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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?"
The problem is that deletionism is viewed as an acceptable way of doing things, which is intrinsically flawed due to capricious and arbitrary notability standards. While administrators are sometimes rather wild, they are not the big problem. The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge, and the push to try and remove valuable information "in favor of" more notable entries. Wikipedia is not paper; it's possible to both expand a notable entry and keep a non-notable entry.
And yes, there are problems with administrators. They are neither sysadmins, nor moderators, but mop-wielders; the problem is that many of them forget that their place on Wikipedia is that of the janitor. It's not a position of nobility and honor, but a behind-the-scenes set of tasks that should never be brazenly abused.
Finally, the community does not have a system in place for culling definitive consensus. The system currently in place is essentially plurality voting: A small slice of the population shows up, registers to vote, and then votes for one of the two candidates (Mr. "Keep" or Mr. "Delete.") Occasionally, there are write-ins, but those are usually viewed as part of the spoiler effect. The administrator presiding over the vote may choose to, at his discretion, nullify or amend the results of the vote. It's democratic, but not quite consensual.
~ C.
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?
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.
Where are mod points when you need them?
There are two issues. The first is that a lot of fancruft and garage band stuff is inappropriately entered. Zapping stuff like that kinda numbs the admins to deletion, it becomes a routine thing to do.
Along comes someone wanting to create an entry on Wikipedia about a comic, but they haven't a clue how to cite references - or where the media has failed - actually know that you should source everything in an encyclopedia.
So, you now have a rather crufty "Comic X" article, which comes to the attention of this deletion-numb admin. Knows nothing about the subject, plugs it into Google, gets a few hits but not a lot. It gets tagged for deletion, when perhaps it should have been tagged as lacking sources. This last option is a step away from deletion and a far better solution.
Oh, and *please* do donate. Wikipedia is the 9th most visited site on the Internet, and the Wikimedia Commons is growing at a rate of 5,000 images a day.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
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.
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?
Part of the reason why Wikipedia is cool is because of the sometimes-bizarre breadth and depth of the information in there. Have you ever looked at some of the TV show pages? I won't name names, because I don't want some overzealous admin going in and burning them all, but there are some long-running shows that have pages for every one of hundreds of episodes, that get into incredible minutiea and detail. And I think that's great. That's what makes Wikipedia superior to any other 'encyclopedia' -- every other encyclopedia that's ever been written has been forced to cut and compress content due to the nature of paper-based printing. Wikipedia doesn't, but it sure seems like some people are still thinking that way.
If an article is well-written and the content in it is factual and referenced, I think it's ridiculous to delete it on "notability" grounds, particularly when the 'notability' criteria tend to be debatable and subjective.
Wikipedia is, despite all these things, a good project. But it's sometimes painful to watch because it could be so much more, if it wasn't held back by people quibbling over what "encyclopediac" means. If Wikipedia just kept going and didn't look back, it would redefine what an 'encyclopedia' meant. It could own that word, rather than be shackled by it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.