.

Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent.

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable.

But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out.

Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs

The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

Thanks Neil, a completely inaccurate reading of what I wrote. For the record, deletionists have been a problem for many people who are members of sub-cultures and Wikipedia has ignored the problem. Writing more arbitrary rules is not the solution. The solution is to fix the software so people can create a richer organization of information.

I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times despite me having been mentioned in about 10 trade and mass publications and having a book published (now two) as well as my own articles in the press. It was baffling that a single person can get a page deleted without any warning, flagging, or attempts to do some research.

But really it comes down to trust. I don't trust any organization that begs me for money then deletes the content that matters to me most and tries to hide behind some bogus "well it's not us really (tee-hee)". Either Wikimedia is in charge or they silently allow this kind of crap.

Finally, the issue of deletionism is purely the result of bad usability and structure. All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.

neilk10• 15 years ago

You might be responding to an earlier version of what I said, but I absolutely agree with you that it's got a lot to do with the software.

Do you really want the Wikimedia Foundation to set themselves up as a judge of the content in Wikipedia? I mean, apart from the fact that we have no mandate or qualifications to do this, how could you get an organization that fits around a few tables in a restaurant to judge all the edit wars in Wikipedia? In over 250 languages?!

If this problem is going to be solved, it's going to be solved in some distributed fashion, by the community, or by interested hackers such as yourself pitching in and giving the community new tools. There's a good chance you (by which I mean any hacker reading this) could get PAID to solve this problem.

Or, it's going to be solved by someone forking Wikipedia content or starting over, but the same problems have to be solved somehow.

ErrantX• 15 years ago

The problem is that WP is a place where a "global culture" (i.e. an encyclopaedia with global scope) meets sub-culture (in this case a sub-set of programmers).

My own personal feeling is that we are too quick to scrub stuff. But there is an important reason for the notability guideline; even though the Wiki is essentially limitless there is a point where indiscriminate inclusion just becomes impossible to handle. I reckon near 70% of the current content is sub-standard and probably about 20% is abysmal - the clean up effort on that is going to take decades. Without some form of line in the sand that gets worse and worse and worse till in the end we have a spam filled mess.

In this case the GNG was clearly being applied a little strongly; bottom line is that common sense is important :) A programming language with a tenuous but credible claim to notability should probably stay.

I wrote the Mongrel2 article, which is potentially hanging by the skin of its teeth if really questioned. Fortunately common sense does tend to prevail with most editors, so I don't see it being deleted any time soon.

> I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times

Which one? I cleaned up your [1] article a little while ago and all I found in the history was on old PROD (proposed deletion) [2]

The deletion process is designed to be flexible; so we have speedy deletions for stuff that is quite obviously out of scope or otherwise problematic from a single glance. Those are quite tight criteria and all they really need to be bypassed is a credible claim to significance (not notability, it is a lower claim). Next is the PROD; which requires you to make a statement about why it should be deleted. That sticks around for 7 days when an admin will have a look and either agree or disagree - during which time anyone else (this is what I spend a lot of my time doing) jumps in to fix it and decline the prod. Then we have AFD which is a full discussion lasting 7 days to establish whether the article can stay. The point is to make sure a few people are checking out the article.

It's not a perfect process for certain and sometimes it is possible for "a single person can get a page deleted", but never really without warning (to someone..).

There is, I think, two problems; firstly a groundswell of material we are slogging through the get up to scratch. And secondly we don't have enough active editors in the sub-domains. Feel free to fix the latter :)

All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.

Deletionpedia does this already BTW. [3]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zed_Shaw

2. The PROD stemmed from when the article was first created. That is a real problem, it pisses me off how quick people are to tag & get rid of new stuff nowadays.

3. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/

ramanujan• 15 years ago

Deletionism has caused innumerable PhDs and casual users alike to stop contributing to Wikipedia. It has been a cancer for years.

If Zed's article means someone at the Wikimedia Foundation finally understands the problem, fantastic!

First thing you do, please kill all of the rules lawyers (and maybe get some machine learning in there to clean up spam and pause edit wars, rather than relying on fallible humans with obvious agendas).

Till then, one can only hope that Zed's fork of Wikipedia gives it an incentive to move in an inclusionist direction. Perhaps a fork oriented around Facebook Connect, such that people edit with their real names and have property rights over their pages (Knol hasn't really properly executed on the idea, though it's been around for a while).

   I'm pretty sure next year when Wikipedia start asking for donations I'm going to come out strong and campaign against them.

Brilliant!

Wikimedia person, you guys do a lot of A/B testing of your donation pages. Why not put something in there asking how many donors actually favor deletionism? I think you'll be surprised how many people have been turned off by it.

Just include it all and let search (and writer reputation) sort it out.

neilk10• 15 years ago

I don't want to talk about other people's research (that hasn't yet been formally presented to the community) but believe me people are working on it.

And your donations have made that research possible.

Jun8• 15 years ago

Well, we don't have the insider insight that you have of course, but I've been a follower of news about such deletionism (and pity editor fights) for a while now, and find that it's really hard to believe that "The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith."

Even if this is true, you can do horrible deeds while thinking that you are acting in good faith, the Inquisition is a good but extreme example. What is needed to stop such nonsense is an internal balancing mechanism in Wikipedia against such wayward editors.

saurik2• 15 years ago

The core problem here is that things are being /deleted/ (in a permanent, no-longer-accessible-for-review fashion): in today's day and age (I'm willing to believe this will change in another 10-15 years) I find it almost unfathomable that Wikimedia really has to /delete/ old content rather than simply "putting it in the attic".

To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality.

Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline".

However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies).

But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic).

And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost.

So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators.

And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner).

Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted".

If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help.

Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in.

But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society.

Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.

basugasubaku2• 15 years ago

This feature exists in the software. But only people with administrator rights have permission to view deleted pages.

If you want to see a deleted page you can usually ask an admin. They will generally restore it somewhere where you can see it unless it was deleted for some privacy reason.

bane4• 15 years ago

I'll be perfectly honest with you, until the Wikimedia foundation steps in and straightens out the embarrassing charade that the community editorial process has become, I know that not only will I personally not be wasting my time trying to contribute to wikipedia, I won't be donating either (no matter how doe eyed Jimmy gets) and I'll be trying to get as many other people as possible to follow suit.

It's unrealistic to expect the foundation to edit all the individual content, but they need to manage the processes. As they are, it's virtually impossible for anybody not already part of the circle-jerk of WP editors to provide any meaningful contributions. The jargon density alone in dealing with anything other than the most basic edits make most people quit immediately.

And no, starting up yet another discussion over WP:N is not going to solve the problem - that's a bigger losing battle than trying to keep a page for Alice ML alive. The foundation simply needs to step in and say "this is how it's going to be" and fix it.

Here's my 3 step solution for what it's worth:

1) AfD's are initially silent -- meaning nobody knows that an article has been flagged. An article needs at least a dozen AfD flags to spark a deletion process. The deletion process needs to be similarly fair, anonymous and automatic. That means secret ballot, long periods of consideration and discussion (not hours, more like months)...in other words, it needs to be a serious deal to remove an article from the site. AfD flags should disappear after 48 hours if no action or discussion has taken place and the default should be to keep the article.

2) Wikipedia needs to eliminate the class of editors completely from the site. Editing powers are given out to outright assholes who pretend to be operating in good faith but really just operate on a power trip. Users may only edit some fixed number of "things" per month. WP is dominated right now by people with literally nothing to do in their lives except spend 16 hours a day policing wikipedia. WP should not be encouraging this type of obsessive personality by giving them power over the community. I can say definitely, 100% of the problem that people have with WP is with these kinds of editors.

3) No single admin may pull the delete trigger, if the secret ballot shows a positive deletion assertion, it needs a panel of 3 admins to confirm. The process to reverse a deletion should be simple and similarly free from the personal whims of overzealous admins/editors.

WP:N needs to either be fixed, or go away. Despite being a guideline, editors treat it as a hard and fast rule that is paradoxically applied completely arbitrarily to individual pages. The guideline is so broken that it would probably only result in a wikipedia containing short snippets of common/popular knowledge if applied across the entire site -- basically what Zed calls "things my grandmother knows about". This completely defeats the purpose of a reference site. People come here to discover new information, not confirm what they already know. If anything, it should be harder to put a page up of highly notable things than long-tail things.

It's not that trying to contribute to wikipedia is inconvenient, or that it's jargon is unnecessarily dense, it's that it fucking sucks to try and be a positive force to expand wikipedia. It's painful, it's no fun, there's literally no reward, and hours and hours of work can poof! go away based on somebody's whim.

It used to be fun. I used to contribute things. There used to be useful and helpful discussions on every page, trying to make them as high quality as possible. But then people started to figure out that it's easier to just delete entire articles that contains a single typo, or where the writer hasn't pulled together all of the references yet or the subject hasn't risen to whatever arbitrary interpretation of WP:N that some random admin is using that day. Rather than try and improve the article, or help find the references, or help establish notability, poof gone goes the work.

And that's been going on for more than 5 years without any apparent movement by the foundation to fix this broken problem. It's not a technical issue (though I agree with Zed that much of it comes from the lack of a '/') it's a policy problem that the foundation needs to address.

edit I think I'll probably be checking out http://www.wikia.com/Wikia as a replacement for wikipedia. It looks like they have a much saner process on the surface.

neilk10• 15 years ago

Thanks for constructive & well-thought-out suggestions. I am just a programmer with a relatively short history working for the WMF but I'll try to raise your concerns.

I think these are interesting suggestions. You are right that the problem is actually relatively small and rests with a cadre of hyperzealous editors. However it is not clear to me that setting limits to editing behavior is really going to help -- those people will just resort to sockpuppets even more than normal. And limits to editing will also hurt a number of people who are doing a lot of good. Clay Shirky is more or less right that Wikipedia thrives on "cognitive surplus", so trying to limit the supply is just self-defeating.

What we need, IMO, is some different kind of structure where being a wiki-insider with OCD isn't the absolute advantage that it is today. I don't know what that would look like.

donaldc• 15 years ago

Notability requirements for an article to exist at all is the wrong approach.

Instead, wikipedia should allow most any article to be added, but have one or more groups that "certify" articles as notable. People who want to avoid all the non-notable clutter can then elect a view of wikipedia that only includes articles certified by the group (or groups) they choose, while non-notable articles can still be viewed by those who choose to view them, and can have the breathing room to in some cases evolve into notable articles.

redthrowaway5• 15 years ago

That's just... wrong. Come on, Zed, at least do your homework. Chris isn't deleting the pages, nor is he acting as some sort of sole determinant of noteworthiness. He's simply proposing them for deletion through the Articles for Deletion process. Also, Wikipedia handles sub-pages just fine. Most active editors have a number of sub-pages on their userpage, and many articles have sub-pages as well where people will store drafts while working on a revision. Your information is wrong, and your tone is insulting. Cut it out, man.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

I don't care what the bureaucratic process is, all I know is one guy went on a rampage electing pages for deletion and they're gone. This "plausible deniability" of page deletion so nobody is to blame really is odd.

redthrowaway5• 15 years ago

There's a discussion at each AfD where anyone can come in and say why a page should or should not be kept. In the end, it is the adminstrator's decision as to whether or not there is a consensus to delete (default is to keep), and there are processes in place for getting the decision overturned.

Chris nominated 8 pages for deletion over a period of 3 days. While it's a spree that's likely hasty, it's by no means a rampage. I believe he was wrong to do as he did, but only a couple pages were deleted, and there's a discussion to have Nemerle restored. He's hardly a one-man wiki-wrecking crew.

chc5• 15 years ago

If I propose that somebody shoot someone I don't like, and that person gets killed immediately afterward, am I an innocent bystander? (Note to people who don't understand similes: I'm not saying deleting a Wikipedia page is similar in gravity to shooting someone. The similarity here is that you are responsible for your ideas.)

If you're trying to tell me the page would have been deleted even if Chris hadn't proposed it, I suppose I can't disprove that version of history, but I can say that it's pretty bizarre.

(Edited because joke was unclear.)

redthrowaway5• 15 years ago

Chris has an HN account. It's under his name, and he's posted in this thread. I am not he.

Tichy• 15 years ago

The donations thing just made me wonder if it could work to have donations per page. That is, you could kind of adopt an article (and get a banner on that article announcing you are the sponsor, perhaps).

Immediate problem would of course be advertising, which would not be desired.

It's just that if I donate now, I feel as if I am supportive of their deletionist policies, which I am not.

idonthack• 15 years ago

Wikipedia deletionism has nothing to do with the lack of paths. Organization is handled by mediawiki's category feature. Name collisions are avoided and similar names collected on disambiguation pages.

"Plan A" is not a new idea, it's exactly what happens to other categories with lots of items that don't deserve their own page.

"Plan B" won't work because part of deletionist policy is to ignore sources published by self-publishing outfits, because "anybody can publish there".

"Plan C" won't solve a goddamn thing. Good luck with "Plan D".

Quit asking for features that already exist.

zedshaw15• 15 years ago

Oh, an name of idonthack with no comments and no karma really. Well, since you don't meet the requirements of notability in my world I'm just going to down vote you.

Thanks for playing anonymous troll.

f10• 15 years ago

Strange that e.g. several content farms are deemed notable by the Wikipedia editors:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia

Notability requirements are fine, but not if they are applied selectively.

bane4• 15 years ago

You should probably flag them AfD.

blickly• 15 years ago

In case anyone is still curious how this got resolved, Monsanto gave up. From his wikipedia user page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto):

> Dear internet,

> You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion.

> I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone.

> Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

gojomo3• 15 years ago

Zed writes: "I have registered notnotable.com... Just put up the same software, get some free hosting from some of the companies out there that I know, and start filling it in with anything that's not on Wikipedia."

There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund.

The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity.

With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model.

The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash

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