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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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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".
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.
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.
From the blog post you cite:
If you want to make comments, make them over at Wikinews. It's not that I don't want to have the last word here (oops... I just had the last word, and it feels GREAT), it's that I think your comments will be more effective closer to the broken systems. Also, I'm tired of fishing your colorful metaphors out of my spam trap. I just chlorinated this thing.
He was trying to raise awareness for the linked article, and fuel a debate there; he didn't want to split it by having it take place in multiple fora across the web. Also, he probably didn't want his blogging system slashdotted.
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.
I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant"
The problem, you see, is that Wikipedia has positioned itself as _not making judgements of importance of a particular subject_. Yet they use a word, "notability", that is a synonym of "importance".
Whether a wikipedia article is allowed to exist is supposed to be judged by a somewhat objective standard: whether or not other writers of reference works considered reliable have considered the subject important enough to write and publish about.
Unfortunately, the result of this rule is (1) subjective squabbling over which works are considered reliable and (2) a distinct bias against topics that are on the fringes of culture. Webcomics have suffered due to both of these: works that write about webcomics have largely been considered to be unreliable, and because they are often fringe subjects there aren't many works to choose from.
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!
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.
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.
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"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.
Wow, crapping all over a free project! What a responsible and mature individual you must be.
Arrogant prat.
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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.
And yet they have an article about Patrick Swayze's younger brother!?
Why was the parent comment modded as troll? Because it is:
"Wow. Cry baby much?" - A trollish start, obviously. Then the comment writer misses the point of the article by going on to list things *he* considers non-notable.
"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." - His use of this sentence is a logical contradiction; the sentence shows how subjective 'notable' is.
"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." - He is putting up a straw man here.
"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?" - Another straw man and wait, I thought he only said a URL wasn't notable? Have to be published in a "popular" paper? SUBJECTIVE.
"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?" - Two straw men; note from mom is an uninsightful analogy, and the article wasn't about web comics 'having different rules'.
That's why it's a troll. To respond to you rather than this troll - I see that you are defending Wikipedia in this thread, presumably because you've invested some time in it, but please keep in mind that the best way to help something is not necessarily to defend its current practices, if they are flawed.
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").
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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.
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?
Because Trivipedia serves a different purpose than Wikipedia.
If I want to know what character slept with the protagonist's sister in the third year of a webcomic, I'd check Trivipedia. If I want an overall plot synopsis and a quick rundown of main characters, with a real-world history of the comic and some info about the author (possibly including a link to a page specific to the author rather than the comic), that belongs on Wikipedia.
Wiki has a huge edge over dead-tree encyclopedias ONLY in the quality of its "non-notable" content. If I want to know about Joseph Stalin, I can pick up the Brittanica. If I want to know about Stephen Colbert, I check Wiki.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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