The Battle For Wikipedia's Soul 471
njondet recommends an article at The Economist that sheds light on the identity crisis faced by Wikipedia as it is torn between two alternative futures. "'It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between 'inclusionists,' who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and 'deletionists' who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries."
Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's advertising or devoid of information, delete. Otherwise, live and let live - surely more information has to be better.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Interesting)
Way too conservative, I'd say. They deleted whole, complete and well researched articles on the Warcraft universe because it wasn't "encyclopedic". Also a lot of Star Wars stuff has been deleted too. Basically deletionists view with bad eyes everything that is fiction related, and dismiss it. Basically anything that is not traditionally accepted as "knowledge" has no place in Wikipedia in their eyes. It is an extremely prejudicial position, not to mention that deletion of articles should be done by consent - but it isn't. Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try.
Based on the difficulties Wikipedia has had to raise money lately, I'd say most people don't like their stand. Fork wikipedia already, I say, and create an all inclusive wiki, before there is only a handfull of articles left which reference Britannica as their only reliable source. Sigh.
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, there are some interrelated problems from my point of view.
I think a possible solution would be to leave stuff in, but somehow promote "good" articles to some sort of "official article" status.
I gave up trying to add to wikipedia a long time ago due to info I added getting deleted. Granted, I never added or tried to add complete essay articles. I added more like bulleted info on areas I knew something about and where I could find no info on the matter on the site.
My take is that some info is better than no info. And it might inspire someone to add a bit to it and things can grow.
So I came across Citizendium again the other day and decided to check if I could perhaps add something there. No, they only want complete articles it seems. That is not my bag. They are going to get nothing from me. I would like to contribute, but they are ruling my contributions out before I begin. Which, I guess is better than after I have spent and wasted time trying to contribute.
( http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page [citizendium.org] )
I think the dual status idea could help both sites.
Info can be added and remain even if not up to par. (Not talking seriously inaccurate here, just not complete and finished articles.) It can stay this way as long as it takes. When and if an article reaches a certain level of quality or completeness, it can get some sort of official article status.
Give viewers a toggle switch to limit views to only official articles should they so choose.
all the best,
drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
As the problem is simply one of image, create two brands, say "Wikipedia Core" and "Wikipedia Fringe". Keep everything, but only elevate articles into the core on some sort of vote / consensus. Keeps both sides happy. The inclusionists get every bit of trivia every recorded, and the deletionists get their pristine image of a "pure" encyclopaedia. Given that the project was initiated as a response to the problems of paper-based encyclopaedias I'm surprised nobody within the project has suggested this.
Seems vaguely reminiscent of slashdot around the time they introduced moderation. Reading the Fringe could someday be seen as browsing at -1.
Deletionists are evil (Score:3, Informative)
My second contribution added three-sentences as the 27th bullet of a list. The entire section was deleted 32 minutes later with the comment "Removed trivia section". The "User Contributions" list of the "Administrator" is almost completely filled with entries like "Reverted edit by ???" and a few "Removed ???". Administrators are a group of trus
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Which is really a very silly position to take.
*troll mode on* What's next, are they going to delete all pages on the Christian Bible? *troll mode off*
Less trolly, I know for a fact that Britannica has entries on Greek Mythology, and Shakespearian characters.
Is fiction only acceptable after a certain period of time?
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:4, Interesting)
---
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen--and they are rather poorly edited.
---
Basically, it means that the Pokemon franchise has a lot more fervent editors than the Solidarity movement in Poland. Whereas not many people have enough information to speak with authority about the latter, there are a LOT of people that have knowledge of every minute detail of the former. And considering the subjects in question, said people have a LOT of time on their hands.
To me, I think it's less a problem with Wikipedia and more a problem with society, and really, the goal of the Deletionists is laudible, but Wikipedia will never, ever, ever EVER be respected within the academic community, just due to the fact that anyone can edit it; any respected teacher will automatically shun a Wikipedia reference, though not necessarilly the good articles that could be linked from it. But just the example above from TFA, the only articles that will have proper accountability are the ones that a lot of people know about... so for the best information on Lost, Pokemon and Britney Spears, Wikipedia's got it!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
While the Economist article is not bad, The Charms of Wikipedia [nybooks.com], a recent article by Nicholson Baker [wikipedia.org], of "Vox" fame, is the better of the two.
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists--some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."
...
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007--deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas--all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic--Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."
Apologies to Mr Baker about quoting slightly more than my personal standard concerning fair use, but it couldn't be more pertinent to t
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Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try.
Yep. Some basement-dweller ruined Wikipedia for me. I spent (a little too much) time fleshing out a fictional article only to see it deleted because it didn't meet that kid's purity ideal. The article wasn't hurting anyone. Its presence didn't degrade the rest of the content - particularly not when you consider the lists of Pokemon and anime characters that are left alone - but one kid on a power trip got off on ruining it.
Nuts to Wikipedia. Until they get things under control, I want nothing to do
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
What I like about Wikipeida is I can find info about virtually anything on there, from obscure books to general scientific knowledge. The deletionist jihad against fictional information is exactly the same as if doctrinaire librarians went through the library with torches burning all novels because fiction lacks notability. Says who? And again, it costs a library money and space to store books but new articles in Wiki cost damn near zero.
It seems like the smartest way to handle this is to use a classification system on the articles, that way if you only want stodgy conservative wiki, you set your filter and there you go. You'd never stray into the wider wiki unless by clicking a link from a stody article.
I just find the whole unilateral nature of the deletionist thing so arrogant. It's no different from the various religions when they get into sectarian pigfights and one side starts burning the books (and sometimes members) of the other side.
Why is it embarrassing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:usefulnes of big disorder vs well-arranged libr (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maintaining those pages does cost... if not money... then the time of good editors who have to police it for idiocy/vandalism/neutral point of view. Effective editors put in a lot of time and effort. Effective trolls and vandals can do their thing with little effort at all. Wikipedia burns through good editors like they are an infinitely renewable resource.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth/ [wikipedia.org]
Your link doesn't work. This link does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth [wikipedia.org]
The problem is that you use the "auto-link" url style. This adds a slash to the end of the link, which results in an error. I had this problem myself a while ago.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:4, Informative)
Me too, which is why I've started includipedia [includipedia.com], an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.
My thoughts exactly
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
If you play it right, you might possibly even give Wikipedia deletionists something to recommend to those people disillusioned with their favorite articles getting deleted.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
* Wikipedia will be quickly filled with balantant advertising, wanabe celebrities and marginal and hardly proved theories (this is alas sadly often already the case)
* Marginal entries are rarely visted, so they don't evelove that much (practice show that the most intersting pages are those which are often visited). Marigina entries are also at risk of being quiclky filled with spam and advertisement, in one word they don't get enough eyballs to be be correctly
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Well there are certainly other valid reasons for deleting pages, such as lack of references, unverifiable, original research, advertising. I presume the debate here is whether an article that has verifiable references should be deleted purely on the grounds of not notable?
Of course, there is the possibility that many people here complaining "my article was deleted" are actually referring to articles deleted on grounds other than non-notable.
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Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
See, it's this mentality that ticks some people (like me) off. I dont use Wikipedia as "a replacement to an encyclopedia". Why would I do that? I have google if Im being lazy, and if I want to trust my information, I go to the library and get a real, tamper-proof encyclopedia regardless. When I want to *really* research a topic, I ignore the wikipedia links and try to find something I consider more reliable, like online documented medical journals, or whatever.
What I *really* use Wikipedia for, and what I loved it for, is the vast amount of human knowledge floating around the internet that cant be found in any other form. The "trivia" section is the most useful part of an article to me, because it's the only way to see all of the various references to something in pop culture. How the heck else am I supposed to find a comprehensive (or at least nearly) list of all the places the Grauman's Chinese Theatre is ever referenced in television or movies? Anything else in the Wikipedia article, I could look up... ANYWHERE ELSE.
It's the constant attempts of Wikipedia editors right now to kill any of the "flavour" of wikipedia out that has made me stop going to the website altogether. In *my* opinion, it had one use. It cant be trusted for encyclopedic information, because it's in constant flux, so I go get a *real* encyclopedia for that stuff. But it was great for obscure referential stuff that cant be found elsewhere. For example, this [wikipedia.org]. Which is an article that they have attempted to delete like 4 times now, and probably will before it's all said and done.
Everything to everybody. (Score:5, Interesting)
On top of that I'd add paid moderators and experts to enter content and double check that no users cheat the karma/mod system into letting them inappropriately get material miscategorized or misrated.
Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through. If someone wants to see every stupid thing anyone has put in then let them. If someone wants to see only expert content then let them. Isn't that the whole point of allowing every user to customize their own experience? Just make the default something reasonable such as all expert content and all content of a reasonably high karma/mod value.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Making a Slashdot-like rating system would help quite a bit. Users could then mod stuff up and down and flag certain types of content. Users with high karma would get an auto flag to the top.
Fiddly though. Are people moderating an article, or an update? It needs to be absolutely clear to them which.
If it's an article you're moderating, what happens to points when an article is updated? I might give negative mod points to an article today, only for someone to update it to an incredible standard tomorrow. The safest thing to do is to discard all prior moderations, every time there's an update. Yet that's throwing away information capital.
I guess a "moderation" could be attached to a given revisi
Re:Everything to everybody. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real discussion would come from how you'd show an edited chunk that was an edit of one you didn't want to see by someone you did want to see. I'd suggest having the latest edit be the one that counts in that case.
Re:Everything to everybody. (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's rare to see something so novel work perfectly the first time. No doubt someone will realize that there is money to be made in providing a better mousetrap, or at least one that doesn't so obviously reek of bongwater as Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia, but we can do better.
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Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through.
It's already easy to sort through. Go to the article on the subject you wish to read about, and don't click on links to articles that don't interest you. Pokemon character articles do not jump out and grab you and make you read them when you are trying to research high energy particle physics. And vice versa, if Pokemon is what floats your boat.
On top of that, there's a very useful category system.
Rating and Filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
Why can't it be both? (Score:5, Funny)
There is something happening when men and men pretending to be women in Des Moines and Davenport; in Lebanon and Concord come out of their basements to write and rewrite and edit and correct because they believe in what this medium can be. We can be the new majority who can lead this world out of a long intellectual property darkness - Communists, Free-marketeers, and Furries who are tired of the high prices of Britannica and the inadequacy of Funk and Wagnalls; who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable; who understand that if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that's stood in our way to knowledge and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there's no obscure minutia we can't illuminate - no minor character we cannot flesh out.
Our new Web encyclopedia can end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable encyclopedias in our time. We can bring doctors and patients; workers and businesses, Democrats and Republicans together for discussion and consultation; and we can tell the big name encyclopedia players that while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair. Not this time. Not now.
All of the inclusionists and the deletists on this site share these goals. All have good ideas. And all are valuable contributors who serve this website honorably. But the reason Wikipedia has always been different is because it's not just about what I or they will do, it's also about what you, the people who love knowledge, can do to increase it.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the years to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of the world false hope and bad information. But in the unlikely story that is Wikipedia, there has never been anything false about participation. For when we have faced down increasing attacks on our credibility; when we've been told that we're not a valid source, or that we shouldn't even try to be the be all and end all, or that we can't, thousands upon thousands of Wikipedia authors have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a free and liberated people.
Yes we can.
False dilemma (was Re:Why can't it be both?) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:False dilemma (was Re:Why can't it be both?) (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, the problem is with reliability. If I add something that I heard once (in the 'sum of human knowledge'), there's no way for someone to use that for research or even to check it back to someone reliable to make sure I didn't make the whole bloody thing up. Unless I can go to the library, grab the book and say "oh, wow, this is exactly like Wiki said it was! oh and look, hundreds of pages going into depth on the same topic! now I'm off to write a paper!", the information exists in a Schrodinger-like state of verifiable purgatory where citing it is a huge risk if I don't know anything about it in the first place.
There's really a reason that if you go grab a book off a shelf it has a giant bibliography full of references to other books. It's an implicit certification of accuracy.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why can't it be both? (Score:5, Insightful)
I do think that Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a valid source for reference material in itself, but I don't think any other encyclopaedia should be either; on the upside, the last copy of the EB that I saw didn't have a list of external authoritative sources attached to each article.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd started writing up a history of our local music scene so naturally I started at the beginning with a couple of obscure bands. Of course some of these people went on to achieve worldwide acclaim (a couple as actors) and I would have chronicled the whole thing.
Sadly the first four articles I wrote were deleted the next day as they were apparently not "noteworthy". Guess this folk knowledge will have to remain in the surviving copi
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a classic example: the band The Protomen. They're very well known for a non-mainstream band, but ask geeks anywhere and they know who they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=The_Protomen [wikipedia.org] Yet, The Protomen article keeps being deleted because of one editor/admin who doesn't know who they are, then they set their wikibots who also magically have admin status to go around reverting edits and deleting random pages they don't like. This is a classic example of letting a few narcissistic individuals with an agenda to push have total power over information and content.
The problem is simple: Instead of figuring out what was wrong with the article, you conclude that it's the admins' fault that the article was deleted. There's no massive conspiracy; the articles just should have bare minimum of facts that tell us why we should care.
Let's hit Special:Undelete and see what was in the most recent version. Hmm, "American progressive rock band from Nashville, Tennessee who create music based on the popular video game series from the late 1980s, Mega Man. They have released one (self-titled) album as of yet and are notable for converting the storyline of the Mega Man video game series into a rock opera." List of members. Three external links (Myspace, official home page, interview with The Escapist).
Now, please read your comment again. Then read the article contents, quoted in full above. You may notice it misses one thing - specifically, the claim that they're "very well known" or that any geeks know them. Instead, the article comes across as "We've made one CD. And we have a MySpace." There's bazillion of garage bands that can make the same claim. I'm not a genius of persuasive writing, but I don't think the article quite communicates the greatness of the band (through neutral claims, of course).
Now, let's compare this to what the criteria [wikipedia.org] say.
The article has now been protected against deletion. There are old deletion debates from June 2006 [wikipedia.org] and yet again from June 2006 [wikipedia.org]. Note that our notability criteria have changed a bit since those days and these days and these days the verifiable sources are among the most revered of tools you can use to prove the notability. So, if the band really meets the notability criteria [wikipedia.org], please do bring it up on Deletion review [wikipedia.org].
And I do mean it. Please do bring it up on Deletion review instead of spinning fanciful conspiracy theories about the Admini
It seems to be there... (Score:2, Funny)
No, but seriously...this is an issue that's really not all that easy to decide. Those in control (the admins) have the right to remove "insignificant" entries, but they boast a wide set of rules about non-censorship and such. Overall, the admins have the say, and can change the rules or strictly enforce them (remember the Muhammad article issue?). Now, whether they think it'll affect readership or whether they carefully calculate how it will affec
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What frustrates me lately is the attitude of a large number of editors who follow the mantra "Either facts are sourced or I delete them on sight, and if an article has fewer than x
Well I guess I'm an inclusionist then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well I guess I'm an inclusionist then... (Score:5, Interesting)
Much of wikipedias usefulness stems from it's inclusivity; if any given subject had to have a related doctorate, we'd have to wait 50 years until academia decides to catch up.
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Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
Trivial is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Trivial is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, I do not find "trivial" and "trustworthy" as conflicting approaches. You can have a very trustworthy place with Trivia (like your typical neighbour woman who knows about *everything* that happens in the neighbourhood, you know her information is trustworthy, although some of it may be trivial). I think what they should be aiming for is to improve the quality of those articles that seem "trivial". Yes, even the thousand of Anime/Manga articles, they are not tririval, they are information.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
True, but surely there is a limit. Are the contents of my lunch today 'informative'. Sure if I happen to become a celebrity on the scale of Lincoln someday, scholars will delight in knowing I had 'Kraft dinner' for lunch because my 4 year old wanted it more than anything... and that will somehow reveal to them something profound... but it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia today. Hell, even a page about me or even my entir
Deletionists (Score:5, Insightful)
nuking the content in a favor of a formal compliance with a policy du jour
is a wrong thing to do. Deleting is easy, creating is hard. And re-creating
is nearly impossible. If you tried resurrecting a deleted Wikipedia article,
you know what I mean.
Re:Deletionists (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have an article topic that is well-researched and well-sourced, by which I mean the subject has received attention in reliable mainstream media, then write the article and cite the sources. But just remember that you don't own that article, and it will be ultimately judged by the Wikipedia community to determine its suitability for inclusion (or modification, merging with another article, etc.).
Re:Deletionists (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, I'll find some for you:
No offense to the guy, of course - just puling an example of a lame Wikipedia article...
Even better is this one:
It's not as though Wikipedia is starved of bandwidth or storage space, so why can't it be a repository of all sorts of nuggets of informative gold? Why do things need to be reported in "mainstream media" to be worthy of inclusion? Slashdot's not mentioned on the nightly news or in newspapers, or even in many magazines, so does this mean it should be deprived of an entry in Wikipedia? Did Wikipedia have an article on itself in its early days, before it received "mainstram media" attention?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Very, very old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose I wanted to write up an article on some chemical intermediate and the various methods by which it is produced and used industrially, and other useful information. The article might not be of interest outside the chemical industry, but it would be informative to anybody who happens to encounter the topic and wants to quickly learn about it.
Would that be considered non-notable and fodder for deletion?
I can certainly see the reason for debate when regarding
What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do the deletionists care if there are trivial articles on there? If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
Do they base their stance purely on how "trivial articles" may affect Wikipedia's public image, or do they have some sort of technical concern about having too many articles?
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Informative)
You may want to read the Deletionism page on Metawiki [wikimedia.org] for more info.
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:4, Insightful)
Each and every one of those pages are the kind of dross that gives Wikipedia a bad name for being an amateur collection of random opinions. They are the noise that is in danger of drowning out the knowledge and there simply isn't the people to tidy them. Far better they were removed.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"who knows what they're doing (e.g. can spell)"
(Just saying it before anyone else does.)
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not based on technical reasons, nor on "trivia" - if Bob's Local Cheese Statue was discussed in the newspaper a bunch of times, and that's cited in the article, that article will definitely stay. It's more based on "can you back this up using a real source, not yourself", to both preserve reliability and make sure that if someone wants to use it for research they can figure out who said what.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that the main reason is a lot less noble: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts completely out of proportion to the actual power." Destroying someone else's work is using power, and that is a rewarding activity in itself, so people with nothing to contribute do so to make themselves feel important.
That's why I've made a principal decision to never again contribute to Wikipedia: doing so would mean engaging in petty power games with deletionists and other control freaks, so why bother ?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know why the parent was modded troll. I used to be very active on Wikipedia, but gave up after getting one two many things I'd worked hard on deleted by power-tripping admins.
Rich.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The most reasonable justification I've heard is "the criteria for notability is verifiability". That is, wikipedia doesn't need unverifiable articles because thanks to vandalism, there's a good chance they aren't true.
Therefore, the only articles wikipedia wants are those that can be verified. They also prefer verification come from someo
Point of a wiki (Score:2)
I'm definitely in the inclusionist's camp (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes wikipedia worthwhile is the amount of information available. Wikipedia credibility isn't in peril because it contains TNG episode descriptions (and it does). It's in peril because it contains inaccurate information. The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information. If it had been wrong on star trek related information, it would still be unreliable. If it didn't have any star trek information, it would still be providing wrong information on that topic.
What that tells you is that the current system works. Any encyclopedia works like that. I wasn't allowed to cite hard-copy encyclopedias when I was doing projects in school, they were meant as a starting point to gather information. Same thing I do with wikipedia. When I want quick information, I go there (and I go there quite often). If I need the extra reliability, I may look at the papers cited at wikipedia and decide if they're good reputable starting points, or go elsewhere.
Wikipedia is tremendously useful if you use it as an encyclopedia is meant to be used. A repository of tons of information for quick reference. If editors continue doing a good job requiring citation sources and checking for accuracy of information on topics they understand, it will continue to grow. If editors start removing information because "it's not worthy" I'm going to have to start going elsewhere for that information and they've accomplished nothing to increase their reputation.
Why can't it be both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Trivial is a matter of opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of things that are marked as such, that I don't think they are. Episode lists of TV shows for instance. Watch a show, want to know what season it was in, Wikipedia can tell you...at least for now.
I've always considered that the whole IDEA of Wikipedia. A site with every meaningful and meaningless piece of information you want. You need to know the particulars of the 1980 Presidential election? Wikipedia. You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.
The fact that there ARE all these types of pages mean two things. People want to write them, and people want to read them. If wikipedia starts to delete them, there will be another wiki that will host them.
Why can't you have both? (Score:2)
Isn't the whole point of doing this collaboratively allowing people to experiment, and breaking the bonds of the traditional encyclopedia?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
WP is probably beyond fixing at this point (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, nobody really understands the point of an encyclopedia anymore. It's to condense and collect information into a generalized mess so that someone can come along, find a snippet or less deep version of the info they need, then follow the source. The "OH MY GOD IT'S THE WEB WE CAN ADD ANYTHING WE WANT LET'S MAKE A BUNCH OF TV SHOWS" mentality snuck in pretty fast. Wikipedia has put way more emphasis on "wiki" and thrown the "pedia" part out the window years before, and *surprise* it's an issue!
Slashdotters are mostly inclusionists? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for including every little piece of info as long as it's possible to organize, and right now it seems to stay quite stable having all kinds of "minimalistic" pieces of data.
However, what called my attention upon entering the commentaries is that most people here were "inclusionists". Is it the aversion to censorship? The interest in unpopular areas of human knowledge?
I think a poll about this in Slashdot would be interesting.
They should fix their own (Score:4, Interesting)
One example is the YATE (telephony) article. It got deleted by an editor who is tied with Asterix. On top of that, the user original writing the article had a copy on his own journal - that also got deleted. Now the article might have been substandard, but instead of letting problems being fixed it got downright deleted by someone with a very biased opinion.
I for one have stopped using wikipedia.
Re:They should fix their own (Score:5, Interesting)
The OpenPBX article went the same way (there was a lot of evidence that the deleting editor was tied to Asterisk and was attempting to delete a lot of articles about Asterisk alternatives). It's one of the reasons I've given up editing Wikipedia - I've seen far too many genuinely useful articles be deleted, even though they cite external sources.
I'm convinced the AfD process is utterly flawed because most of the people who take part are either deletionists (who will vote "delete" no matter what), or already connected with the article (who will defend it and vote "keep", and be immediately discredited by the deletionists as being biassed). Unbiassed people just don't have an interest in taking part in this sort of petty politics, so if an article is entered into the AfD process the chances are it's going to get deleted.
Re:They should fix their own (Score:4, Interesting)
A pretty nasty case of either deletionitis or a small Asteriks conspiracy.
It's the accuracy, stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
Exclusionsists Miss the Point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely there must be some compromise. (Score:5, Funny)
Nah that would never work.
Ignore the Trivial (Score:3, Insightful)
As for trivial content inside a less trivial article, that's what the community is for: removing article info that's not good enough to include. Whether because it's trivial, uncited, biased, or just wrong, anyone who isn't barred can clean it up.
If Wikipedia wants to do both, and encourage trivia entered by people who understand its status to be kept out of the main article, it should just add a "trivia" section that's hidden by default, perhaps linked at a separate page. Then people adding trivia can do so without bothering anyone who wants to ignore it. And it will make it easier for later editors who clean it up to move it somewhere from which it's not as likely to be just moved back in.
The standard practice of giving everything that exists the respect it deserves, even if just a small amount, is almost always the solution. Anywhere. On the Internet, we have the luxury of infinite space for everything, and infinite degrees of respect. The Wikipedia attitude started out working like that. It can continue.
Label, don't regulate (Score:5, Insightful)
The same thing goes for page locking: although there are still some extreme cases where pages need to be locked, many of the reliability problems would be mitigated by labelling recently-changed parts or frequently-changed parts of pages. Readers can then take responsibility for their own level of trust.
Both cases are about matching expectations to reality: the situation can be improved by changing the content OR by making expectations more accurate.
To fix wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
* allow users to declare a field of expertise (or multiple fields). As these users make edits, their ranking goes up the longer the edits go without reversion- or some other way for users to say "yes, this guy seems to know about astrophysics".
* Perhaps create a non-profit entity to verify backgrounds (confirm Ph.D's, etc) and add a trust metric which is offset by user rankings.
* on top of the above, have a mode to view a page color coded by the contributor's expertise. Edits by good editors get a certain color in that particular page view. Allow pages to be restricted to users with a certain level of credibility.
the above ideas (only ideas) might serve to help rank pages reliability. Then inclusionists could have their way and the exclusionists have less reason to exclude.
Britannica (Score:4, Insightful)
* Britannica gets relevance
* Articles get concrete data that is reliable
everybody wins?
Specialistic knowledge? (Score:3, Informative)
I was writing the articles by recalling my direct knowledge of the facts, adding photos of things I made myself, documenting knowledge I gained from the master of the craft, things he shown me and talked about, but he had his own notes, I had my own, but there was no handbook of any kind - not that any would be printed ever, because there would be maybe 10 customers in my whole country to buy it.
I think this is where Wikipedia can be important, a place to store knowledge which doesn't belong anywhere else and is easily lost permanently. Deletionists, please provide a viable alternative if you think it's wrong.
Former editor and inclusionist (Score:4, Interesting)
When I joined in '04 wikipedia was largely inclusionist but since it reached around 750,000 english articles, became increasingly deletionist to the point that it is now largely deletionist.
Also, the "free" part of its motto "the free encyclopedia" also means open-source, so anything with a hint of not being GDFL approved is deleted with prejudice. "Fair use" at some point became "fair game", nevermind that I (and others) spent time sourcing fair use images only to have them all deleted.
The perfect rule is already there, actually (Score:3, Informative)
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
Isn't that amazingly elegant? If actually enforced, and used as the sole criterion for notability, it would kill off most of Wikipedia's fancruft and original research ramblings at a stroke.
A fictional character biography on Will Riker? If the only citations are the show itself, that's not thirdparty, so it's gone. Random Keenspot comic nobody's ever written anything about? *ping*, out of existence. On the other hand, if somebody's published a book on the symbolism in The Matrix, then wham, that article can be made legit. Chex nightmare? No end of good webcomics media coverage there. Deletion-proof! Focussing on other sources' views (rather than the current scenario of editor opinion, but backed up by others if challenged), would greatly improve the quality of articles and reduce the frequency of edit wars too. So the rule does away with the subjective concept of notability, and replaces it with the simple idea of "can we make actually a good, verifiable article out of this?".
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about advanced stuff? (Score:3, Interesting)
Subjective Policy (Score:3, Insightful)
You can check out my interactions with wikipedia admin at these urls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Tefosav [wikipedia.org]
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Zenasprime [wikipedia.org]
Due to this hostile environment, I've pretty much given up on any effort to participate in this "community" based effort.
How about we "refactor" it? (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, the Pokemon and World of Warcraft articles, mentioned by others as obviously not appropriate. But to a cultural historian, they are well worth saving. Just not in a general encyclopedia. Instead of deleting the articles that some people put a bunch of time into, why not work closely with the people interested in such things, and move their articles onto another server with another name? Wikipedia itself could have some summary pages on the topics, with links to the other sites.
I've been making a lot of use of one of them that exists: wiktionary.org. Now, it's quite obvious that documenting every obscure word in every obscure language is utterly inappropriate for wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Traditionally, a books that does that is called "dictionary", not "encyclopedia". Wiktionary is an interesting take on this idea, organized as one big interlocking dictionary of all the world's languages.
It's pretty clear that wiktionary is the start of something very useful (though it's rather incomplete and in need of a lot of help from a lot of people). It's also clear that its material doesn't belong in wikipedia, except maybe for a few summary articles. There's also a lot of cross-linking between wikipedia and wiktionary. So I'd list this as a successful case of splitting off a significant chunk of human knowledge, kicking it out of wikipedia, and reorganizing it as a successful wiki in its own right.
As an amusing example of wiktionary's usefulness, a few weeks ago I noticed an apparent anomaly in the use of a 2-char Chinese word that I probably can't include here [wiktionary.org], but it's pronounced ai4ren2 in Mandarin and aijin in Japanese. Using the classical characters, wiktionary has an article giving the Japanese, Mandarin (and Min Nan) meanings of the word. They show two rather different interpretations of the characters whose basic meanings are "love" and "person". This could be a nice example of how a single writing system doesn't always make it possible for people who speak different languages to communicate in writing. In this case, they just might miscommunicate some significant information. You won't often find this problem mentioned in a typical single-language dictionary, but wiktionary's format makes for easy comparison of such borrowings.
Rather than just deleting articles from wikipedia because they're not "notable" (whatever the hell that might mean to the deleter), we could cool down the fuss by saying that they're more information on the topic than is appropriate for wikipedia, and should be moved to wikiX, for some appropriate X.
Of course, sometimes the classification is a bit fuzzy. Consider, for example, the word "truthiness", which has good articles in both wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and wiktionary [wiktionary.org]. Each article is (at least for the present) well written for its site. In particular, the wiktionary article gives 19th-century citations for the word's use, and also goes into its etymology, appropriately for a dictionary site. OTOH, the wikipedia article is nearly as funny as Colbert's introduction of the word, and includes links to related topics such as "big lie", "noble lie", and "consensus reality".
It's a pretty good example of how to handle a borderline case.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What is "Noteworthy?" (Score:3, Interesting)
In 2006 my daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. We had created a non-profit group and memorial fund in her memory and many media outlets had reported on the murder but some editors at Wikipedia did not consider an article on her to be "Wiki-worthy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente [wikipedia.org]
One jackalope, in his successful attempt to delete the article, stated "Wikipedia is not a memorial. Murders of this type are lamentably common. Even the existence of memorial funds/scholarships does not confer notability."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente [wikipedia.org]
I then took a different route and instead created an article about the charity I founded in her memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann's_Group [wikipedia.org]
This article was also nominated for deletion with the comment: "Blatant promotional page."
Fortunately I was successful in my continued attempts to keep the articles - but only after we had worked to get two pieces of legislation passed, including one named for her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer's_Law [wikipedia.org]
The process that I had to go through in order to convince people halfway around the world that this subject was "notable" was profoundly frustrating. The qualification to be fully-cited is an understandably objective criteria but to then apply a notability test is not only completely subjective but also thoroughly unrealistic.
Wikipedia vs. Wikia (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone else commented "The solution to this mess would seem to be to trash everything unsourced or transwiki it to a place that doesn't care about reliability, but that's not going to happen."
It's happening. Wikia [wikia.com], which is Jimbo Wales' commercial operation, is the other place that "doesn't care about reliability". Wikia claims to be an encyclopedia and a search engine, but all they are is a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Wars|Trek|Craft|Gate] wikis, the Yu-Gi-Oh wiki, the Marvel Comics wiki, and similar popular culture. They even have fan fiction. They don't have much else. The machinery is the same as Wikipedia, but the standards are far lower. Wikia has ads, but the reader demographic lives in their parents' basement, so the clicks may not be worth much.
There's now a push on Wikia (the "WP:FICT" debate) to move the fancruft to Wikia, where Wales can try to monetize it. Wales is still involved with Wikipedia, so this is a conflict of interest. It's probably good for Wikipedia to have a place to dump the cruft, but it's troubling that the nonprofit and profit-making sides have some of the same management. The IRS may have something to say about that.
Wikipedia was done around 2006. By then, almost all the subjects worth an article had one. New articles now tend to be self promotion (garage bands, mostly), minor historical figures ("member of the Ontario parliament 1936-1938"), atlas information ("State Route 152"), or utter junk ("I rule!!!").
Wikipedia's maintenance process is labor-intensive. It's the encyclopedia anybody can trash, and a sizable, ongoing effort is required to fight the trashing. That effort increases as the number of articles goes up, which is what limits the useful size of Wikipedia. If volunteers don't keep up the maintenance, the thing will turn to mush. The right size for Wikipedia is probably below 500,000 articles.
Re:deletionists (Score:5, Insightful)
"And furthermore, you're ugly!" Yeah, that rhetorical flourish really adds to the logical cohesion of a point.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)