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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."
Funnily enough, it can on non-contentious subjects where there is a general consensus. For example if we look at the T-34, the Halifax bomber and a few other I have looked up lately, the quality of the articles and their objectiveness is quite impressive (I am familiar with the subject matter enough to catch mistakes in these).
The anarchical approach fails the moment it gets into a contentious subject or when facing with a well organised system hell bent on putting their side of the story through. Articles on some of the more corrupt US congresscritters are a good example of this. Creationism, Life/Choice and a few others are also in this category.
A mixture of anarchy and order for the contentious ones is possibly the best solution.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
I don't see why there can't be room for any kind of articles as you only come across what you search for - it's not like you are holding a 1 metre thick book where you have to wade through a million random articles to find what you want. Although initially sceptical of Wikipedia I do actually find it quite useful these days as a starting point for many a piece of research.
Funnily enough, the slashdot subculture section has become a victim and been removed. It's through that article on Wikipedia that I got a grip on the untold jokes/cliche's that abound here.
"freely available public knowledge, without the cruft."- why would The Washington Post which makes it's money and reputation on charging for the distribution of knowledge, ever endorse that?
We are all just people.
Wikipedia's problem is bloat. Most of the articles about anything important were created before article 500,000. At 1.5 million, most of the articles are junk. It's bottom-feeder stuff now.
Popular culture is a significant problem. There are far too many Star {Wars|Trek|Gate} articles. There's a Wikipedia article for every Star Wars comic book. For a while, someone was trying to create one for each character in each story in each comic book, but that was beaten back.
Then there's the ongoing effort to put every musical composition available in Wikipedia. A wiki is the wrong tool for that job. CDDB/Gracenote and IMDB have real databases for that sort of information, with useful linking and searching, but Wikipedia doesn't have the structure for that.
Wikipedia bloat impacts quality. It takes a huge number of contributors just to undo vandalism and clean up messes. Those contributors are now stuck cleaning up a mountain of dreck. They're falling behind.
That's hard on a volunteer effort. There are a few editors for whom Wikipedia is their day job, but the only one known to be full time is a political lobbyist. The thing just isn't staffed to deal with all the dreck.
According to the strictest definition of Wikipedia's notability guides, I'm apparently notable by Google. Searching for my real name shows mostly matches for me, and a few hundred of them at that; that's a specific notability criteria.
I've also published 4 LWN.net articles; but that's not a direct route to fame. Also I'm Security+ certified; apparently CompTIA claims that over 25,000 people hold the cert, which is fewer than Mensa can claim (I'm part of a small but well-known group in the market?).
On the other hand, I'm jobless and have no real achievements. I speak a lot on mailing lists and publish articles and such and sometimes get a little attention. Be careful how you define "Notable."
Support my political activism on Patreon.
What Wikipedia editors determined wasn't worthy of an entry, Washington Post editors deemed worthy of an article. Much like in the accuracy comparison with Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wikipedia has once again demonstrated that they are the ones practicing higher standards. Sure, the newspapers and the encyclopedias and everyone else who's losing eyeballs to Wikipedia will tell us all why it can't happen... each and every day that it's happening.
Whilst the casual description of the deletion process, illustrated with random examples, is presented in a fairly lighthearted manner, it is an admission that there are some quality procedures in place at Wikipedia.
You do have to wonder if they chose their examples to try and give them the notability they lack.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
The Washington Post makes money by publishing interesting articles written by individual writers. Individual writers make money by writing on topics that interest readers, often by doing nothing more than sharing their opinions on things, albeit eloquently expressed opinions. The problem with the question your asking is that there's an implied idea behind it that "The Washington Post" has opinions and an agenda. Your question is unanswerable because it's asking for the opinions and motives of a thing, which has none, rather than asking about the opinions and motives of the various people in question (which almost certainly differ). There are numerous reasons why that particular writer might endorse that (personally held beliefs), why the editors might publish it (increase readership, satisfy the writer who writes other things they like more and they don't want to reject the few things they don't, look like they encourage diversity of opinion, etc), all of which would combine to cause the publication to contain opinions that are contrary to the best interests of the publication, because the publication itself puts no thought into this at all, everything happens on an individual level, with each person making decisions to benefit themselves, not the publication.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
In their effort to better mirror "published" references, wikipedia staff has of late been acting very elitist. They will remove material that is not cited in published sources. That is very anti-web. Publishing is old-school. Authors of newer information are not even bother to publish anymore because it is easier to stick it on the web (perhaps with ads to make a buck).
If they want to give special status or marks to citations of published material, that is fine with me. However, deletion of non-published material is going overboard. Status: okay. Deletion: Not.
Time for a wikipedia revolt.
Table-ized A.I.
Why is parent moderated as funny? This pretty much sums up how Wikipedia works, in my experience. One article I saw was marked for deletion. The discussion eventually came to the conclusion it shouldn't be deleted. A fortnight later, it was marked for speedy deletion, no new points were raised, and it was deleted. I still have no real idea why, and once the page is deleted non-admins can't even get at the discussion.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For 14 months I've tried to get my bio taken down because I'm not notable. They just laugh at me, and by now there are six long "Talk" pages associated with my bio that are full of insults. It all gets indexed in Google. I'm so non-notable that they cannot find a picture of me anywhere on the web. It doesn't make any difference. When the teen-age admins on Wikipedia decide that someone needs to be punished for challenging their right to be anonymously obnoxious and invade my privacy, nothing stands in their way. There are 142,766 biographies of living people in the English edition of Wikipedia, and I promose you that this figure includes a lot of people who would rather not have to watch their biographies get vandalized for the rest of their lives. http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
Wikipedia is falling under the bureaucratic knife here. Currently there is a major campaign being put on from a handful of editors to remove fair use images -- that is, free to use but copyrighted -- in favor of copyright-free images. They've removed something like 30,000 fair use images from biographical articles and have been replacing them with lower-quality photos. In one case, they tried to use a really atrocious cell phone photo instead of a promotional shot. Jimbo Wales for some reason supports this insanity.
Bureaucracy is slowly turning Wikipedia into a not-very-fun place. Editors are ruining great articles by being too overzealous. The notability thing is just one example.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
If they have sufficient readership (or links, based on Googling, for example), then they probably belong there.
None of that officially maters, go read the web resource notability criteria. If it's not referenced by some credible source it does not belong on wikipedia according to them. One site I know got it's article deleted by an admin despite an Alexa rating of 19k.
If your web comic isn't getting enough people thinking it's notable and campaigning for it, then yes, it probably isn't. Sorry about that. Keep working on it...
Have you even read what I wrote or are you such an idiot as to be incapable of any reading comprehension. My point was that not ENOUGH webcomic articles are being deleted according to their own criteria. 99% of the webcomic articles only belong there is you use a criteria so loose it's hilarious, one that was specifically made for webcomics by the webcomic community as under any other criteria 99% of the articles should be gone.
Either there is a consistent or at least agreed upon notability criteria or the whole thing is worthless.
You're assuming that everyone who criticises Wikipedia hasn't had much to do with it. This isn't exactly the case.
There's communities that have had articles deleted for 'notability' reasons when they've been notable to the community, while articles on similar subjects have stayed intact. They start to wonder that if it happens to them, how many other subjects does it happen to? Is notability defined by how much that one editor cares about a subject?
There are people who have seen Wikipedia arguments spill out into their little corners of the Internet, and people who have read Lore's excellent sendup of Wikipedia, and others who have had edits reverted for no apparent reason other than the editor in question didn't like it, leaving a big blank space in the article that your paragraph used to fill.
There are people who have found that 'consensus' comes not from two factions settling their differences and finding common ground, but when one faction gives up and lets the other faction put their 'truth' on the page. There are those that have watched featured articles degrade in quality until they stop being worthy of feature status as all the truth leaks out.
There's plenty of criticisms of Wikipedia that only become apparent when you've had something to do with Wikipedia. A lot of them, though, wouldn't have been so bad if Wikipedia wasn't striving to be accurate. If it was called "WikiTrivia: The Internet's largest resource of interesting information" then it would have been a rousing success and probably would have served the same purpose it does now, without people being so concerned about Wikipedia being correct.
Absolutely. I participated in one of these discussions as well, and none of the established Wikipedia editors would consider the discussion for why to keep the article. They simply throw out that the article is not notable, and when you reply with links and quotes from Wikipedia rules explaining what makes something notable, they flat out ignore you. What's even funnier is when people join the discussion who aren't established editors and the editors/admins start throwing around terms like "sock puppet" and "meat puppet" to make your contributions to the discussion dismissible. They even go so far as to go back and change their opinion from "keep" to "delete" if they decide they don't like the people arguing for the side of keeping the article.
Wikipedia policy itself is a joke. They have rules and policies set forth to suit most editors' purposes, but when their agenda doesn't sit nicely with established policy, they pull this card out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:IAR
Not to mention that the wikipedia people officially say not to do this and that deletion are not supposed to be popularity contests (it's supposed to be about notability not number of rabid fanboys). I mean the GPs statement shows the problems with the current notability guidelines rather well I think. Even some of the people who are pro-wikipedia have no idea what its about anymore.
I just wanted to add to the roar of people saying that some things not notable to one person MAY be notable to SOMEBODY. Now if they are running out of room on their servers or something.... Well then let's renegotiate, otherwise, why not just leave EVERYTHING in? I can only see many upsides and relatively no downsides. If something was mentioned in wikipedia even once, for selfish reasons or otherwise, it still might be valuable information to SOMEBODY, and if somebody else ends up passionate about it and alters it in a way more in line with their version of reality, well, don't we have a process set up for that already? Great! Let them duke it out in the discussion area for all to see publicly.
Wikipedia is a great design, and a great functional resource. It's going to be even greater over time, and I think the eventual elimination of "notability" etc., will be part of that process.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.