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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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.
"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.