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?"

Comments

Admins to blame?

[ta bu shi da yu]

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.

Re:Admins to blame?

[rdwald]

I don't think the admins are being blamed per se, but rather the policies. As it is, one person can nominate a little-read article for speedy deletion, and it will be wiped before anyone in the relevant fan community has had a chance to comment on the deletion page. I think the problem is that the population of people who pay enough attention to Wikipedia to notice and respond to deletion requests is not identical to the population who read and benefit from Wikipedia, so people in the former population can delete articles useful to those in the latter population.

Re:Admins to blame?

[ta bu shi da yu]

In that case, the slashdot summary is misleading. It very clearly says "but are the admins listening?"

If articles such as webcomics have been deleted due to speedy deletion, then the admin doing the deletion is in violation of policy and should be called to account. However, is there any evidence of that happening? I'm genuinely interested.

Re:Admins to blame?

[jaaron]

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.

Why is trivia bad?

Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?

Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.

Re:Admins to blame?

[One Childish N00b]

Is trivia not information? Are trivia sections that detrimental to Wikipedia's credibility that they must be stamped out wherever they may be found? I really don't think they are, perhaps you could clarify the reasons why you do. (I'm not flaming, merely curious - I've never had a chance to ask a wikipedia admin that question).

As far as I see it, Wikipedia is less an encyclopaedia and more a burgeoning store of all world knowledge. Obviously there has to be a lower limit to the notability or notoriety of a subject before you want to waste the few kb's of storage space on it (a One Childish n00b entry, for example, would be pointless, but an article on the debate over whether trivia sections should or shouldn't be allowed would be worthy of a mention on Wikipedia's Wikipedia page - Ironically, probably in the trivia section), but as far as I see it, eliminating trivia sections is destroying large swathes of interesting facts because it doesn't fit an encyclopaedic style.

The problem that arises from that is you are removing knowledge that people might want to read. Wikipedia is not a valid academic reference and I doubt it ever will be due to the fluid nature of it's contents, so removing interesting trivia tidbits to make articles look more academic or 'encyclopaedia-like' strikes me as taking form over function.

Re:Admins to blame?

[pla]

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.

One flaw with that...

Wiki has evolved into a useful resource for looking up information - Not always the authoritative source, but if I don't recognize a concept, I'll usually check Wiki first.

Now, in the long run, every article should evolve into something well-written and fully referenced. In the short term, even a two-sentence summary of something only briefly popular does a world more good than nothing. Yeah, what amounts to a promotional blurb for a minor webcomic doesn't exactly qualify as high-quality reference material - But as opposed to a blank page?

In the loooooooong term, humanity itself fails the "notability" requirement. Unless Wiki evolves into a math and physics oriented reference, calling "WWII" notable and "Full Frontal Nerdity" not, amounts to nothing less than purely subjective discrimination.

Re:Admins to blame?

[rdwald]

I don't object to the length of those articles; I've always believed that any information someone is willing to write (which is true, not vanity, and not original research) should stay in the Wikipedia. OK, maybe some notability requirements, but the minutiae of certain sci-fi universes probably has as much appeal as many of the webcomics whose articles were deleted. I guess in some sense the hard-core fans are "shielded" by those with a lower level of interest; no one is going to delete the article on lightsaber combat, for example, so even if only a small fraction of users care about the details, they'll stay in. If that same number of users care about a webcomic, though, they have no such protection.

Re:Admins to blame?

[ta bu shi da yu]

True... it does seem like a massive whine. Still, the tone with which he write does not mean that the subject matter isn't relevant or interesting.

Re:Admins to blame?

[mean pun]

Sorry, but you're not doing a good job defending this policy. I'm sure this has been discussed to death on Wikipedia, but that isn't reflected in this defense.

Trivia is bad because in essence it's about unimportant information. Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, not a bunch of unimportant facts. If the information is important, then it's not trivia.

But aren't 99% of the entries in any encyclopedia unimportant to a particular reader of that encyclopedia? Conversely, if someone bothered to make a Wikipedia entry for it, there is at least one person in the world who considered this information important. In your defense you only give a circular definition of unimportant (= trivial = unimportant).

If the information is not important to the subject, then it shouldn't be included.

That sounds like shifting the goal posts to me. Yes, the entry of a particular topic should be on topic, but as long as an entry is on topic to a particular subject, even if the topic is the color of the bricks of the local school, why should it be deleted? Or do you mean that Wikipedia as a whole has a subject? If so, what is it?

If the topic is about something trivial, then it shouldn't be on Wikipedia - go put it somewhere else.

Again, why, and what exactly is `trivial'?

We routinely remove information. Our policies mandate it. For instance, you may not include original research.

(Ignoring the rather cryptic example.) Of course there are reasons to remove information, but why is `it is trivial' one of these reasons?

Re:Admins to blame?

[orangesquid]

As far as I can understand, articles without good references and citations are all candidates for deletion.
The web is a rapidly-growing environment. Show me how many well-done, intelligent, popular webcomics have professional (or at least webzines, although those are often not good enough) things written about them...

So are similar things like local music communities. There are plenty of bands in, say, New York City or Philadelphia that produce serious, sophisticated music, have experienced musicians, are not "some stupid kid's garage band," have a decent following, but have not put out albums on a major label nor toured heavily (two of the only criteria for bands that aren't very, very famous to not get speedily-deleted). Also, what about bands *not* in major cities? Where a band has its venues should not be of matter, although I'm sure most people would say to themselves, "Oh, a band from Philly *must* be more worthy of inclusion than a band from Nowhereville, no matter how artistic, serious, mature, or respected they are."

Re:Admins to blame?

[Eponymous Bastard]

If I put up an article on "Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online" which describes a site with a single stick figure webcomic that I updated six months ago, then the article should be considered garbage and rightfully go for speedy deletion. Nobody wants this kind of useless garbage polluting all the searches on wikipedia, plus it detracts from the more professional look of the site (compare to everything2)

The problem comes in when someone nominates for speedy deletion an article on a website which has clearly been regularly updated for years and has an active fanbase. Not only is this a request for cleanup but it is also a slap in the face as you're put in the same category as the Eponymous Bastard Webcomic Online. (unfortunately I don't have the list of deleted webcomic and the site is /.ed but there were some long live ones IIRC)

I'd suggest that any web site that has been online and regularly updated for a year cannot be speedily deleted.

Another suggestion is to, instead of deleting, move them to a webcomic wiki.

But in the end, wikipedia has articles on every single pokemon. I'd consider webcomics more interesting than that.

Re:Admins to blame?

[hucke]

One thing I would like to point out is that list of information is frowned upon by many, many Wikipedians. Trivia sections are generally disliked... Are they?

Trivia sections have the support of many, many Wikipedians, as is evidenced by the large number of them that exist and continue to exist.

Some months ago, it was decided by a tiny percentage of Wikipedia editors - those who take part in the policy discussions - that trivia sections were to be marked as discouraged. In thousands (tens of thousands?) of articles, someone inserted a little box in the trivia section saying that trivia sections were discouraged.

For most of the editors who actually work on the articles in question, this was the first time we were aware that there was a crusade to eliminate trivia.

And months later, those boxes are still there, and so are the trivia sections. It seems that the people who actually edit articles don't take kindly to random persons coming in and barking orders about how to edit an article. We scroll right past those annoying little boxes and continue to edit and add to the trivia sections.

So much for "consensus". Consensus on wikipedia is a sham - it means consensus among people who spend their time reading and editing WP:* pages, not among the community as a whole.

It's far easier to write a list of points than it is to carefully incorporate the information into prose. We don't want to encourage that sort of thing. The "In popular culture" and "trivia" sections are loose collections of facts about the subject, or references to it in other media. Converting a list into a paragraph would make it almost unreadable. If I want to find out what television shows were filmed in a particular location, for example, a list is by far the best way to present this information.

Re:Admins to blame?

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I TOTALLY agree with you. I've written a few articles on wikipedia that were pulled WITHIN WEEKS. When I question the admin, it's always "notability". WTF??? Oh, I see - an article on a local band that played every bar between Maryland and Massachusetts for the better part of 15 years and whose members went on to other cultural exploits, but NEVER PUT OUT A RECORD, is not notable, but the name and identity and detail of every pokemon character IS notable? What a load of shite. I guess data for contemporary anthropology doesn't qualify as "notable" for those asshats.

I've written many other articles for wikipedia, and none of them were pulled, so it's not like I don't kow how, or I don't know what I'm taking about. However, since there has been this overzealous culling of articles, my production of articles for wikipedia has decreased dramatically, and I no longer consider it my "go to" for general info. Either wikipedia DOES IT ALL, or it has to fess up to the facts: it's not an ecyclopaedia.

RS

Re:Admins to blame?

[vonFinkelstien]

99% of the time I use Wikipedia is to look up trivia. i don't think I'm alone.

Re:Admins to blame?

[Firehed]

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. So long as it's accurate, why does it matter if it's deemed "important"? Importance is hugely subjective - if I were in charge of deciding what articles are important enough to keep in WP, you'd see a whole lot less about Hollywood entertainment, for example. Yet Hollywood information stays - I can go check out Hally Barre's bio if I'm so inclined. Why shouldn't I be able to dig up information on some obscure webcomic, too?

As long as information is accurate, it shouldn't need to be important. Stick it in a trivia page or separate it if you want, but don't make it disappear. We all see different things as important - and on a global scale, any piece of information will be important to someone.

Of course, if it turns out that this whole thing is about Wikipedia's hard drives getting a bit cramped and you need to trim things down because a nonprofit can't afford a new drive, contact me and I'll FedEx down a spare drive :)

Re:Admins to blame?

[Random832]

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. You're conveniently ignoring that the closing admin also gets to decide what the consensus actually is.

Re:Admins to blame?

[squiggleslash]

The irony here is that those who have webcomics wouldn't dream of complaining to Encarta or the EB, as everyone would just either laugh at them or ignore their whining

There's no irony in the above whatsoever. For Encarta or EB to have an article on "Bob the Angry Flower", Microsoft or Britannica has to pay professionals real money to research and write the article for the subject. And in the past, EB would have had the added problem of the size of the encyclopedia adding to its cost and manageability for end users. By comparison, in Wikipedia we're talking about articles that have already been written and contributed for free, that - if truly non-noteworthy - add fractions of a cent to the costs of running Wikipedia as an on-going operation. Bandwidth costs for an article nobody reads are non-existent, the only real cost is storage. How much does 10 kilobytes cost?

I'm not proposing (and didn't propose - I did the opposite) that there's no reason for AFDs at all, but I do believe that as deleting legitimate articles has a real cost and DOES undermine Wikipedia more than keeping a non-notable article, the discretion should be on the side of not deleting. Fast track processes for article deletion in particular need to be reviewed so only the narrowest of criteria can apply to them. That is not the case right now.

Personally I can't see how a periodically updated openly available webcomic is not a legitimate subject for an encyclopedia article in an environment such as Wikipedia's where the contribution cost is free and the maintenance cost is more or less proportional to the webcomic's notability. Unless the comic is being used as a wedge to pass by genuinely unencyclopedic content, there's no legitimate reason to delete such articles.

Re:Admins to blame?

[Tom]

Mod parent to +10

That's the whole point. If half of the effort that some people put into finding articles to mark for deletion, deliberating and discussing deletion, checking, verifying and then finally deleting the article - if half of the effort people put into destroying content were instead put into creating or improving content, Wikipedia would be so much better.

And the second problem is also very much true. I've seen articles marked for deletion where the decision was made (either way) based on 3-4 "votes". Hello? You are deciding to keep or delete an article for millions of visitors based on a random sample of 0.00001% of them? That is not democracy. Democracy is having everyone vote (or at least have the opportunity). Democracy is not running your country (or website) by the opinion of the first three people you meet on the train that morning.

Re:Admins to blame?

[xtracto]

"It is trivial" is one of the reasons because, as said above, "trivia" = "unimportant information". Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that contains relevant and important information.

I think that Wikipedia policy of removing "trivia" and the NPOV policy crash with one another. The problem you have with your deffinition of Trivia is that you define it as "unimportant information" and the term "unimportant" indicates a point of view. It may be unimportant for you, or for the bunch of guys who are editing the wikipedia but it is important for someone else doing, for example, some research about the mismatches of equipment (cars in this case) in movies, for which some of these information snippets would be relevant.

I haven't said what is trivial. I've merely said that trivia is not good for Wikipedia because providing unimportant info is not part of our goals.
But again, who are you to define what is and what is not important information?

In my opinion (which, of course is not neutral) the information contained *in* trivia must be integrated with the rest of the articles. Therefore, it is trivia lists what should be discouraged, but the information must be kept there in a good prose text.

Re:Admins to blame?

[hucke]

"Caught out"? Are you trying to call me a liar? (I guess you're not a believer in WP:AGF)

Here, I'll "check the facts":

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Trivia&limit=5000

There's a sample of five thousand articles that still have your little anti-trivia boxes nagging the editors to "fix" trivia sections. Press "Next 5000" to see the other half of the list.

The facts show that plenty of editors are ignoring the trivia nag-box.

Let's take one of these articles as an example - I chose the first one on that page that was about a subject I'm interested in:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke

According to the history page for that article, the article was tagged with the {{trivia}} template on 10 May 2007. That was nearly six months ago. It was a "drive-by" edit; the user who put in the {{trivia}} box has made no edits to [[Arthur C. Clarke]] before or since.

Since the article was thus tagged, there have been over 130 edits to the page. At least five of those edits were in the trivia section - plus one edit to remove the nag-box, followed immediately by another edit to put it back in.

So, over nearly six months none of the people who have an actual interest in the Arthur C. Clarke article have been motivated to remove, merge, or rewrite the trivia section in a form acceptable to the policy police.

That's a fact. It shows that the "consensus" is a myth.

Re:Admins to blame?

[Ray Radlein]

The great ongoing pop culture notability purges are an ongoing failure point for Wikipedia.

Maybe some admins and users have taken the various "Wikipedia vs. Britanica" comparisons of years past a little too much to heart, and are trying to "improve" Wikipedia by removing all of those articles which wouldn't ever appear in Britanica, but that's an extremely short-sighted thing to do. I mean, "A page for every Pokemon" may be a catchy (if inaccurate) joke about Wikipedia, but it also represents a strength, not a weakness: After all, there are lots of places one can go on the internet to find information about, say, France, or The Battle of the Nile, or Channel Island Politics; there aren't nearly as many places you can go to learn actual facts about Patrick Farley's award-winning comics, or the differences between all of the various Gundam Wing incarnations, or the full internet career arc of Star Wars Kid.

Re:Admins to blame?

[Kadin2048]

Again though you speak of Wikipedia as if it has a fixed volume. You can't "fill it up" with useless trivia -- it has no (effective) size limitation.

Yes, you have to be concerned about pushing the S/N ratio too low, but that could be remedied without constant purging based on subjective guidelines. If an article starts to accrue a lot of cruft or trivia, either just rewrite it more cleanly (preserving the other information, if anyone wants it, in the older versions), or move the trivia to a sub-page. There's no reason why you can't have a page for 'foo' and then a separate page for 'foo trivia' or 'foo in popular culture', if those sections are starting to get out of hand. That lets the people who want to find that information find it, while presenting a concise summary on the main namespace page.

More information is always better; the only bad information is unorganized information. If WP admins were as aggressive about shuffling non-essential stuff into sub-articles and keeping the main namespace clear, it would be fine, and Wikipedia would be broader and deeper as a result.

Re:Admins to blame?

[delinear]

For that matter, it makes sense to just mark trivial pages as trivia rather than deleting them completely. That way "trivia" could be enabled with a simple click, but by default only notable articles would be returned/linked from other articles.

On the other hand...

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:On the other hand...

[Rachel Lucid]

So, we should be fair and balanced on slashdot, except when someone actually stands to benefit from a change?

Look, I write a webcomic. I admit it. I also know that as it stands, I have a snowball's chance in hell of getting a Wikipedia article, and probably will remain at that point for another year, minimum. I don't care about getting an article for my comic there right now because either way I don't stand to profit in any form beyond some eventual respect for what I do, so my impact is reduced to whatever stir I can make.

I don't want the guidelines removed; I want something a little less capricious than "Must have been reviewed in dead-tree format". If truly notable comics like Evil Inc. and Checkerboard Nightmare are deleted from Wikipedia, and Schlock Mercenary's status on wikipedia is somehow 'tainted' because his series of books is self-published as opposed to going through some publisher like Scholastic, then how the hell am I supposed to know when mine is notable? More importantly, WHEN? Does a review in my college's paper count? The AJC? Does every webcomic have to be featured in the New York Times to be notable? Or can I just go "I have X number of comics in my archive and X amount of fanbase, is this enough?"

The concept that all online content is suspect is a holdover from Compuserve days. Surely we have evolved beyond this.

Re:So what makes your comic so special?

[Seumas]

Everyone who has a username on the internet thinks they deserve to be in Wikipedia. Notability is of some importance, to establish a base for submission. I run a niche auction site with about 50,000 members. Do I deserve to have a wiki entry? No. Does my website? No. Does a regional radio talk show host? Probably. Does The Penny Arcade comic strip? Probably. Does something some guy does with a couple thousand RSS subscribers? Probably not.

Now, the problem is, what defines notability? I believe an example I saw given on Wikipedia was "will they still matter in 50 years?". Well, in today's culture, how many people are still "notable" from the 1950s that still were of some importance in the time, anyway? It would be a little bit like suggesting that a library (or especially the Library of Congress) only archive "best sellers".

And of course, there should be no problem with an article on Wikipedia discussing web comics which then lists dozens or even hundreds of web comic serials. But for every single pokey-the-fucking-penguin to have its own article? I don't really see the point.

So there needs to be a careful balance between only documenting and archiving things that "matter a great deal" and letting a lot of history and information slough off to the side forever, because at the time, not enough people deemed the subject or topic "popular" enough.

snobs

[Scudsucker]

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.

Bah! It's an encyclopedia, stupid!

[Carbon016]

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.

Re:Bah! It's an encyclopedia, stupid!

[grommit]

That's a shame then. Wikipedia could be so much more and yet it decides to limit itself to just be an encyclopedia.

Re:So what makes your comic so special?

[J0nne]

I personally think the whole notability thing is stupid, for a simple reason:
I use Wikipedia to answer this simple question: who/what the fuck is x? If people start deleting articles just because they think x isn't important enough, how am I supposed to find out what x is, even if nobody really cares about x?

As long as people don't write their own articles and there's no original research, I don't care whether the article is deserved or not. It's not like those articles take up a lot of room, or that it makes it harder to browse wikipedia...

wikisnobs

[TheLink]

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.

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 :). If the "encyclopedia" policy was followed strictly that bit would be replaced/removed.

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. /wiki/notnotable/webcomic1/

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.

Deleting is too easy

[rx-sp]

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.

Re:Given Wiki's lengthy treatment of Magneto...

[julesh]

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.

I gave up offering help to Wikipedia last year...

[DJRikki]

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.

slashdot filtering for wikipedia?

[tingeber]

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.

Re:So what makes your comic so special?

[silentbozo]

What may be notable to you may not be notable to someone else. Almost by definition, smaller communities are not notable to larger communities - what the hell do you care about Civil War Reenactors or the AMC Gremlin, unless you're a Civil War buff or a collector of AMC Gremlins.

As Wikipedia tries to broaden its audience, the notability of much of its content, which is again almost by definition a reflection of interest, drops. Using that as a metric pretty much ensures a very bland collection of content which appeals only to the average schmoe, except that there's nobody to blame if the information is flat out wrong.

Why on earth at that point, after all the information that nobody else carries has been dropped from Wikipedia, would I want to use Wikipedia, when I can use Britannica, where I can have it all locally and not worry that someone's been screwing around with the article?

That's frankly the most stupid thing about this whole process - instead of demoting content from Wikipedia Prime to Wikipedia Everything, they're just throwing content out - articles in some cases where a lot of people devoted a lot of time to contribute and edit and crosslink with other articles. At some point, you're going to unravel a whole bunch of articles after whitewashing the more basic bits that they're built atop of.

Re:So what makes your comic so special?

[mikael_j]

You summed up my feelings on the subject pretty well. If I head to Wikipedia to find information on something, perhaps from an article I know existed a few weeks ago and it's not there then clearly whatever I was looking for should've been there. But certain Wikipedia editors seem to think that only the biggest most important things are worthy of attention, if anything it should be the other way around.

My point is that unlike a regular encyclopedia Wikipedia has the ability to not just contain articles about "important" things (as deemed by the editors) but also about things which a normal encyclopedia would not bother including because it wouldn't fit. So to delete articles just because some random editor decided that the subject of the article wasn't notable enough is just silly and personally I think part of it is that certain people who edit Wikipedia are on a bit of a power trip and enjoy enforcing their own interpretation of the rules.

OTOH, I'm one of those guys who used to sit around and read dictionaries for fun when I was a kid, so I loe having lots and lots of articles to read, especially with hyperlinks, I never know what I'm going to learn when browsing Wikipedia.

/Mikael

Webcomics vs. Porn Stars

[sadangel]

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.

Storm on the horizon?

[Aladrin]

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.

Why does notability even matter?

[necro2607]

"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.

Re:Troll?

[sahrss]

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.

Re:So what makes your comic so special?

[flynns]

See, here's the thing about that. If this was a printed encyclopedia, you'd have a point. This is, however, Wikipedia, and number and scope of articles that it is possible to contain are essentially limitless. Notability ought to be a moot point, and while everyone on the internet is not authorized to write about -themselves-, it's quite possible that someone else could find them interesting enough to write about, and find the sources to do so.

The question is not "what defines notability"? The question ought to be "Who gives a damn about notability"? If you'd asked the editors of Britannica whether Star Trek was notable enough to get in their publication, or maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they would have laughed you out of their office. These things are okay in Wikipedia. Why? Because thousands of useless, seemingly 'trivial' articles on wikipedia does not harm anything else in any way whatsoever. One man's trivia is another man's pure gold. My God, man, look at the Star Wars entries. That universe is documented down to the completely forgettable subplots of the most crufty books on the market. But it's still there.

Point is, a 'never-delete' policy (with exceptions for obvious goatse trolls and the like) beats the pants off of a "is it notable?" policy. The default right now is dis-inclusion, rather than inclusion. And it's a lousy idea.

Notability is the cancer of Wikipedia

[Trixter]

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.