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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."
"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.
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
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.
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