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Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the 'notability purges' taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?"
As an admin on Wikipedia, I wonder if it really is a problem with administrators. All comics must go through articles for deletion, where the community must decide. An admin just makes the closing decision based on consensus, then either keeps or deletes the article.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good. It can run both ways.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wow. Cry baby much? The notability claim is there for a reason, and it works, it stops ego listings. Consider the people who think they're in a band just because they've got a myspace account and put one mp3 up there. These get listed a lot. The are, by wikipedia rules, non-notable. Radio stations who get listed just because they exist? They're not notable. Open Source software? A bunch of it (including a couple of things I've worked on) has been marked non-notable and deleted.
What's important to someone, a fan, a listener, a developer may not be important to anyone else and you have to work hard to prove notability. Mere existence isn't enough. Has the comic you read won an award? Published an anthology? Those are pretty good indicators of notability. Having a URL? No. The whine that some comic was mentioned in a local newspaper was laughable; being notable in your own back yard, how is that good notability? Heck, if that counted I think I'll present a note from my mom saying I'm notable and list myself. Why should web comics have different rules to everyone else?
Rather than ask people to NOT donate, ask them to donate to YOU, so you can set up a 'ComiPedia' where things WON'T be deleted. (just having a blonde monent....)
This is a case where it's of utmost importance to see the both sides of the coin clearly: Wikipedia is also growing a more and more important platform for many webmasters to advertise there stuff on.
If there is one side you should not listen to on if web comic X should be put there, it is the web comic writers. Because these are already biased.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Goodness! Who listed the parent comment a troll? This is a commonly held view among many Wikipedians! Of course, it is diametrically opposed by many, many other Wikipedians... but still, to call this a troll is a bit ridiculous.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why don't we just find/create a WikiPeDeletions.org... ie, where things WikiPedia doesn't - for some reason -
want to support can be quietly transferred to, so they can live out their lives there.
It's just plain silly to delete others' works.
Perhaps a network of WikiPeDeletions.org's - each specializing in a particular type of deleted item,
or possibly the reason for deletion (if known).
Of course, then, there'd then need to be a portal/search engine to find any article(s), on any/all
of the places where its topic may reside, after deletions by the original WikiPedia.org.
(This is meant as a serious article, despite its possibly humorouse spin-off URL names - above.)
The Internet - serious business!
I read your comment with interest, but got a bit confused at "Occasionally, there are write-ins, but those are usually viewed as part of the spoiler effect." What exactly do you mean?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I remember when the entry for the "Juggernaut Bitch" video was deleted for lack of notability, nevermind that at that point over a million people had seen it, and was notable enough for for the producers to put it in the frikkin movie. Yet you'll have no problem finding lengthly articles on obscure Final Fantasy or Star Wars characters. "Notability" seems to be a completely arbitrary standard that admins use to remove articles they don't like.
In some countries, comics are considered cultural heritage. Especially in Belgium and France, and while the comics are quite different, I understand the same is true for the United States. So, wikipedia has an entry on Suske en Wiske because it's culturally relevant to Belgium.
However, one might argue that webcomics are culturally relevant for the Internet and a such should be included. Personally, I'd say: if there are people who are willing to write about it, it should be included.
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
... as well as other superheroes, some of whom were so obscure they could be used as weed-out questions at a comic geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and yet had about as much written about them as topics of minor societal importance such as Catholicism, Argentina, and friction, I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant". Even accepting the snobbish "We want to be Brittanica-lite, no comics, video games, or fantasy literature unless it would shame us not to include them" POV for the sake of argument, after you've got a featured article on Tom Bombadil and Matter-Eater Lad (no, really -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad) you have already gone well past the point of no return for subjects of trivial import.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Actually blowdart has a good point, though it could have been put better. In all communities there are people who are well known within that community, but not outside. I am sure there are famous wine-tasters, pigeon breeders, slashdot posters, golf-course designers, tidley-winks players well known within their circles. Also many towns will have worthy and locally well-known charity workers, musicians, etc. Most of these will not warrant a wikipedia entry. The problem is that many people do not have a global perspective and will create articles for them. This is why review and deletion is necessary, and some people will be upset. An example I know of is Stephen Knapp who is well known among followers of Vedanta but has a notice that the article may be subject to deletion on notability guidelines. This may be the right decision as I am not sure whether he is known much outside this special interest circle.
This seems to be the very same malady that afflicts bloggers: the illusion of being popular and influential. People seem to forget that the Internet, vast as it seems to be, is only "used" by 18.9% of people, and even it still seems to be a lot, most of the use limits to email and an the occasional news site. Most people don't even know what a blog (or a webcomic) is, and even the ones who do, they don't care about those particular ones, except for a couple of dozen of fans.
It is the absolute numbers that seem to throw people into this illusion. Back in the days, if you wrote a college newspaper and got, let's say, 300 readers a week, that would be unquestionably an assessment of the quality (or, at least, the popularity) of the publication, and probably would get you a sweet job in the local newspaper. If you had a band, and managed to attract 300 loyal followers, that would be an amazing thing. But on the internet, that's a drop in the bucket, I got that much visits in an outdated blog only through google searches that happened to display my blog in the first page.
So, in short, leave the spotlight for the real notables, and go back to improve your own act in order to one day, with lucky, to deserve to be really famous like the "big boys".
Mens rights groups have been trying to put info into wikipedia for years, a few (actively proud feminists in their wiki bio's) have pulled the nobility card, and no support, so Deleted! Topics like MGTOW (Men going their own way) the slogan and world wide group has been deleted, because its not a non-profit group. The mens rights and misandry pages are stripped down due to disagreements, it cant be expanded by people who actually run MRA sites and written books on the subject, because its not Notable? That makes no sense, its like saying a founder of black panthers cant put in information.
It's sad that even famous authors and events in history are removed due to notability, if simpsons episodes and 4chan can be in it, so can best selling authors from the 80s. I Tried to add Twyana Davis as an article, just for it be deleted for notability reasons, mostly because a couple 20'ish editors never alive in the 80s, read the newspapers or watched tv. So its not notable to them. One of the largest rape scandals to happen.
I've seen editors say text was copyrighted, when it was released under creative commons, and proof provided, still deleted. An editor deletes because stub articles should be put into other articles, which makes no sense. Information goes in, it gets edited by everyone as time goes on, thats what makes a wiki powerful.
Its a freaking political nightmare, if someone doesn't agree with you, they can delete it for a numerous reasons, and people are finally seeing that. Notability is sighted as the number 1 excuse for deleting an article that someone doesnt agree with.
Ha, take a look at the pit bull article, its a warzone, editors dont agree with the AKA and the National society of veterinarians.
Wikipedia while useful, is horribly ingrained in thought control by editors. Its suppose to be a collection of human knowledge, not "Only knowledge that we agree with". Those who control the information, as the saying goes....
So, I wont donate until they change their rules and behavior. Groups have set up their own WIKI's due to this political/social moderation.
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/index.php/2007/10/30/wikiwatch-how-did-that-picture-get-there/
"Comments are closed".
I rest my case.
Magneto and Tom Bombadil are integrated enough into our culture that I'd not be surprised to see references to them outside superhero and fantasy context. Much less surprised than seeing references to e.g. Torg of Sluggy Freelance (the only web comics i read regularly, and one of the oldest and most popular such) outside a comics context.
But I wouldn't defend the notability of Matter-Eater Lad.
When will people start understanding Wikipedia is a summary of already published, reliable sources and not their personal webcomic advertisement forum? It's simple: if people write about your subject in the press or other reliable sources, you put that information up. If not, you don't. Notability only serves as a duck test for reliable sourcing - chances are good that if something looks non-notable it lacks any sort of primary/secondary source to back it up in the first place. Why can Penny Arcade have a Wikipedia page? Because the news reports on it.
There's a reason it's called Wikipedia and that is to be a tertiary source like any other encyclopedia. There is nothing new or unique about how encyclopedias work, and since notability is a subset of reliable sourcing, why doesn't this point get hammered into the minds of the general public when Wikipedia is one of the most used online resources?
Admittedly, Wiki itself doesn't make the distinction, and it's further hampered by Jimbo Wales going out and making asinine statements about how Wikipedia aims to be "the sum of all human knowledge". But some of the fault has to lie with the public. I suppose a lot of (mostly younger) people have never owned an old-fashioned encyclopedia in their life, and are used to more casual websites where anything goes.
This page needs to change. A small cabal of admins made this useless policy, and they use it to crowbar anyone who goes against them.
I figure 50 slashdotters could get toghether to change the page, and hence this assinine policy.
They should get a clue and realize the reason why I (and I suspect many other people) use wikipedia is because it's NOT a dead tree encyclopedia. If I really wanted a dry academically written encyclopedia I've one in my home which I've not touched in years.
:). If the "encyclopedia" policy was followed strictly that bit would be replaced/removed.
/wiki/notnotable/webcomic1/
Just the other day I saw that "People Eating Tasty Animals" was marked for deletion twice. While it's not as notable as "roe vs wade", IMO it was an important case (whether or not you liked the verdict).
Also, there are plenty of articles which are not written in an "encyclopedic way", but those are the bits I like.
for example: "Deed of change of name" (which was recently brought to my attention)
Edited snippet:
"There are various reasons why a person would want to change his or her name:
* to replace a frivolous name given by their parents (e.g., old name James Bond, new name Jason Bond; a well known example is Elton John, who changed from Reginald Kenneth Dwight in favour of a career in the Music Industry)"
The last bit is definitely not "encyclopedic in style", but I like it
The way wikipedia currently works, I think only spam or vandalism articles should be deleted. Because with deletion you lose a LOT of stuff permanently. There is no history etc. They could always leave the page and history there, then replace the final page with a standard "deleted/not notable/<other reason>" and people can go to history to see the article if they want.
If it's a namespace/clutter issue, why don't they just move all the stuff they consider not notable in a "not notable" section.
e.g.
Anyway, I don't really care if wikipedia destroys their own usefulness - IMO the wikipedia has become successful in spite of the policies, power-mad admins and "leadership" than because of it. It's a wiki, lots of people used it and it grew. If wikipedia doesn't want to hold "nonnotable" stuff I'm sure someone eventually would and a decent search engine should help me find it.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: Deleting is too easy. It's also strangely enjoyable. People who can't create often like to destroy, and Wikipedia gives them this ability. More than that, it makes them that feel they're doing good by destroying articles! I would even say there are two types of contributor to Wikipedia: Those who create, and those who destroy. A surprising number of "editors" (I use the term loosely) have never actually written anything. Instead of deletion, editors should actually "edit" and work to improve the article. They should post constructive comments on how it can be improved or, gulp, actually get in there and improve the article themselves. Deletion should be the last option. Here's my story: I wrote a lengthy summary of a complicated novel. It took me from dinner time until midnight, because I did it properly and quoted sources. It was deleted (reverted) instantly for reasons of 'copyright' -- quite literally after around a minute of being online. The comment from the "editor" was littered with poor grammar and bad spelling, so I didn't even feel I was being overruled by a superior intellect. That's five hours of my work destroyed instantly by somebody making an arbitrary decision. OK, I thought, I'll condense my piece into a series of plot points that's shorter, and spent more time doing this. No good. Instant deletion again, by somebody else, this time apparently because what I'd written wasn't relevant. (Somehow the plot points have been reincorporated and are there right now but who knows for the future?) Wikipedia is a broken machine that's held together by the sheer ego power of its contributors, most of whom are college kids who think they're changing the world. I just can't wait for this bubble to burst so that people will stop quoting Wikipedia at me, as if that's the end of the matter. It isn't. It's not even the start.
Mainly due to articles I created or helped amend being deleted, and unless you check back all the time on everything you do there is no warning sent out saying "this is up for deletion".
When questioned one of the deletee's simply replied "well it was marked for deletion and no-one said anything so we deleted it".
So when you spend your own free time to help out and have some idiots just click away on the delete button it really makes you think "why bother" and since then, I havent.
I may be saying something already known or discused, but a filtering system like on /. could in fact be the answer. People give points instead of voting for deletion, and the user could set his/her threshhold on any level, ths being able to see only the greatly approved stories or also the less known ones.
Storage space could be a problem, though.
oh my god... it's full of stars!
Is it trying to be an online version of a print encyclopedia, complete with space limitations, or is it an encyclopedia "big" enough to encompass and incorporate any-and-all information?
Since Wikipedia doesn't have to worry about running out of paper or shelf space, why shouldn't it include even the most obscure subjects and article, including unfashionably populist?
Yeah, sure, cull out the high school band rock star-wannabes and other vanity articles, but why not make room for the rest?
Britannica may feel compelled to self-limit itself, justifiably or not, but those limits don't apply to Wikipedia and shouldn't apply.
You're saying that Jimbo Wales, whose decision on WP policy is final, and Wikipedia itself are both wrong.
Wha?
You're a liar. Just a plain liar who hope that people wouldn't read the TFA "1) Wikipedia appears on my referrer list as having provided 401 out of 293,781 referrals for the month of September. In October (the month during which I stirred the pot again) it provided 395 referrals (as of this writing). Webalizer rounds this down to ?0.00%? of my monthly traffic. Obviously my Wikipedia article is a HUGE part of my advertising campaign. (Where?s the sarcasm tag, now?)"
How about instantly deleting any mention of when the subject of the article was briefly mentioned in "The Family Guy?"
I believe that there has been an overreaction to criticism of Wikipedia that it is of uneven quality. The old idea that you "don't put off the newbies" seems to have been downgraded. Everyone will be familiar with the big bold tags, but I have also witnessed unnecessarily destructive criticisms of newbies by experienced editors in subjects where it is very difficult to get people to contribute.
Wikipedia is something entirely new! If you don't want uneven quality go read a dead-tree encyclopedia. If you don't want to read an unnotable article go read some other article!
If so, I agree wholeheartedly.
Every porn star who has appeared in a single movie is considered worthy of a Wikipedia article. Search for them, they are there en mass. Yet, to be worthy of an article, a webcomic has to be in the top what . . . 10? 20? I can't say I know really. Like many aspects of Wikipedia, it's inconsistent. I think every webcomic has had an article at one time. Some are well-entrenched, others continue to exist only because their notability is not even worth the effort of deletion.
The idea that any actor, even an actor in a cheap porn filmed in a barn in Idaho, is worthy of an article because it exists in the space outside of Internet culture while a webcomic has to meet a meaningless standard of notability outside of its primary sphere of influence and existence is evidence that the notability requirement, while well-meaning, is fundamentally flawed.
If you take this argument to the extreme and wikipedia becomes the sum of all knowledge then it will become unwieldy. If I hear someone say "George McGovern said something like that" and I don't know who they are referring to I would like a concise list of possibilities, not "George McGovern , purveyor of finest smoked haddock" and "George McGovern, Bogville's crossowrd champion 1997".
It could be like Zero, the computer in Rollerball:
He considers everything.
He's become so ambiguous now,
as if he knows nothing at all.
I'm sorry, I must have missed something. When did Slashdot become a forum for airing random internal Wikipedia grievances? The inclusionism/deletionism debate is as old as Wikipedia itself, and better discussed on Wikipedia itself, where it'll matter a damn.
For that matter, what the hell is this doing under YRO? How is this possibly a--
Oh, that's who posted the story. Never mind...
No statement is true, not even this one.
Personally, I think think this is the winner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightsaber_combat.
Seriously, how does Wikipedia justify the large, informative categories frequently nominated for mass deletion while something this ridiculous is allowed to exist? I don't think any of these fighting styles are even mentioned in any of the films. If they don't fit on the general Light Saber page, they're too trivial for Wikipedia. Certainly a lot more trivial than dozens of popular webcomics.
It really looks like Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia of Star Wars and Star Trek trivia, instead of a serious repository of knowledge with some information about absolutely everything.
I had to fight to have a positive page created about me and my projects (not by me) deleted... hehehe
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I was reading through the comments, and the last one of the guy who quit submitting because they delete without even informing those who have submitted... It made me think: Is there a Delete Storm coming? Where people just go to every page they can find and hit delete on everything?
Slashdot tends to draw attention to things in a massive way, and that Delete button is pretty high-profile right now.
I'm not saying people should do it, but if they did... Would it cause a policy change? A LOT of useful articles will disappear if it happens.
Personally, I think Wikipedia is only good for the non-obvious stuff... You know, the stuff you -can't- find in a 'real' encyclopedia. Anything I could find in a real one, I'd go there first, since I'd likely want to cite it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Schlock what Mercenary fame?
Hmmm....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... I've seen plenty of pr0nstar bio's queued for deletion just because they were too short Funny huh? A pr0nstar with a short article on wikipedia?Hang on, by "article" are you perhance refereeing to the dangling participle or his misplaced modifier?
As for TAF, it is completley ignotable. Dido kdawson.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
I agree. The policies towards trivia are a little harsh; if I'm bothering to go to wikipedia to look something up, then it's probably the trivial I want to know. Take the Simpsons or South Park; being British, I often don't get the "in" jokes, and I want to know why they're funny.... I've always thought that wikipedia should record everything possible about a subject, and if that causes long articles, so be it. Splitting articles into numerous pages is even more annoying. Still using a modem, if I download a page, disconnect, read it, then find that the info I want is actually in a sub-article really irritates me....
"Mere existence isn't enough. Has the comic you read won an award? Published an anthology? Those are pretty good indicators of notability."
Frankly, who cares? I don't. What if I want to know some details on [whatever web comic] someone just mentioned to me? Maybe I want to know a handful of relevant links? Google is going to give me a bunch of irrelevant crap I don't want.
On Wikipedia I can enter a word, name, phrase, and I'll get some information and some relevant links. I don't care for a damn second how "notable" the item in question is. I just want to know some information on what I typed in. Why is it such a huge deal if it's not that notable? Is there some huge scarcity of storage space for this data? I can see no reasonable excuse for having such strict and overzealous "notability" requirements.
I pretty often look up local bands to see some info about them. Of course none of them are even there. It would be nice if I didn't have to sort through a bunch of shitty, image/video-loaded Myspace pages in order to check out the local music scene. I'd love to read a few little blurbs about local bands on Wikipedia. Why is that such a problem? Actually, the real question is, is that even a problem at all?
IN FACT, I'll argue right now that the LESS notable something is, all the more reason to keep the article and get people to contribute whatever info they might have! Why even BOTHER running an online encyclopedia-style site if you're going to shut down articles that happen to pertain to not-widely-known subjects? I can understand extremely trivial stuff like "The QX935 is a $0.39 alarm clock from Bill's Dollar Store in Urbana, Ohio", but even then, maybe someone found an old "QX935" sitting around and are wondering about its origin?
I guess it's all a question of what the intention of Wikipedia is. They do have the text "edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet", which implies to me that the more information available, the better. The whole "notability" rule seems to contradict this core concept, though.
I've largely given up on Wikipedia as a contributor. Partly it's just a getting over it kind of thing, and on that I'm obviously not alone, judging from recently publicised stats. However, it's much more to do with the very demoralising feeling that having contributed much time and effort in drawing illustrations, taking photographs, writing articles and generally getting caught up in the original spirit of the project, I'm now frequently having my work deleted (particularly images, which in all cases are completely fine and freely given by me) by non-creative finger-wagging types who have taken over the whole thing and turned into a sort of "no ball games allowed" boot camp.
Fuck you, tossers - I'll save my creative time and effort for someone who can appreciate it.
..topic specific wiki production... and in time when it gain notability it will make linkability from wikimedia in an approved article....
or maybe it can be the other way around.
The web is open....
Wow, crapping all over a free project! What a responsible and mature individual you must be.
Arrogant prat.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wikipedia thinks that it's bigger than it is and that's the start of its downfall in my opinion. It become too anal-retentive for me not to want to make any (more) contributions. All this excessive markup ("citation needed" etc), KB -> KiB gayness, AD -> CE too... And still many pages are crappy indeed or missing.
Wikipedia only works if there are multiple competent editors who independently contribute to the article, and correct each others mistakes. If that is not the case, the article is really just a soapbox or blog for one person (even if that person happens to be correct).
I see the notability criteria as an attempt to ensure that. Which means that they have to be flexible, and change as the demographics of Wikipedia change. Subjects related to free software and Libertarianism are relatively less notable now than they used to be, as the demographics have become much more mainstream. But in absolute terms all subjects have become more notable, as the increasing number of editors means more subjects are likely to have multiple independent editors.
As a Wikimedian from 2003, I may say that notability on Wikipedia is a bullshit and that it is regularly used for removing content which is not according to the cultural/ideological/... values of some group of Wikipedians. It is not even so much related to admins of Wikipedia because there is a regular procedure for voting for deletion.
However, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and encyclopedia is not a place for original research. This means that there shouldn't be only an event for making article about that event. Also, there should be at least a couple of partial description of such event somewhere else to make description of the event relevant enough.
In general, if "event" fulfilled the next two rules there are no reasons for deleting it: (1) Three independent sources about event existence. (2) Three different informations about the event.
Here is the example related to software: Software may be hosted at SourceForge and described at Freshmeat. However, both of sources are not independent because both description are made by author him/herself. Software may be partially described at some site which is dedicated to type of the software. This is the first independent source. Software may be included into Debian and Ubuntu. This is the second independent source because Ubuntu usually mirrors Debian packages. And software should have one more partial description to be added into one encyclopedia.
The main problem in understanding encyclopedia is that it is not dealing with primary sources. Encyclopedia may not write an article about Orwell's 1984 based only on Orwell's book. Encyclopedia may write an article about a book only via secondary source proxy. Description of what something means in the book is not a job of encyclopedist, their job is just to retell what someone else described.
Classic encyclopedias are not following strictly this rule because they are made by academics and they are able to say that their article is "amalgam of secondary source and encyclopedic article", even it is not consistent in the spirit of encyclopedistics.
I described here an ideal. However, I am sure that there are a lot of things around. Maybe some/the most/.. of webcomics really don't have enough of relevant enough mentioning out of their sites. Also, to be honest, if descried rules would be applied to English Wikipedia, at least 1/3 of articles would be deleted because there are a lot of original research. An article about some television series episode has much more original research then encyclopedic content. Etc. etc. But, it is a much better starting position then arbitrary decisions of members of Wikipedian community.
And at the end: According to my experience, the most of objections to Wikipedia are related to lack of knowledge how to write articles. Please, RTFM first. And if you read it and you still think that you are right, please write your objection to the list. There are a lot of people who would support you if you are right.
It's a sad thing, indeed! Why bother anyway? Should it be about a *real*, paper enceclopedia, then you have to select what goes in it and what trivial thing does not, but in this Web 2.0 every little bit of information should be at our disposal. I use wikipedia for everything, looking up information on webcomics, podcasts, tv series, software, ...
And assuming these things are non-notable, what is being taken up? A couple thousand bytes of disk space?
Look at uber douchebag Bob Owens, the blogger behind several internet hoaxes promoted by Michelle Malkin. Because Bob is a non-notable blogger, his role in these hoaxes cannot be documented.
Bob Owens, internet douchebag thinks the Wikipedia rules are the bestest ever.
The willigness of some prolific individuals do undo countless hours of other's work has left a sour taste in my mouth of late. For example, deleting images within a week unless they satisfy a user called Betacommand's strict criteria for a valid fair use rationale, images that required me to spend time capturing from a DVD editing, and uploading with a dial-up modem. What I'd like to create (if I had the relevant skills) is a non-centralised wiki encyclopedia that pays no attention to copyright law, or at least pays lip service to it. Basically keeping the original content aspect of Wikipedia (no cutting and pasting) but not becoming paranoid about a photo uploaded from an obscure website.
Wikipedia is not the sum of all recorded knowledge and it should definitely not be.
It's an encyclopedia () -- meaning ``general education,,. The greek etymology has been incorrectly translated even here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia as ``general knowledge,,.
It is not general knowledge, otherwise it would be called encyclognosis (""); for example, a POV is usually a very interesting piece of general knowledge but it should not be a part of an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia as it is, is a mess because it fails to enforce its role as the largest online encyclopedia and instead allows anyone to write non encyclopedic items in it. It should focus more on deleting such items (TV series, webcomics) than expanding its volume.
from wikipedia and the internet in general
So the subjectiveness of importance outweighs having things for the few who might need it? Whats good for the goose is good for the gander? I noticed I can't find anything on XKCD....that's kinda messed up. This reminds me a lot of the article in Science Daily that was covered on slashdot previously referencing how things not enough people find important, we are now struggling to document before it is gone/etc. It is for this reason that this whole notability thing needs to be thrown out the window, and appropriateness as well. Of course try to keep information as accurate as possible, but if something was listed only when it is currently notable, then we wouldn't have history on wikipedia. Obviously wiki is a bit more than that.
Stopping donations,would show them how "notable" their policies are.
I wish wikipedia would split off into many websites,each focused on one large category(e.g. Astronomy wiki) and central search engine to get the information from this wiki network.
this is why the subline is "News for NERDS, Stuff that MATTERS"! :)
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I would never provide financial support to Wikipedia. I have many interests and have added useful, relevant links to many Wikipedia pages. Now they are regarded as spam and immediately deleted. Such an approach is just censorship IMHO and is plain stupid. Each link should be, if possible, assessed for quality by a HUMAN and not an automated robot.
My web domain.
whats the point of censoring the internet... they create this great idea where people can contribute to the greater knowledge... then some power freaks get in and try to control the "qualtiy" of the information... thats bs.. if they dont like the fact that people have bias, or a differnt maybe non mainsteam view then they should bugger off and leave this place called earth... ok ive had enough of a rant, but seriosuly there are too many uber geeks out there on wikipedia trying to be cyclopedia nazis.
That's the same arrogant attitude that most of those Wiki admins have now. Notability is not for you to decide upon.
I watched 28 Days Later a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction and now it's marked for deletion.
OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus, but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down, so dark matter can bite it.
My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect and the long tail.
At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money afterward, they can bite me. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And yet they have an article about Patrick Swayze's younger brother!?
Jayjg was even banned from the Italian Wikipedia for abusively deleting edits. The problem on English Wikipedia is that it is the co- founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, himself who personally approved the controversial appointment of Jayjg to the powerful Oversight Committee for English Wikipedia despite numerous objections from other editors about Jayjg's abusive edit-warring. This is hardly surprising given that much of Wikimedia Foundation's funding comes as anonymous donations often from dubious political foundations.
Some very revealing studies of Wikipedia from the outside:
wikipediareview.com
wikitruth.info
antisocialmedia.net
I tried multiple times to keep pages alive that ran counter to specific Global Warming pages, complete with references and the like, only to see them gone. I had been before under the impression that anything deleted would at least go through some process. (fwiw - I was showing glaciers that are increasing, with links to who said so, to counter the sensationalist shrinking one). I even tried to integrate some of the facts in the previously mentioned article and it was poofed. Its not even on the discussion page.
I don't even bother with the site anymore, and I am posting Anon as my id here is the same there
The biggest asset of Wikipedia is not its computing resources like memory or bandwidth, but its contributors.
Deleting articles is likely to drive away contributors forever, who could otherwise edit "more notable" articles later.
The practice of deletion seems to stem from the false notion that Wikipedia could ever grow "full" or too big.
What bandwidth/memory usage do the "non-notable" articles amount to in the end? Not to very significant numbers, I would say.
...is why anyone is still bothering to edit Wikipedia? The claim of being a site that anyone can edit is a flat lie; the site got taken over by pedantic assholes over a year ago. I occasionally still look things up on it, but I made my last edit in May.
Wikipedia is a haven for beaurecratic idiot savants, and atheist fundamentalists of a kind who would make Richard Dawkins look objective. These are people who are utterly devoid of any other reason to exist whatsoever, and therefore derive whatever tenuous sense of self-worth they have from editing the wiki themselves, and ensuring the number of other people capable of successfully editing is kept to the smallest number possible, in order to maintain their own "prestige," and the wiki's "credibility," the latter being a source of continual, gnawing insecurity to said individuals. In other words, one great big closed, elitist, back-slapping circle jerk; exactly the thing that they spuriously claim to have avoided.
Seriously...if you want to host wiki-based content, do yourself a huge favour and host a copy of MediaWiki privately somewhere. You might think that idea sucks in terms of not getting any exposure...but your material isn't going to get any exposure either when it gets deleted from Wikipedia, with the claim that said material doesn't conform to their inane policy, when the reality in most cases is simply that they disagree with what you're writing.
Sorry, Jimbo...You had a great idea...but unfortunately, as most ideas do, yours had a fatal, head on collision with human nature.
I. Wikipedia could be the end-all be-all of human information. The global archive of all of man's art and knowledge. Instead, it is very discriminatory often deleting articles because someone finds them of no significance. (Mind you most of our famous artists and authors were considered of no significance until after their deaths.)
II. Other people's work and effort is repeatedly destroyed. We're not talking about controversy of hot political issues. We're talking about simple non-controversial articles. Someone will spend hours editing an article only to come back and find that it's deleted some weeks later. (This is why I do not do much with Wikipedia other than use it for more common topics. Why would I want to contribute to something if all my effort is going to be repeatedly deleted. My time is too !@#$% precious for such crud. All because of some petty idiot.)
III. Because of the above reasons, many of us do not contribute much to Wikipedia. So when an issue comes up and we voice our opinions we are quickly dismissed for not being a contributor and our votes are discounted. (Even if we write a large explanation of our feelings to include with our vote.) It begins to feel like some "cartel" or "clique" and if you aren't a member then you can't play.
It's a shame...and this is truly a bigger concern than the political articles being hacked IMHO. As this is a failing in the present philosophy of Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia fund drive is to buy servers and so on. So, yes, all the articles do cost money, and Wikipedia has to constantly expand. Of course, some of this is due to bandwidth demand also.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
To misquote Isaac Asimov's Salvor Hardin in Foundation, "XML is the last refuge of the incompetent."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
-nt-
Take Ian Cromb, a Cricketer from New Zealand in 1931-1932.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Cromb
I think he had 961 balls bowled, not 960. And now it is so.
Who spends their time putting this crap into wikipedia? And then who spends their time correcting my asshat edits?
That was proposed a long time ago by someone who ran a site called "Wikinerds". Not sure what happened to that.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think AFD is usually pretty good, but I agree with Howard that the webcomics underscore a problem that needs to be addressed. However, UCFD is currently experiencing an excessive purge, IMO. Have you been following this?
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Many efforts to expose censorship on Groklaw (of posts that disagree with "PJ") are airbrushed out of Wikipedia as soon as they enter.
Don't believe a word of what you read in wikipedia, it's incredibly corrupt.
Smart people create articles while stupid people just delete the work of others. Therefore smart people leave wikipedia. The stupid people can dominate and they delete even more useful work.
The solution would be to keep all articles and assign a notability value to them. That way everybody can see how other people see the notability of an article.
In the moment wikipedia moves in a different direction. They are trying to delete more and want to restrict editing.
Until they get the message: Please don't give them a single Cent
20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.
If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Wikipedia Admins I'd wager seldom create much content (articles, sure...the sum of their creation is likely found in summarizing the world in wikipedia articles).
They like the control and power. They are just like the kids who run around and kick down the sand castles of other kids. Destroying hours of work. Why? Because they can...and because they can't build sand castles.
I really couldn't agree more. The notability rule is stupid, pointless and overzealously applied. It needs massive toning down.
For example, in a world that's going more and more online, the requirement for a website, online game, etc. to be "notable" is that it must be mentioned in at least one offline source (magazine, newspaper, etc).
Now, Wikipedia might not have noticed, but magazines and newspapers are going online. There are already online editions of many noteable, respected magazines that never make (in whole) it to print, where the online edition contains more content.
Plus, of course, the simple fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to delete content from Wikipedia. What, really, is the point? All the arguments I've heard so far about search relevance, etc. are easily addressed (mark a page as "minor interest" and make the search reduce the relevance of such pages so they show late in the search, for example).
I, personally, think it's fear of some wiki admins who can't cope with the sheer scope that "their" project has reached, most importantly with the fact that it isn't "their" project anymore, it's ours (as in "all of us").
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There was a wikipedia article (which I did not create or edit) for a Flash game of mine that got deleted based on notability. While I realize that it was just an online game, it was a rather popular one, spread to dozens of sites and got 10s of millions of hits before the major explosion of Flash games in the past few years. It was also open source, and people were actually their own variants, so it was active in that sense. Maybe it wasn't important to whatever editor was trying to get a little "i deleted 1000 artickles!" sticker on his userpage, but it was important to somebody, and it wasn't hurting anyone just being there. It wasn't like the title was gonna get it confused with anything else. So I was a little annoyed that perfectly good information got removed on grounds of notability by some snot who didn't really know one way or the other.
How about a site for all the deleted articles?
We ( Citizendium, Slashdotted yesterday) have no "notability" policy. Like much that is conceptually confused on Wikipedia, that policy was invented after I left.
Of relevance: we do have a maintainability policy. I'm not sure what our stance toward webcomics might be, but I suspect it would turn out to be more permissive than Wikipedia's. Just note that we do have a strict rule against self-promotion. This means that a webcomic would have to be at least important enough for someone else to want to start an article about it. Fair enough, no?
In other news, the Citizendium has just started its own funding drive. If you're boycotting Wikipedia over deletionism, but you want to support free knowledge, why not give to an outfit that really needs your money? :-)
Articles without good references should be updated with references. It doesn't necessarily make them candidates for removal. After all, if the topic can be written about and it's notable, then that is exactly what should be done: fix it :-)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
One of the biggest problems that I see is that deletionism on Wikipedia is spreading like a plague. New contributors often get burned by a "notability" deletion - whether justifiable or not - and then they themselves turn into deletionists. It's even happening in the comments above - people are annoyed that web comics are being deleted, so they take it out on other subjects they deem less notable than their favorite subject - porn stars and video game characters in this case. Such users then think it is acceptable to vote delete on 20 or 30 afd debates in a row by just parroting whatever the guy above them said, and the cycle of death continues.
If anyone has any specific articles they want an admin to take a second look at and help get through the deletion review process, reply here and I'll take a look.
Can someone explain to me why http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_expletives was removed with barely a murmur? That was an interesting, relevant, entertaining, popular, and well-cited list.
Wikipedia sucks. They can be so damn zealous with that kind of pruning.
Is there any way to dig up the last version of a deleted article?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The real solution is for the "inclusionists" to fork Wikipedia into "WikiKnowledge". I've followed the issue for a while as an observer, and that's pretty much the answer I've come to. There are people who want an encyclopedia, and there are people who want the sum of human knowledge. The groups seem more or less equal in number, so why not accommodate them?
I doubt I'll ever contribute to Wikipedia. I read the discussion pages, see the way people just go crazy at each other over edits, and decide that I don't really need the hassle. There's no academic discussion going on most of the time - just whines and rants about procedure that often devolve into nasty personal battles. As far as I'm concerned, it's no longer a place where everyone can contribute freely.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Without trivial entries in wikipedia how are you going to get this chain of links?
http://xkcd.com/214/
Somewhere along the chain somebody is going to think something is trivial, making the interesting traversal impossible.
All over Wikipedia, articles are being deleted just because, using incredibly strict guidelines, a few people find them not to be "notable." The level of bureaucracy in Wikipedia these days is absolutely absurd. Everything is done by policy, policy that in most cases is not thought out.
I created an article for Antec, and some editor (not even an admin) put it up for speedy deletion because he thought it wasn't notable (he just hadn't heard of Antec). But at this point, you have to go through the whole deletion process, even if your article is obviously not worthy of deletion. Basically, I was stuck dealing with useless bureaucracy rather than actually contributing to Wikipedia because one editor is a fool.
Possibly the worst problem are the deletionists, editors that come in and just want to delete an article if THEY don't think it's notable. The worst part about this is that they don't have to actually think that it isn't notable, just that it doesn't stress it's notability. Therefore, they can be wholly aware that an article is something that is relevant to Wikipedia, but is not yet up to standards, rather than trying to improve it they will just nominate it for deletion.
I encourage everyone to follow the Articles for Deletion section and fight against the rash of unnecessary deletions and ill-informed editors.
Wikipedia seems to be having some issues with admins deleting articles in connection to their notability guidelines lately. PortableApps.com, the website that makes available portable software that runs from removable media (like a portable version of Firefox) was recently deleted under the notability guidelines with very little notice (aka speedy deletion). This despite the fact that it's the most popular portable platform (more popular than the commercial ones), in the top 10 on SourceForge, in the top 5,000 websites in the world and has been extensively covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, PC Magazine, PC World, Wired, etc.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
It seems there are two diametrically opposed forces at work here: One that feels Wikipedia should be the repository of ALL human knowledge, and the other wanting to make the best ENCYCLOPEDIA.
An encyclopedia needs to be accurate and concise. I can understand wanting to limit it to generally useful and notable information.
However, I would prefer the repository idea. There is a vast amount of information that is community and culturally specific. It may be utterly inane to the majority, but to that niche of humanity it could be interesting and useful. Wikipedia has no physical constraints on size, so it makes no sense to limit the entries for mere notability sake. Accuracy and redundancy are good limiters, but the only affect notability should have is in search result ranking.
Isn't that an understatement? I've personally seen entries for community websites pulled because the naz..... I mean moderators at wikipedia felt it was a conflict of interest that a community member wrote the entry. Not the site owner mind you but a member of th site's forums.
The naz.... I mean moderators also pulled entries for a site because the site was "similar to another site already listed". Didn't matter that they two sites had different operating concepts/goals. Just proves the bias that those in power at wikipedia have.
Printed encyclopedia publishers attacked wikipedia hoping to discredit it. I don't think they have to worry anymore. The community over there is discrediting themselves. If they don't get their act together then the whole project could implode.
Instructables.com is a site I'm sure many of you have heard of, been to, maybe even done a project from. Anyone who visits the site even remotely frequently sees idiotic howtos on stuff like "how to make toast"
It's crap like that that doesn't belong on instructables.com, and crap like this (webcomics) that doesn't belong on wikipedia. There is already a big black spot of non-knowledge detailing every episode of every obscure 80s tv show that ran for half a season, do we really need to add to it with a page for every teen who puts out a weekly webcomic? I of course make a few exceptions for the top of the top, stuff like penny arcade, but White Ninja doesn't need a page. Anyone doing research on white ninja is a moron. (a moron with a good sense of humor and fine taste in webcomics)
Wait- if an entity is not mentioned in at least two sources, can someone explain how an article about that entity can possibly cite sources for its claims?
Consider that if there's only one source for the article, then the Wikipedia article does not add new information (as per "No original research"). If the Wikipedia article doesn't add new information, then Google can be used to find the original source and the reader loses nothing if the Wikipedia article is deleted.
The majority of Wikipedia is made up of non-notable articles (do we really need a 2 page article detailing Captain Kirk's family life and career?) and removing them would simply kill Wikipedia.
So lots of people are commenting "wikipedia shouldn't be a dumping ground for advertising!". True, that. But consider this: would you rather have info left out of something that is, by definition, supposed to be encyclopedic? Then other people complain that you get crufty pages and no one will trust wikipedia for veracity. That's already happened! Deleting articles won't help this phenomenon; it will force people to start from scratch, putting even less effort into writing an article because they know it will probably be deleted again. As for veracity, everyone knows that wikipedia is a starting point and that you should do your own research to confirm facts within subjects that really interest you.
Then there are groups that say wikipedia needs to be "trimmed" and "sleek". Wikipedia isn't some piece of desktop software that runs in a vacuum! It's an encyclopedia! It's supposed to be encyclopedic! You know, comprehensive, over-arching, all-encompassing, not leaving things out due to bias. And yes, deleting things because they aren't "notable" is bias; if I went around deleting things on wikipedia that weren't noteworthy to me, there would be no articles on professional wrestling and football and half a dozen other subjects I know nothing of, or care to know of.
These destructive weenies who can't deal with the information overload should go find some other project to ruin. I've always considered wikipedia a first stop for starting research into topics that interest me; when I've found a page or two that was missing something I knew to be true, I've added it. Recently, I've noticed that edits adding factual information have been reverted, with not even an explanation. I have since stopped contributing to wikipedia, and I won't be donating any money to them until they get rid of the notability nazis.
Nathan's blog
Seriously. Who gives a damn? Not only webcomics are very rarely fun (though this is subjective and debatable), but they spam the web and everyone writes one. If you're making articles for webcomics, are you then going to make articles for every web log (what snobs call "blog") and personal web site there is as well?
If so, I'll create a webpage for my cat, say it's relevant artistic expression, and write an article wasting Wikipedia's space and time.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
I'm sorry, you're little comic book isn't important. You're cat's nickname isn't important. The fact that the 23rd letter of both Star Trek II and Star Trek III's script is P isn't important.
Everyone thinks "my stuff is important" but I'm sorry, it's not. Wikipedia has slowly became overrun with crap and the editors are overrun having to take a look at these articles. Speedy delete doesn't hurt Wikipedia if it's used correctly, otherwise you'd have more articles added to Wikipedia then ever could be deleted. Look at a real encyclopedia, you have a very specific and direct area to cover. Important stuff, with concise articles targeting the major points. Compare that to Wikipedia, which can have more space, so they can have better and larger articles on more topics. That doesn't mean every thing in the world needs a wiki article. You don't see me writing an article on my monitor, or my paper hat that I create.
The problem sounds like this guy isn't "notable". I've never heard of him, I'm sure most people here haven't heard of him either. So exactly why are we trying to protect unneeded Wikipedia article. Wikipedia has always had the ideals that articles should be useful to Wikipedia and it's readers. I find random comic's article to not satisfy the noteworthy. You had a local paper write an article about you? Wow, that's fantastic. However I'd like to think Wikipedia avoids having articles about every local event in every town across the world.
Gain some notability, gain some publicity, and maybe then you'll be worthy of Wikipedia. But sorry, just because you self publish a book in your basement, doesn't mean you're notable for that.
>Maybe you could search for the saying in question, perhaps in combination of McGovern ? Especially since someone else might be interested in the crossword champion rather than the dead senator?
(emphasis mine)
Obviously his Wikipedia Entry needs updating.
Citation needed.
I'll call the town hall and ask them to put the flag at half-mast.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Just out interest, does anybody have any rough figures on how long it would take to download and unarchive one of the Wikipedia content database dumps? And whether these dumps include deleted content viewable by administrators?
There's other posts on this, but rather than just echo a 'me too' I'm going to try and make this clear. When I go to Wikipedia, I'm looking to find information on something I don't know that interests me. Some days, that's an obscure 1980's toy line, other days, that's the Crimean War or trying to figure out what exactly 'daub and wattle' construction is. Wikipedia's long been hailed for the fact that it has a huge number of interrelated articles (I've seen forum games where the whole point was how to get from, say, Darth Vader to the Florida Everblades in 7 steps or less) which provide a massive amount of information you can't find anywhere else without a lot of research across multiple forms of media or hoping that someone's got a website on the subject that will pop up within the first 12 pages of a Google search.
Reducing Wikipedia's breadth and depth by limiting it to 'notable' information is the inversion of that utility. If the only things that are listed are things people will have heard about in 50 years, there's an exceedingly good chance people will either already know these things or be able to access the information in a matter of moments, to say nothing of the inherent fallacy of deciding definitively what will or won't be noteworthy two score and ten years from now.
Wikipedia's usefulness to me is dependent on this same breadth and depth of information, compiled by many people who all know what they're talking about- or at least know where to find someone who does. As Wikipedia's depth and breadth lessen to 'notable' information, which by its nature must already be easily found and known, the likelihood that I'll bother to use it decreases. That phenomenon on a much larger scale seems to me like the only 'notable' information that Wikipedia should be taking into consideration when something's marked for deletion.
First off, yes, I am a Wikipedia administrator. I'm even in the top 10% of admins by number of deletions having only been given "the mop" in May. But this doesn't mean that I am a deletionist, evil, abusive, or wearing pink bunny slippers. It means I'm doing a job that does sometimes need doing.
I must have seen this (the inclusionism vs. deletionism) debate hundreds of times, and each time, it is important that people learn why the dichotomy between deletionists and inclusionsists exists.
Although Wikipedia aims to distribute as much knowledge as possible, the mantra of the inclusionists, this philosophy alone lets anyone post anything they want to write about. While this could be a good thing in an ideal world, the reality is that the history of my last pet cat is part of the body of human knowledge. I doubt, however, that this is appropriate for Wikipedia. This is for a very simple reason: no one but me can verify that what's in it is true, and few people could edit it aside from improving prose. This means that it is unlikely that the article would experience the organic growth of articles that is characteristic of Wikipedia, and would remain based solely on my perhaps erroneous say-so.
Wikipedia therefore relies on a good rule of thumb: notability. This says that something probably shouldn't be there if we can't find someone to point to to prove that we're not pulling information out of our... hat. This is a good idea - anyone may be able to write anything, but the ability to point somewhere else saying "they said so too!" is a great reassurance that, yes, this isn't made-up nonsense.
This is a problem in particular when a field made up of (probably) valid subjects is not well-documented or publicized -like webcomics, for example. A webcomic may be important, indeed it may have a thousand devoted fans, but if you can never point at someone to say that something's true, you might as well be reading that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 43.
The timing is too funny. Check out these videos that were posted to YouTube recently: Wiki Video Series Make sure you watch #4 where wikipedia bans itself I've always questioned whether or not wikipedia is living up to its original intentions. Seems like a small group runs the majority of the site.
Wikia, Jimbo's for-profit wiki company, is the "Trivipedia" system. They host the Star Wars wiki, the World of Warcraft wiki, the Everquest wiki, the Star Trek wiki (plus a second wiki for fan fiction) the Marvel Comics database, and even a Muppet wiki. Ten of the top twelve wikis on Wikia are fancruft. That's their market niche.
Why not just put your writing on a web site of your own? Google & friends will still see it. I never rely solely on wikipedia to find information on anything.
Reason for deletion: "Non-notable, in-universe only subject. Unlikely reliable sources can be found to indicate notability. Fails [[WP:FICT]]."
That's correct. [[WP:FICT]], the Wikipedia Policy on Fiction, is what keeps Wikipedia from drowning in fancruft. A published book or movie gets an article. Minor plot elements and minor characters do not get their own articles, unless they themselves are notable enough to have writeups in significant published sources. Yoda and Gandalf have articles of their own. Below that level of notability, auxiliary articles for components of fictional works should be avoided. Usually, a line or two in the main article is sufficient.
Remember, others have to check and maintain this stuff. Every new article adds to the load. Cleanup, linking, categorization, translation, and other tasks have large backlogs due to all the incoming junk.
If you want to write fancruft, go over to Wikia. That's their business.
Who kept deleting the Everywhere Girl!?!?!?!?!
Indeed. If they really want to prune the "not notable" stuff on the basis that it is noise in the search terms, just put a "not notable" tag, and exclude it from regular searching unless a "search obscure topics" box is checked Space just isn't an issue for the text (maybe images...), since the deleted articles are still in the database.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I dropped out of Wikipedia almost completely for a couple of years, thanks to exactly this issue.
After a particularly busy stretch of writing and editing, I took a little break from Wikipedia, to rest and recharge my all-too-easily drained batteries; and while I was away, the Great Webcomics Purge began. I was, frankly, nauseous when I saw what had happened upon my return.
These days, I pretty much limit my Wikipedia work to articles on women's soccer, because I know that there are enough Soccer Partisans on WP to protect any soccer article from ever being run through the shredder. They may not follow women's soccer themselves, but they would swarm all over any attempt to AfD an article on, say, Bente Nordby.
Yep, you're seeing the hand of Political Correctness Censorship. The Other Side(TM) is bigger than you, so you lose. Messianic Judaism faces many of the same issues, enough so that we started cataloging instances of these editorial disagreements.
Constitutionally Correct
The admins (some of whom will carry out a deletion even when the discussion was really a no-consensus), and more importantly, the deletionists, don't listen to anyone, and that's largely the problem. If these guys haven't heard of it, it doesn't exist. I've stumbled upon many AFDs that were slated for deletion until someone like me stepped in and exposed that the problem wasn't a lack of notability, but a lack of familiarity of the relevant location or culture by the people who'd voted. AFD needs more eyes to ensure that cultural or regional ignorance (a lot of times it's Americentrism, but not always) doesn't lead to bad deletions, but the problem is that AFDs are at their highest rate ever. It's impossible to monitor them all these days.
It's also worth noting that the criteria for "speedy" i.e. no-discussion deletions have become broader in the last couple of years.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Why on earth is it that the only way to remove content from Wikipedia's index is to delete the article outright? You'd think in an age of Subversion systems, and such, that there would be a way to hide the content from the general indexing system, so that its there to recover later or compare to if need be, but not clogging up the searching used in Wikipedia. Why on earth we would be deleting things (meaning they are likely gone gone gone) as opposed to hiding them or re-purposing them to some lesser importance. If you ask me this shows a logical flaw in the wikipedia system. I've long held that the wikipedia idea is great, but it would be so much more useful if you had moderators assigned to a particular area of knowledge, and they controlled what happened in their subset of knowledge, rather than the more global scope wikis have.
Well if I was to write small snippets of information on the very few topics I know a lot about and put them on my own website unless thousands of other sites linked to me Google wouldnt rank the content highly at all.
I felt that the collective knowledge of adding to existing articles and in a few cases, adding completely new ones on subjects I had a extensive knowledge on was the best option.
As predicted here, http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/wikipedia_vs_software
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hear hear.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
A little over a month ago, the wiki page for Marvin Perry was nominated for deletion, based on multiple claims of "not notable." This is despite the fact that Perry has held at least 11 major titles in kickboxing, spread out amongst several large sanctioning bodies, some of them international. He is, simply, a true paragon in the field.
It ended up being even more absurd than that; in the course of the discussion, even after a slew of citations were noted, it was charged that kickboxing itself was not mainstream enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, that several international publications were either biased or fictional, and that the short length of the article made it deletion worthy in and of itself.
Something is obviously going wrong over at Wikipedia, and it seems like a coterie of users and admins are attempting to delete large swaths of material not within their immediate scope of knowledge, and they are using the notability standards to do it. A revision of that policy will probably serve the project well.
The best mixed martial arts training in Boston - www.redlinefightsports.com
Of being a shameless apologist for Wikipedia?
How much are they paying you to astroturf Slashdot?
And why do the rest of you put up with it?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Once upon a time, I was a big part of the Webcomics Wikiproject on Wikipedia.
Like other Wikiprojects, we worked together to establish a consistent framework of notability requirements for webcomics; we culled out freshly-minted vanity cruft; we welcomed and nurtured new articles; we maintained lists of deserving webcomics which did not yet have articles; the works. Most importantly, we had a process, carefully arrived at through discussion and consensus (involving some of the premier names in webcomics study and criticism, I might add), under which everyone could operate reasonably.
It worked.
I myself ran some entries through the AfD (VfD then, but still) process because they didn't fit (one that I recall was a webcomic with four pages, two of which were single-image "splash" pages); on those occasions, I took the trouble to carefully explain the community criteria involved, and encourage the overly enthusiastic contributors to keep working on their comic, and to stick around and contribute more to Wikipedia in the meantime.
For comics which did fit the inclusion criteria, I would go to the comic's forum, where inevitably someone would have just posted a "Hey, I just created an article about [xxxx] on Wikipedia!" message, and I would welcome them to Wikipedia, explain the process involved and why their webcomic was suitable for inclusion, explain how to get started editing, and how to avoid the standard eager-puppy newbie editing mistakes.
Like I said, we had a mutually-agreed upon framework in place; while not perfect, it succeeded in keeping WP free of vanity cruft, and, at the same time, kept contentious disagreements to a minimum.
And then I took a little vacation.
At the same time, a couple of the other major contributors took a break; as a result, there weren't enough people minding the store when two people, who had no real knowledge of webcomics, swept in and started tossing articles to the VfD buzz saw, right and left. Never mind the established process; never mind the carefully-negotiated group consensus -- they simply swept in, substituted their notions of notability for those of dozens of previous contributors to Wikipedia, and eviscerated the webcomics field.
After which, of course, most of the people who cared about webcomics simply gave up on Wikipedia. Some of their efforts moved over to the GFDL Comixpedia, but its user base, obviously, lacks the scale of Wikipedia's. Mostly, the folks who had devoted so many hours to webcomics articles simply found themselves deflated by the whole experience. In my case, it more or less chased me away from Wikipedia for a couple of years; and even now, I'm very careful about which articles I work on; I only have just so much time and attention I can spend, and I cannot afford to play guardian angel to every article I work on, to make sure that someone doesn't just delete it.
Since the dawn of the Great Webcomics Purge, Wikipedia's history with webcomics articles has been one long string of increasingly absurd "Oh my Gawd -- can you believe they {deleted, tried to delete} that?" moments. Time and again, articles have been proposed for deletion which would normally have served knowledgeable webcomics experts as reductio ad absurdam examples of articles which could never possibly be proposed for deletion.
Blah blah blah... fucking whiners. "I am relevant! I want to be in Wikipedia like everybody else!"
...Well, in some cases, it may be. But not necessarily... And it may not be clear what's worth documenting until a fair amount of time has passed. You know, get some perspective.
I mean, why is it so important to have a webcomic documented in Wikipedia anyway? What information is there about the comic that is so important, so worth communicating, that one doesn't get by... going to the webcomic site and reading the archive? Well, people get excited about these comics and want to talk about them... this is a perfect reason for someone to start a fansite...
The thing is, webcomics are a dime a dozen. Everybody has one. People wipe their ass and write captions on the toilet paper, and slap it online somewhere, it happens all the time. Is it really worth creating an encyclopedic record of all these flash-in-the-pan half-efforts?
So why delete them? Because what you choose to write about is just as important as the quality of the writing. Wikipedia is not "everything2".
Bow-ties are cool.
Misconception #1: It's not a "vote". It's a debate. There's no tally of votes and plurality has no meaning. The arguments presented are what is supposed to have meaning. If there are 10 "deletes" with no justification and 1 "keep" with a well-detailed and sound argument, the "keep" may be considered worth more than the "deletes".
Misconception #2: It's not a democracy and users are not equal in standing. Arguments from well-established and respected users are weighted much more heavily than users with 1 or 2 edits. This is to prevent the kind of astroturfing that was done in the linked discussion. It was incredibly obvious that the vast majority those "keeps" were from people who ONLY came to WP to "vote". They were not interested in or participants of the project and several created their accounts for the sole purpose of "voting" in this one debate. These people's "votes" were summarily discounted.
It also seemed obvious to me that these guys posted somewhere "Hey! This article is about to be deleted. Everyone come vote to keep it!" bringing a bunch of people to flood the debate with "keeps" who otherwise would not participate in the project at all. The administrator caught on and called them on it. So they got mad that their free advertising got deleted despite their astroturfing, called the administrator abusive, and made a call to
The
Start a wikicomic*.
That would be notable.
I will continue to explain, because some of you seem slow.
Since it would be notable it could be in wikipedia;which would reference back to the wikicomic.
Just because you are on the web, does NOT make you notable. Hey, I have a web site, Do I deserve to be in wikipedia to? no, no I do not.
*Yes, someone was smart enough to snatch up the wikicomic.com domain. I can think of a couple of other that aren't currently claimed, but won't post here to avoid anyone from snatching them up. I am sure a few of you can get together, furrow your brow in intense concentration and come up with something not claimed..of course you mothers will have to spell check it for you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was one of the people involved in creating the Notability policy. Articles on subjects that are not notable pose numerous problems for Wikipedia.
The wiki process works poorly regarding topics that are not of lasting interest to large numbers of people. Eventualism on Wikipedia, the idea that a stub or poorly written article will ultimately improve, relies upon there being interested individuals who will show up and edit the article based on their interests and knowledge. Subjects that aren't really notable don't draw many editors, and the editors they do draw tend to be connected with the subject in some way: fans, critics, friends, students, and others who are likely to add material which is not neutral and can't be substantiated by solid sources. The test case that led to the creation of notability policy years ago was a self-described surrealist and artist, who had created numerous articles related to his activities that were impossible to refute as unfactual because the references upon which they were purportedly based were local newspapers and magazines that were not available on-line or through even the largest libraries. The problem gets worse with the passage of time, since blogs and minor print publications can disappear without a trace. Hence, the notability policy came to emphasize coverage in national or major regional publications.
Articles on subjects that aren't notable draw the lion's share of formal complaints to the Wikimedia Foundation. This is mainly a problem with biographies, but to a lesser extent occurs with schools, bands, minor political offices, corporations, publications, and so on. These complaints have to be handled responsibly and are a burdensome distraction from the business of the Foundation, requiring the involvement of the most capable volunteers as well as, in some cases, paid staff. Truly notable people and organizations are unlikely to complain about their articles due to the widespread press coverage they already receive.
One of the posters above notes that there are widespread articles on Wikipedia on minor porn stars which do not draw deletions as do minor webcomix. Wikipedia is nothing if not inconsistent in its application of guidelines and policies, so the presence of such counterexamples doesn't mean much except that there aren't as many Wikipedians willing to take the time to police that category of articles.
Indeed, deletion policy is and always has been applied inconsistently. Any deletion decision has a certain amount of randomness because of the nature of the process. That said, there is a strong bias towards keeping stuff. Precious few truly meritorious articles get deleted, and there is a great deal of junk that gets kept only because of luck and the predisposition to keep things.
Wikipedia is not in charge of Gundam.
When you check the wiki pages history there are just to many undo-edits by bot scripts. It looks more like a growing number of so-called admins is not older than 15 years and have their bots 24/7 undo other peoples pages. For example how much knowledge on a topic does a 15 year old have compared to a 30 or 60 year old person?
For academic pursuits, Wiki is far from a good source for a number of reasons, but as a casual read, it can be interesting to read the other articles that are linked to it and sometimes those trivia section herald some of the most interesting tidbits of information.
Then you get parts of the Wikipedia community saying, "We aim to be the sum of all knowledge." Where are other people are going, "No we're an online encyclopedia." Well you know what. Make up your freaking minds and post in big bold letters on the frontpage: "We are A not b." (Forgive my dualistic approach, but right now it's trying to be both and nobody's on the same page.)
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The community of which you speak is in fact a small group of editors of Wikipedia who fall into the "deletionist" and "inclusionist" camps. People from each camp will discuss things on the pages-for-deletion discussion pages, and then an uber-editor will make a decision to remove or keep the page. The discussions are deliberately said not to be a vote. I fail to see where the community comes into it, when there is no vote and the uber-editor's decision can be as arbitrary as he/she wishes. A deletionist uber-editor will delete anything he can, while an inclusionist uber-editor will keep anything he can. They cherry-pick the discussion to match their own preconceived notions.
_http://dark-wraith.com/index.php?blogid=1&catid=10
entitled "Clueville Calling on Wiki Line One":
There has always been a battle between the inclusionists and the deltionists. The largest problem is when a couple of self-annointed "cleanup police" come to an article and try to get it removed on the grounds that they have never heard of the topic, therefore it is non-notable. This is a nearly a constant point on nearly every AfD that I've participated with, where those making the accusation of non-notability really are completely ignorant about the scope of the general topic that the article explains.
This is not to suggest that articles of a very obscure nature (and genuinely non-notable) don't get written but far too often, from at least my perspective, articles are nominated invoking this rule for reasons that have more to do with internal Wikipedia politics than any real justification of non-notability.
However if the nature of the content is informative or asynchronous, then often lists or tables ARE the most digestible and effective way to structure it on the page.
Wikipedia articles should be structured according to nature of the content, varying within an article as needed. But for some reason a cabal has decided that sequential paragraphs are the only valid form of writing on a Web site (which I must point out contradicts many best practices). If content exists as a list or table, in many case editors and admins attempt to shove it into narrative paragraphs. Sometimes they make it work, but most of the time what results is a wordy gray mess instead of clear organization. And when it clearly doesn't work, they simply delete the information instead of leaving it in list form.
I have no idea where this obsession with paragraphs comes from. Perhaps from comparison against print encyclopedias, which seems to be a larger obsession of the admins and leaders of Wikipedia. IMO that is stupid because Wikipedia is so obviously superior in concept and implementation. Trying to turn it into a "real" encyclopedia is counterproductive and ignorant of the core value of the product.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I did some recreating of articles, got warned, but not banned, and warnings were retracted and other users restored articles back to the original form. They may be subject to deletion - but they will go through a more fair process to do so.
:)
Please DO NOT do a donation boycott. Things are getting more fair and balanced as a result of Slashdot's attention and my actions on Wikipedia. They need money to maintain their organization and servers and to do badly needed upgrades (especially with them getting linked to by Slashdot!
Work within the system (even though it may have taken some direct action), don't starve it for funds - it isn't the enemy - it just isn't the best it can be.
The same could be said even of Slashdot.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
Hell, I'm a thirty-year-old American and I miss about 10% of the references in any particular Family Guy... I used to go to WP to find these references, but about a year ago I found that a lot of this trivia was disappearing before my eyes. Looking at the discussion page I saw comments a lot like this Slashdot discussion.
I tried to voice my opinion as an end-user in the appropriate places, but was dismissed and referred to something like a dozen policy pages. As a result, I use WP about 25% as much as I used to. It seems that a large subset of the administrators there care more about exercising power by "cleaning up the place" or "pruning the tree" than they do about serving the people who use the site. That's a shame, and it means that they will follow their precious policies until WP becomes irrelevant.
I use friend/foe to signal strong [dis]agreement instead of mod points. What else are f/f good for?
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
That's not inflammatory, it's simply the truth. You don't go advertising yourself as "the sum of all human knowledge" and then go deleting articles because some asshat thinks they're not worth documenting. Every single defense of "Notability" is bogus. Space? Delete one day's worth of editing history and free up half a gigabyte. Don't think it's worth documenting? Not to the person who spent the time on the article.
Plagarism is a real concern. Notability is just petty.
Oh boy, lets start selecting what is and what isnt trivial!
Kinda like how US history books leave out certain aspects of american history to either satisfy certain groups or censor certain points of view
Honestly, what does it really matter? Information is information, and I thought the goal behind Wikipedia was to centralize as much of it as possible.
No, the idea behind Wikipedia is to be a USER-EDITED ENCYCLOPEDIA.
By definition, an encyclopedia contains NOTABLE information. An encyclopedia is not, for example, a phone book, nor is it a magazine, nor collection of advertisements.
Yes, there may be plenty of nifty bands in the Philadelphia area that haven't been released on major labels or haven't toured much. And guess what? NONE of them belong on Wikipedia! That's what myspace is for.
This is just Wikipedia saying "Hey, we only want really notable things in here." and everyone thinking "I'm important, no really!" and not liking it when Wikipedia gives them a healthy dose of "You're one of 10,000 web comics. Anybody who cares reads your comic. You aren't worth an article."
paintball
There are two issues mainly being brought up regarding Wikipedia.
1) Reliability and verifiability of content.
2) Notability Deletions
This Slashdot post regarding Webcomics is NOT dealing with verifiability and reliability of facts. But rather addressing the second issue.
So to all those who keep talking about how we don't want a bunch of bad info. Please, stop replying until you understand the issue. I don't mean to be rude. But the vast majority of the sights being deleted contain valid information. The issue at hand is that certain admins have harsh judgments as to what constitutes notability and what does not.
I had a friend who's comic was deleted for notability issues. At the time, my friend's comic met ALL of the stated notability requirements. And has been running three times weekly since 2003. It was put up for deletion.
The main argument given was that the site's statistics weren't high enough on a particular tracking site (which I had never heard of, nor had most people I knew). So essentially notability was determined by stat ranking in an obscure non-notable stat site. Great!
Notability is a very opinionated quantification. What is notable? Is "Manic panic" hair dye notable? Yes or no? To most people it is not, but to certain sub-cultures - very much so. Likewise, a comic may fit a very particular sub-culture. It won't have mass readership outside of the sub-culture. Say the comic is on transgenderism; it might not have high readership but may be very noteworthy "especially" within it's genre. Dilbert is a pretty good example. Blue collar workers might not get it, office workers find it quite the read.
So to "Deletion Vote" we went. My friend's webcomic had a lot of support in voting. But most were dismissed because they weren't registered user comments. Even those of us who are registered users were dismissed. We apparently didn't have enough site edits. (Sorry, I have a life. And I can't justify wasting it on Wikipedia while it maintains frivolous notability requirements. Also, a great many articles on non-volatile topics are fairly at "done" point. So more often than not I see no need to edit.) However, those who just chimed in to the debate to vote "no" (assuredly at the request of the site admin) who provided generic reasons to delete and clearly had no relation or interest to the "web comic" discussion - their votes were counted. By the time the admin was done dismissing all the supportive votes and included all the delete votes. The totals had been so skewed it wasn't even funny.
The end result? It was deleted. Then they went on a spree and deleted another 50 or so entries. Guess what....
Most of us involved in this situation refuse to donate in support of Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia is an example of a "lot of potential" and "tons of failing".
Let the "users" decide what articles should be up. And as long as the content is valid...let it be. Admins should only be deleting invalid content.
Obviously they need a "Trivipedia" that can collect all the crap with two-way linkage to mainstream Wikipedia articles.
Everybody wins: the mainstream search index remains relatively clean, and tomorrows consumers of rich information have a place to find out every last little thing about truly obscure topics.
I mean, duh.
The big problem, though, is when the damage done by a deletion sweep is too great to be easily repaired. For instance, with the Great Podcast Purge, a lot of podcasts with legitmate notability were removed, such as Geek Fu Action Grip, Scott Seigler's EarthCore podeo-novel, and Gaming Uncensored (which, from what I understand, was one of the first video-game related podcasts). The latter deletion being of particular annoyance to me, as one of the hosts (Jamie Jordan) has a particular physical disability, which I forgot the name of - however, I'd forgotten the name of the disability, and that information is not on Jamie's web page, nor is it on the podcast page, and, well, I can't check the Wikipedia article because it got deleated. Even the web pages for This Week In Tech were facing deleation (sp).
In short, it's not a matter of just notablility deletions that are annoying me, as it is form of executing them in Great Purges, like what Howard Taylor is complaining about. Great Purges maximize the amount of damage over a short period, making it longer, more tedious, and more difficult to repair the damge caused, and to remake deleted pages. Furthermore, such deletions often occur under the radar, with little notice given unless you are browsing the specific pages facing deletion, making it very easy for a Great Purge to occur without any warning.
This is pretty straightforward to fix too. All that needs to be done to the wiki archetecture, is a list of catagories which had a high number of deletion requests made, placed on the front page. If, say, 15-30 requests for deletion are made for articles about, say, Arena Football teams, it would show up on wikipedia's front page, so readers have enough warning to say that they do find this notable, and state they want the article to be kept, rather then the request going unnoticed until it was too late.
And until this gets fixed, then I really don't feel comfortable giving my money to support a system that would permit users to wipe out a vast swath of entries on a topic which doesn't interest them, without a way to alert users of the pending deletions. Once that's fixed, I'll certainly give Wikipedia some of my money - but not before.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
> A wise man doesn't know more information than a foolish man, just what he does know is more relevant.
I sincerely doubt that. I know significantly more about everything than some people, and significantly less than others, with the only remainder being knowledge peculiar to my own life. Certainly not the 'general knowledge' an encyclopedia is supposed to contain.
Moreover, those who are wise are simply better at organizing information. Yes, here it can be that they forget trivial things, but more often it's that they're simply better at searching it out. After all, there's a reason no sane person uses Wikipedia's own search function but instead filters Wikipedia links out of Google (or follows the references on the page itself).
That said, if the information is enough to cause that much of a fuss, I should think it sufficiently notable. Even if only for the very practical purpose of helping everyone to get along. I think that the fuss proves its notability, don't you? And if it wasn't notable, it certainly is now.
After drawing international media attention (print, internet, and TV) for our upcoming Star Wars fan film, we decided to add a Wikipedia article. We're not Wiki experts, but we tried to do our best with our first attempt, making a short article on the film, the coverage it had received, notable points about it, and sent it in. It was tossed as not long or detailed enough... apparently a few paragraphs was too little. So, we tried again, writing a long and detailed article about how the movie came to be, what it was about, etc etc. Again, tossed. Non-notable. I tried explaining how we'd received broad media attention (including Slashdot), and if I recall right, was ignored because the movie hadn't been released yet, and as such was non notable.
We wouldn't have minded cleaning it up, changing it, adding more references, doing whatever was required... but instead we were hustled off. We have thousands of preorders, thousands of visitors to our site every month, and coverage all around the world, all before even being released, all for an unfunded fan film made mostly with blood and sweat...but, apparently, we're not noteworthy enough.
I've had other, similar Wiki experiences, but this was enough for me to call it a day. I still use WP frequently, mostly for obscure stuff, but it seems the editors have an iron fist over the place. As such, I'll avoid subjecting myself to that.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
How do I find articles which have been deleted in order to restore them? The times I would be motivated to undelete would be after I've done a search for something which no longer exists - but of course, I have no way of knowing that they no longer exist.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
You don't know what notable means?
It doesn't mean 'a lot of people have heard of us' which wouldn't be true in your case anyways.
I think you fall into the 'everyone we know knows about it, therefore it is notable,"
No, you are not noteworthy, no matter how much blood and sweat you put into something. Now, if you become a worldwide hit that appears on major global news shows, then it is an indicator that it is noteworthy.
Wikipedia is the enemy in the sense that as long as its around, no competitor stands a realistic chance of taking over. It's similar to how even if an OS better than Windows were to come along, it's still unlikely to gain a significant amount of market share, because its a product whose value is based entirely on the size of its userbase.
Wikipedia as is is pretty good, but just not there yet, and there are many problems with it, such as this deletion issue, which stand no realistic chance of being fixed as long as the people who are in charge remain in charge.
Given that there is no realistic chance of reform at the current Wikipedia, boycott and hoping it starves is about the best hope that reformers have.
After quite some time of making many minor contributions - manly fixing typos, fixing references, etc - I stopped contributing about a year ago because I kept seeing my fixes being removed and stub articles I filled in being reverted back to blank. It was never anything that could be controversial either - no politics or religion or such. Someone along the way made a really bad decision about not allowing content to be added. Just kind of threw a wet blanket on what made Wikipedia great.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I say we scrap the whole thing and put up a webpage that says
"Mostly harmless."
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I am all for the Boycott and they won't be getting my money.
You are part of the cancer killing the Internet.
If WP keeps deleting random articles people think are "non-notable", how many people will cease to support WP? An ever-increasing number.
If WP starts letting marginally notable articles stay, how many people will cease to support WP? Very few.
So why is this even a question?
Have a look at this one for example -
.. ready ? .. being deleted before. And to add to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logmein&action=edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LogMeIn&action=edit
First deleted as non-notable, that's for the company with 10mil+
installation base (as of 2006). Then it was deleted twice again
on the grounds
the circus, there's no traces of discussion for these two AfDs.
I did however participate in the last one, and the majority vote
was Keep. The admin however produced the superficial argument and
nuked it without much consideration.
To stick it further to a damn corporate overlords, the article
was also locked to prevent recreation.
---
The problem is a COMPLETE LACK OF ADMINISTRATOR's ACCOUNTABILITY.
Plenty of the admins are these little tsars with a strong need to
enforce policies left and right to assert themselves without any
regards to the actual context. And there's no way to stop them.
THAT is the issue with Wikipedia. Not the comics-shmomics stuff,
which is just a manifestation of the underlying problem.
Way to support your post. Seriously, if Slashdot had more posts like yours it'd be a much more interesting place to read. I'm with you entirely, also, there's nothing wrong with trivia sections and you'll never see me getting rid of one.
Comment of the year
You're arguing that articles that are rarely read shouldn't be deleted?
It's actually takes rather long to get rid of obviously crap articles.
Although you can vote in a deletion discussion, the administrator can theoretically ignore a 100:0 outcome for keep and delete an article. Years ago this was handled different. There was a seek for consensus and an article was only deleted when most persons agreed with the delete. But this was changed. Speedy delete and the notability make things worse.
If you do not want, that your work is thrown away by deletion fetishists, stop adding content to wikipedia.
Please do not give money to wikipedia unless they respect persons who add information instead of deleting it.
I think we need an alternate Wikipedia.
The politics and the administrators of the current Wikipedia are immune to advice.
An alternate Wikipedia could work as a filter to the current wikipedia.
When an article exists in the current Wikipedia the alternate Wikipedia would just take it's contents.
Changes in the alternate Wikipedia would also go straight to the current Wikipedia.
When an article is removed in the current Wikipedia it's last version remains in the alternate Wikipedia.
Such articles could get a notifier like: "Deleted in the old wikipedia"
Additionally there could be a system to maintain the notability of an Article as integer value.
Greetings Thomas Mertes
Seed7 Homepage: http://seed7.sourceforge.net/
Seed7 - The extensible programming language: User defined statements
and operators, abstract data types, templates without special
syntax, OO with interfaces and multiple dispatch.
I think it's time for you to get out your tin-foil hat...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Creating a wiki for deleted WP articles would be doable if you didn't need to be an admin to see a deleted article. That's the policy that turns deletionism from an annoyance into a scourge.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.
You seem to think that Wikipedia has clear-cut "notability" rules. It does not. What it has is a set of guidelines that people who participate in the notability discussions are supposed to consider before achieving a "consensus". Participants can ignore these guidelines if they choose — but when I was a participant, most people didn't even bother to read them.
Incidentally, "notability" has nothing to say about ego listings. That's covered by the rules that prohibit advertising and autobiographical articles. So much for your understanding of the "notability rules"!
Things may have been tightened up since I participated, back in 2005, but back then notability discussions were a joke. Whoever took an interest in the issues voted (in theory, we were having a discussion leading to a consensus, but it was really voting) and eventually an admin would decide that there were enough votes one way or another for a "consensus" to be called. The definition of "consensus" varied from admin to admin; sometimes a majority on one side or the other, sometimes it was a 2/3 vote. But even if they'd been consistent about it, it's stupid to call something a "consensus" when there's still a significant minority in opposition. And "consensus" of what? Just a few self-selected participants, often recruited by somebody who wants to force a decision one way or the other.
One way I liked to contribute to Wikipedia was by bringing up random articles. If the article was worthwhile but ragged, I'd copy edit it. If the article was trivial crap, I'd submit it for deletion.
One I randommed onto an article that was a biography of a Canadian guy. His sole claim to fame? He once ran for Provincial Leader of a major political party. He came in something like third or fourth. (A roughly equivalent U.S. scenario would be somebody running for governor of a state, and coming in third or fourth in the party primary.) He then went back to his regular job and never ran for anything again.
Not notable, right? Indeed, it turned out that he was only in Wikipedia because somebody had used a bot to insert the names of everybody who ever ran for anything in Canada. But a bunch of people who thought that Canada was underrepresented in W stacked the discussion, and got a "consensus".
If I thought Wikipedia was worth reforming, the first thing I'd do is eliminate the notability filter. After all, one of the big Wikipedia "big rules" is "Wikipedia is not paper". That is, there's room for everybody. I used to groan every time that rule was cited during a notability discussion because the rule has nothing to do with whether somebody/something is notable or not. On the other hand, "Wikipedia is not paper" totally contradict the whole idea of having a notability filter.
Its funny you mention the Star Wars Kid article , because certain Wikipedia administrators have been trying to supress the fuck out of his real name from that article for months. There's even a threaded debate about it on the articles discussion page.
Non-notability and trivia seem to me to be the whole point of a universally editable internet encyclopedia. If I wanted to research so-called notable subjects, I'd use a proper encyclopedia written and edited by paid professional experts; if I wanted to research anything to do with so-called non-notable subjects (like much of contemporary popular culture) then the only encyclopedia in the world likely to have an entry for a webcomic is, and should be, the wikipedia. The notability requirements defeat and frustrate the natural utility of the wikipedia as a reference.
Apparently when this article posted, http://www.schlockmercenary.com/ was slashdotted... or at least they think that's what the 8% jump in page views was.
Any website whose server handles enough daily traffic that a slashdotting is less than 10% of their daily page views passes any notability criteria I can think of.
Anonymous because I'm lazy
In other words, our knobs don't go all the way to eleven.
Nonsense! Slashdot is CowboyNeal!
So it is really the end of times. Well, it sure as hell's funny to watch.
Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. I don't think it's sufficient, though, and I'm not sure if there's a good way to know that an article is deleted or just absent.
This sig is not the Zahir. Lucky for you.