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Our Love/Hate Relationship With Wikipedia
netbuzz points us to a somewhat snarky Washington Post article about the Wikipedians' work in upholding a minimum standard of "notability" for the collaborative encyclopedia. Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog: "The Washington Post this morning gets its snickers at the Wikipedians who do the best they can to apply the minimum 'notability' standards needed to keep the online encyclopedia's 1.5 million English entries relatively free of worthless junk. 'It's also safe to assume these are people with a lot of time on their hands,' the Post writer notes... These are people doing a truly thankless job... and they deserve a few thank-yous."
Here's his take on the Post's bemusement from a NetworkWorld blog:
... evolving language, etc.
"Bemuse" is a synonym for "confuse". It is not a synonym for "amuse".
Yes, yes
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Slashdot, in true tradition, misses the current happenings in Wikipedia world.
The big story at the moment about linking to external videos on YouTube (and other video sources).
This is all started with Fox serving takedown notices to Quicksilverscreen for linking to YouTube videos, under the assertion that linking to copyright infringing material is, in itself, illegal. Hence the repercussions for Wikipedia (and, pretty much any site governed by US law).
C'mon slashdot, keep up!
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Because most of them will be unverifiable and probably down right wrong. IF there are no outside sources for verification and only 1000 people in the world who know anything of the article's subject then you have a single person writing the article probably. Not to mention that the larger the wikipedia the more energy is needed just to maintain some sort of coherence in the articles and remove obviously wrong crap (which means other articles will suffer as this is a finite resource).
I'd prefer a limited wikipedia with good articles to one with everything where half the stuff is utter shit.
If anyone and anything were given articles on Wikipedia, you *would* have to wade through millions of junk articles to find what you want.
One important requirement for articles on Wikipedia is that they are verifiable. That means providing sources for the information in the article, allowing others to ensure that the article is accurate. If there are no published sources which contain information on the subject of the article, there would be no way of evaluating it. I doubt that the authors of an article on some kid's garage band could provide a reference from outside of their circle of family and friends.
Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Not a primary source, not a secondary source. Articles on Wikipedia are written about what is already published elsewhere. This is an attempt to keep Wikipedia neutral, and minimize the influence that a particular editor's biases might have.
The Post article quotes Jimmy Wales as saying that the decision to exclude an article is based on "a discussion among known editors." The article goes on to ask who those editors are and answers its own question "these editors are called 'administrators' and they get their jobs after being nominated and voted in by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." Well, that is wrong on two counts. The discussions on deleting articles are in no way restricted to admins. Admins do determine what the consensus of the discussion is after a fixed time period and have access to the tools to actually delete the article, but they have no special role in the discussion. The second error concerns how admins are selected. There is no vote by "by the great mass of Wikipedia contributors." There is a nomination and review process and the final decision is made by an even smaller group known as "bureaucrats." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_fo r_adminship . That's two errors in a single paragraph, but I suppose with tight budgets in the newspaper business these days, they can't afford the kind of scrutiny for accuracy that Wikipedia articles get.
One answer is that there are many wikis out there. For almost everything that Wikipedia says it's not, there's another wiki out there that will cover the information you're interested in working on. For many of them, Wikimedia itself hosts those wikis, so it's not always a matter of DELETE DELETE, sometimes it's a matter of finding the right wiki. For instance, Wikipedia might not like to have really detailed programming guides on its site, but the content would be perfectly suitable for Wikimedia's Wikibooks. Wikipedia is a little too straight-laced sometimes, but there's Uncyclopedia if you want to add a joke to an article or otherwise go overboard with a subject. Wikibooks no longer takes game walkthroughs, but there's Strategy wiki for that.
Without the cruft? Your definition of non-cruft would seem to be very broad.
"Nice" or not, most Wikipedia editors I worked with had very set notions about the "right" way to do things. Even if you have the official guidelines on your side, it's very hard to get anybody to change their minds. When I participated in the "request for deletion" discussions (I think they're called something else now) people mostly had their notions of what was notable and what wasn't, and that was that. Sometimes they'd even refuse to explain their opinions.
It really doesn't matter whether the discussion are polite or not, because they never go anywhere. It's a myth that Wikipedia is edited by consensus. Content is controlled by those who outstubborn everybody else.
According to the strictest definition of Wikipedia's notability guides [wikipedia.org], I'm apparently notable by Google. Searching for my real name shows mostly matches for me...
[...]
I speak a lot on mailing lists and publish articles and such and sometimes get a little attention. Be careful how you define "Notable."
Dig deeper and you'll find exclusions for things such as blogs and other 'end-user' created content. The guidelines are meant as a guage for editors and not absolute rules... every situation is different and should be judged accordingly.
Because there are still limits on the system. If you let each person, group, and event in the world have a page on Wikipedia, you'll have serious problems telling them all apart. As an example, there are 38 people on Wikipedia named John Smith, and more with some variant on the name, like Johnny or Jon. And that's after trying to eliminate nobodies. If they let anyone with that name have a page, it would be a nightmare to tell them all apart.
Then there's the problem of how to get an accurate entry on an unimportant topic. Wikipedia depends on collaborative editing to ensure factual accuracy, but that depends on having plenty of contributors. The fewer people there are contributing to a page, the more likely it is to have unrecognized factual or interpretive errors. A page with only one contributor can say literally anything about its subject, which is exactly how a number of serious errors have gotten into Wikipedia. A noteworthiness requirement is a reasonable way of guarding against that problem.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Worthless junk? That's what Slashdot and the Uncyclopedia are for.
--
make install -not war
Don't put Wik into the encyclopedia box.
The Wikipedia project tried VERY HARD to put ITSELF into that box, beginning with its very name and slogans. Don't get pissy now that people see it in that box, and have certain expectations as a result.
"Main Page - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia"
"Welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit."
And from the about page:
"This Web site is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia..."
It may be all those things you mention IN ADDITION to an encyclopedia, but an encyclopedia is CLEARLY what they are trying to be.
In the webcomics world, they've butted heads over notability so much that most commentators have advocated abandoning Wikipedia for a dedicated webcomic wiki.
The problem appears to be that a webcomic is usually considered notable by reputation and influence, things that traditionally are hard to provide sources for (not least because the first response when someone asks about it is "you don't know Girly?!") This has led to several entries of exceedingly notable webcomics being deleted from Wikipedia, including a well-regarded satirical webcomic about webcomics that got major attention when it riffed on another webcomic's joke, something that doesn't translate well to a source; and an old hand in webcomics who doesn't have a huge amount of readers but is a significant influence on other artists, which again doesn't translate well as a source because webcomic creators are not in the habit of talking about their influences other than Calvin and Hobbes.
One could say, "well, why don't you get in and help and make sure the notable comics don't get deleted?" It's simple: we don't have time to babysit the Internet. The webcomics community have made it quite clear to the editors involved that they're doing these comics a wrong, and they keep putting up important comics for deletion. Fights on Wikipedia go to the most persistent, not who's right, and these editors are particularly persistent. It's disheartening to spend our time writing about something that's notable to us, like Checkerboard Nightmare or Girly, only to have it trashed by the people 'in charge' as soon as our backs are turned. It's better in the long run to throw up our hands and go somewhere where Wikipedia's endemic problems don't get in the way of having an accurate picture of webcomics, even at the expense of Google position.
And yet... notability as a criterion for inclusion is not and never has been an official policy of Wikipedia. It is, at most a disputed guideline, and the Wikimedia Foundation's own fundraising materials include the statement, "Imagine a world in which every person has free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." Not "the sum of all notable human knowledge" or "the sum of the human knowledge we think is worthwhile", but the sum of all human knowledge.
a) Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia
b) Wikipedia only keeps articles written like an encyclopedia
c) Wikipedia only keeps articles that can be verified outside the internet, thereby deleting a lot of 'cruft' that made wikipedia useful in the first place.
There are some obvious editors with vendettas against certain kinds of content, in particular comics and webcomics, where a lot of webcomics were deleted for 'not notable' simply because they shared a host with another webcomic (or comicgenesis, or drunkduck, or webcomicnation). So largely, they cut out entire sections of content built by communities, which then alientates the community from wikipedia, and any further content they may contribute to wikipedia as a whole.
Wikipedia's value and usefullness keeps going down because they delete the stuff that I would use wikipedia to find, and instead have to resport to sifting through google results.
One of the most laughable tests for notability is using google to search for the keyword and then telling it to ignore all forums and blogs. Okay, so they only want stuff that nobody talks about and can be found in a dead tree encyclopedia? Why use wikipedia at all then?
One day someone is going to AFD the wrong persons content, and that person will be a very powerful person in some company that will sue wikipedia out of existance due to legal costs. That is the reason why stuff should not be purged from wikipedia for mere "notability"
Wikipedia has a reverse slashdot effect, when ever something is nominated for deletion, someone tells the person who wrote the article and that results in a bunch of people trying to save the article, but the article gets deleted anyway due to "this is not a vote"... okay then what the hell is the point in having a AFD discussion, why not delete the entire wikipedia?
I don't use wikipedia except as a last resort, the content
You called Wikipedia 'wik'. Wik is actually the name of a user on Wikipedia... a banned user, as a matter of fact. (And somewhat controversial in his day.) But even more than that, even when people call it 'Wiki', it's roughly analogous to calling The New York Times 'Newspaper': "Oh, hey, did you see that cool article in Newspaper the other day?" Wiki is a variety of software. There were wikis before Wikipedia.
Appropriate terms for Wikipedia include Wikipedia (but please not WikiPedia - or do you say SlashDot, MicroSoft, ComPuter, and such?), something like "the 'pedia", or possibly "the wiki" (in contexts where it is clear Wikipedia is the one in question - of course, there are thousands of other wikis). And if you're REALLY stressed for typing speed, how about calling it 'WP'?
-- grumbling for the day is done.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Odes to their dead hampster
cheers!
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
I agree with everybody's points - ordinarily, there is no reason to strip "non-notable" articles and information and "cruft" from the encyclopedia. But there are some other points to consider. For one thing, Wikipedia is supported by user donations and has no advertisements. All that hosting money has to come out of somebody's pocket. If the powers that be have a choice between paying to host large amounts of information on topics of very limited appeal/use, and saving money on bandwidth and storage by removing that information, then they have every right to select the second option, particularly if it means Wikipedia as a whole can remain more financially secure.
Information is NOT free-as-in-beer.
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