Slashdot Mirror
Call For Halt To Wikipedia Webcomic Deletions
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Howard Tayler, the webcomic artist of Schlock Mercenary fame, is calling on people not to donate money during the latest Wikimedia Foundation fund-raiser. This is to protest the 'notability purges' taking place throughout Wikipedia, where articles are being removed en-masse by what many see as overzealous admins. The webcomic community in particular has long felt slighted by the application of Wikipedia's contentious Notability policy. Wikinews reporters have recently begun investigating this issue, but are the admins listening?"
As an admin on Wikipedia, I wonder if it really is a problem with administrators. All comics must go through articles for deletion, where the community must decide. An admin just makes the closing decision based on consensus, then either keeps or deletes the article.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good. It can run both ways.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wow. Cry baby much? The notability claim is there for a reason, and it works, it stops ego listings. Consider the people who think they're in a band just because they've got a myspace account and put one mp3 up there. These get listed a lot. The are, by wikipedia rules, non-notable. Radio stations who get listed just because they exist? They're not notable. Open Source software? A bunch of it (including a couple of things I've worked on) has been marked non-notable and deleted.
What's important to someone, a fan, a listener, a developer may not be important to anyone else and you have to work hard to prove notability. Mere existence isn't enough. Has the comic you read won an award? Published an anthology? Those are pretty good indicators of notability. Having a URL? No. The whine that some comic was mentioned in a local newspaper was laughable; being notable in your own back yard, how is that good notability? Heck, if that counted I think I'll present a note from my mom saying I'm notable and list myself. Why should web comics have different rules to everyone else?
This is a case where it's of utmost importance to see the both sides of the coin clearly: Wikipedia is also growing a more and more important platform for many webmasters to advertise there stuff on.
If there is one side you should not listen to on if web comic X should be put there, it is the web comic writers. Because these are already biased.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Goodness! Who listed the parent comment a troll? This is a commonly held view among many Wikipedians! Of course, it is diametrically opposed by many, many other Wikipedians... but still, to call this a troll is a bit ridiculous.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why don't we just find/create a WikiPeDeletions.org... ie, where things WikiPedia doesn't - for some reason -
want to support can be quietly transferred to, so they can live out their lives there.
It's just plain silly to delete others' works.
Perhaps a network of WikiPeDeletions.org's - each specializing in a particular type of deleted item,
or possibly the reason for deletion (if known).
Of course, then, there'd then need to be a portal/search engine to find any article(s), on any/all
of the places where its topic may reside, after deletions by the original WikiPedia.org.
(This is meant as a serious article, despite its possibly humorouse spin-off URL names - above.)
I remember when the entry for the "Juggernaut Bitch" video was deleted for lack of notability, nevermind that at that point over a million people had seen it, and was notable enough for for the producers to put it in the frikkin movie. Yet you'll have no problem finding lengthly articles on obscure Final Fantasy or Star Wars characters. "Notability" seems to be a completely arbitrary standard that admins use to remove articles they don't like.
In some countries, comics are considered cultural heritage. Especially in Belgium and France, and while the comics are quite different, I understand the same is true for the United States. So, wikipedia has an entry on Suske en Wiske because it's culturally relevant to Belgium.
However, one might argue that webcomics are culturally relevant for the Internet and a such should be included. Personally, I'd say: if there are people who are willing to write about it, it should be included.
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
... as well as other superheroes, some of whom were so obscure they could be used as weed-out questions at a comic geek version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and yet had about as much written about them as topics of minor societal importance such as Catholicism, Argentina, and friction, I don't see how they can possibly justify excluding works of minor writers as "insignificant". Even accepting the snobbish "We want to be Brittanica-lite, no comics, video games, or fantasy literature unless it would shame us not to include them" POV for the sake of argument, after you've got a featured article on Tom Bombadil and Matter-Eater Lad (no, really -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter-Eater_Lad) you have already gone well past the point of no return for subjects of trivial import.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
This seems to be the very same malady that afflicts bloggers: the illusion of being popular and influential. People seem to forget that the Internet, vast as it seems to be, is only "used" by 18.9% of people, and even it still seems to be a lot, most of the use limits to email and an the occasional news site. Most people don't even know what a blog (or a webcomic) is, and even the ones who do, they don't care about those particular ones, except for a couple of dozen of fans.
It is the absolute numbers that seem to throw people into this illusion. Back in the days, if you wrote a college newspaper and got, let's say, 300 readers a week, that would be unquestionably an assessment of the quality (or, at least, the popularity) of the publication, and probably would get you a sweet job in the local newspaper. If you had a band, and managed to attract 300 loyal followers, that would be an amazing thing. But on the internet, that's a drop in the bucket, I got that much visits in an outdated blog only through google searches that happened to display my blog in the first page.
So, in short, leave the spotlight for the real notables, and go back to improve your own act in order to one day, with lucky, to deserve to be really famous like the "big boys".
Mens rights groups have been trying to put info into wikipedia for years, a few (actively proud feminists in their wiki bio's) have pulled the nobility card, and no support, so Deleted! Topics like MGTOW (Men going their own way) the slogan and world wide group has been deleted, because its not a non-profit group. The mens rights and misandry pages are stripped down due to disagreements, it cant be expanded by people who actually run MRA sites and written books on the subject, because its not Notable? That makes no sense, its like saying a founder of black panthers cant put in information.
It's sad that even famous authors and events in history are removed due to notability, if simpsons episodes and 4chan can be in it, so can best selling authors from the 80s. I Tried to add Twyana Davis as an article, just for it be deleted for notability reasons, mostly because a couple 20'ish editors never alive in the 80s, read the newspapers or watched tv. So its not notable to them. One of the largest rape scandals to happen.
I've seen editors say text was copyrighted, when it was released under creative commons, and proof provided, still deleted. An editor deletes because stub articles should be put into other articles, which makes no sense. Information goes in, it gets edited by everyone as time goes on, thats what makes a wiki powerful.
Its a freaking political nightmare, if someone doesn't agree with you, they can delete it for a numerous reasons, and people are finally seeing that. Notability is sighted as the number 1 excuse for deleting an article that someone doesnt agree with.
Ha, take a look at the pit bull article, its a warzone, editors dont agree with the AKA and the National society of veterinarians.
Wikipedia while useful, is horribly ingrained in thought control by editors. Its suppose to be a collection of human knowledge, not "Only knowledge that we agree with". Those who control the information, as the saying goes....
So, I wont donate until they change their rules and behavior. Groups have set up their own WIKI's due to this political/social moderation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect (See what I did there?)
A corollary to Duverger's Law, which predicts that plurality voting will always lead to two-party systems, the spoiler effect is the tendency of a third-party candidate (like Ms. "Cleanup" or Mr. "Merge") to "steal votes" from another, similarly aligned candidate, like Mr. "Keep."
My comment was that advanced members of the community with a broader mindset than "Keep/delete," such as myself back when I was on Wikipedia, tended to aim towards merging or cleanup whenever possible for notable articles, but there is almost never any such splintering within the "delete" crowd, and they tend to be quite vocal in eliminating claims of notability. For example, in this case, I remember a few months back how the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, possibly the highest honor a webcomic artist can receive, was not only refused as a measure of notability, but also had its article deleted. This is a more serious example, but there are others.
I need sleep now, but I'll just leave with my story. I left the project because of what I perceived as administrative abuse of a fellow user who was always acting in good faith until she was blocked, after which her actions were made in the same bad faith as those of the administrators with whom she sparred. It's really too bad; I wanted to do a series of articles on Internet memes, but I left and ED stepped in instead. (Believe me, ED is no improvement.) You can find the story at my userpage. People like me will never rejoin the project as long as it refuses a simple truth: It's not possible for Wikipedia to be open and controlled at the same time. The same thing happened to cdrecord, XFree86, and Mozilla with Debian; they thought they could control something that belongs to the community, and each time, Debian just shrugged and forked. The only things standing between Wikipedia and that fate are deep pockets and name recognition.
~ C.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-in_candidate (Insomnia strikes again!)
~ C.
Here's the problem in a nutshell: Deleting is too easy. It's also strangely enjoyable. People who can't create often like to destroy, and Wikipedia gives them this ability. More than that, it makes them that feel they're doing good by destroying articles! I would even say there are two types of contributor to Wikipedia: Those who create, and those who destroy. A surprising number of "editors" (I use the term loosely) have never actually written anything. Instead of deletion, editors should actually "edit" and work to improve the article. They should post constructive comments on how it can be improved or, gulp, actually get in there and improve the article themselves. Deletion should be the last option. Here's my story: I wrote a lengthy summary of a complicated novel. It took me from dinner time until midnight, because I did it properly and quoted sources. It was deleted (reverted) instantly for reasons of 'copyright' -- quite literally after around a minute of being online. The comment from the "editor" was littered with poor grammar and bad spelling, so I didn't even feel I was being overruled by a superior intellect. That's five hours of my work destroyed instantly by somebody making an arbitrary decision. OK, I thought, I'll condense my piece into a series of plot points that's shorter, and spent more time doing this. No good. Instant deletion again, by somebody else, this time apparently because what I'd written wasn't relevant. (Somehow the plot points have been reincorporated and are there right now but who knows for the future?) Wikipedia is a broken machine that's held together by the sheer ego power of its contributors, most of whom are college kids who think they're changing the world. I just can't wait for this bubble to burst so that people will stop quoting Wikipedia at me, as if that's the end of the matter. It isn't. It's not even the start.
Mainly due to articles I created or helped amend being deleted, and unless you check back all the time on everything you do there is no warning sent out saying "this is up for deletion".
When questioned one of the deletee's simply replied "well it was marked for deletion and no-one said anything so we deleted it".
So when you spend your own free time to help out and have some idiots just click away on the delete button it really makes you think "why bother" and since then, I havent.
I may be saying something already known or discused, but a filtering system like on /. could in fact be the answer. People give points instead of voting for deletion, and the user could set his/her threshhold on any level, ths being able to see only the greatly approved stories or also the less known ones.
Storage space could be a problem, though.
oh my god... it's full of stars!
He was expanding on the vote metaphor. You have essentially two "candidates" - Keep and Delete.
The "Write-ins" are alternatives like Merge and Cleanup - which are really other ways of saying "Keep" but do not actually seem to count as "Keep" votes, thus making it seem like there are fewer supporters of the Keep option when it might actually be what the majority wants, if only in spirit.
In other words, "Merge" and "Cleanup" should be counted as "Keep" for the purpose of those votes. If the admin only does a grep for "Keep" and "Delete" then he may be discarding a lot of votes that would otherwise preserve the article... you can't clean up an article that was deleted, after all...
=Smidge=
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.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"Mere existence isn't enough. Has the comic you read won an award? Published an anthology? Those are pretty good indicators of notability."
Frankly, who cares? I don't. What if I want to know some details on [whatever web comic] someone just mentioned to me? Maybe I want to know a handful of relevant links? Google is going to give me a bunch of irrelevant crap I don't want.
On Wikipedia I can enter a word, name, phrase, and I'll get some information and some relevant links. I don't care for a damn second how "notable" the item in question is. I just want to know some information on what I typed in. Why is it such a huge deal if it's not that notable? Is there some huge scarcity of storage space for this data? I can see no reasonable excuse for having such strict and overzealous "notability" requirements.
I pretty often look up local bands to see some info about them. Of course none of them are even there. It would be nice if I didn't have to sort through a bunch of shitty, image/video-loaded Myspace pages in order to check out the local music scene. I'd love to read a few little blurbs about local bands on Wikipedia. Why is that such a problem? Actually, the real question is, is that even a problem at all?
IN FACT, I'll argue right now that the LESS notable something is, all the more reason to keep the article and get people to contribute whatever info they might have! Why even BOTHER running an online encyclopedia-style site if you're going to shut down articles that happen to pertain to not-widely-known subjects? I can understand extremely trivial stuff like "The QX935 is a $0.39 alarm clock from Bill's Dollar Store in Urbana, Ohio", but even then, maybe someone found an old "QX935" sitting around and are wondering about its origin?
I guess it's all a question of what the intention of Wikipedia is. They do have the text "edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best information source on the Internet", which implies to me that the more information available, the better. The whole "notability" rule seems to contradict this core concept, though.
I've largely given up on Wikipedia as a contributor. Partly it's just a getting over it kind of thing, and on that I'm obviously not alone, judging from recently publicised stats. However, it's much more to do with the very demoralising feeling that having contributed much time and effort in drawing illustrations, taking photographs, writing articles and generally getting caught up in the original spirit of the project, I'm now frequently having my work deleted (particularly images, which in all cases are completely fine and freely given by me) by non-creative finger-wagging types who have taken over the whole thing and turned into a sort of "no ball games allowed" boot camp.
Fuck you, tossers - I'll save my creative time and effort for someone who can appreciate it.
Wow, crapping all over a free project! What a responsible and mature individual you must be.
Arrogant prat.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No, this is not the same wikipedia story. Deletionism is rampant on Wikipedia and I'm glad this story showed up to shed some light on it. It's YRO, because what deletionism is in reality censorship, and that effects all of us.
This has been discussed on Wikipedia, with people either been shouted down or banned. It's time to move it to other venues so people know that Wikipedia is no longer a cause to give money to or support, or even use for that matter.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Wikipedia is not the sum of all recorded knowledge and it should definitely not be.
It's an encyclopedia () -- meaning ``general education,,. The greek etymology has been incorrectly translated even here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia as ``general knowledge,,.
It is not general knowledge, otherwise it would be called encyclognosis (""); for example, a POV is usually a very interesting piece of general knowledge but it should not be a part of an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia as it is, is a mess because it fails to enforce its role as the largest online encyclopedia and instead allows anyone to write non encyclopedic items in it. It should focus more on deleting such items (TV series, webcomics) than expanding its volume.
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.
I watched 28 Days Later a few days ago and then read its article on Wikipedia. I was intrigued by the virus in the movie and noticed that its article needed a little cleaning up, so I did so. Oh well. They decided that it's just fanfiction and now it's marked for deletion.
OK, so it's just an unimportant article about a fictional virus, but darn it, I found it interesting reading to the point that I wanted to add to it. I'm a Republican and not interested in the Democratic candidates next year; maybe I should delete their article. Baseball is just a game; delete. I'm not Catholic - gotta go. I like turtles all the way down, so dark matter can bite it.
My point is that everyone values and takes interest in different things. If it's not costing Wikipedia a lot to host minor pages on diverse subjects, then why not? Part of that huge diversity is what made Wikipedia popular. You'd think they'd heard of the network effect and the long tail.
At any rate, they can delete the article I like if they want, but if they're still going to ask for my money afterward, they can bite me. Incidentally, that last article is the plot summary of an episode of a non-mainstream TV show. Hope I didn't draw the attention of the delete-happy admins.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And yet they have an article about Patrick Swayze's younger brother!?
Jayjg was even banned from the Italian Wikipedia for abusively deleting edits. The problem on English Wikipedia is that it is the co- founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, himself who personally approved the controversial appointment of Jayjg to the powerful Oversight Committee for English Wikipedia despite numerous objections from other editors about Jayjg's abusive edit-warring. This is hardly surprising given that much of Wikimedia Foundation's funding comes as anonymous donations often from dubious political foundations.
Some very revealing studies of Wikipedia from the outside:
wikipediareview.com
wikitruth.info
antisocialmedia.net
20th Century physics is based on mathematical trivia from centuries before. See Why Beauty Is Truth and Fearful Symmetry for popular accounts of how stuff that appeared to be total trivia - even to most of the mathematicians who indulged in it - turned out to be the basis of our best equations for describing reality.
If progress had depended on Wikipedia, it wouldn't have happened. And it's not just in hard science - an art historian could provide countless examples of what became major movements in art that began far out in the margins. In censoring "trivia" is Wikipedia castrating humanity's future?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I really couldn't agree more. The notability rule is stupid, pointless and overzealously applied. It needs massive toning down.
For example, in a world that's going more and more online, the requirement for a website, online game, etc. to be "notable" is that it must be mentioned in at least one offline source (magazine, newspaper, etc).
Now, Wikipedia might not have noticed, but magazines and newspapers are going online. There are already online editions of many noteable, respected magazines that never make (in whole) it to print, where the online edition contains more content.
Plus, of course, the simple fact that it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to delete content from Wikipedia. What, really, is the point? All the arguments I've heard so far about search relevance, etc. are easily addressed (mark a page as "minor interest" and make the search reduce the relevance of such pages so they show late in the search, for example).
I, personally, think it's fear of some wiki admins who can't cope with the sheer scope that "their" project has reached, most importantly with the fact that it isn't "their" project anymore, it's ours (as in "all of us").
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
We ( Citizendium, Slashdotted yesterday) have no "notability" policy. Like much that is conceptually confused on Wikipedia, that policy was invented after I left.
Of relevance: we do have a maintainability policy. I'm not sure what our stance toward webcomics might be, but I suspect it would turn out to be more permissive than Wikipedia's. Just note that we do have a strict rule against self-promotion. This means that a webcomic would have to be at least important enough for someone else to want to start an article about it. Fair enough, no?
In other news, the Citizendium has just started its own funding drive. If you're boycotting Wikipedia over deletionism, but you want to support free knowledge, why not give to an outfit that really needs your money? :-)
Wikipedia seems to be having some issues with admins deleting articles in connection to their notability guidelines lately. PortableApps.com, the website that makes available portable software that runs from removable media (like a portable version of Firefox) was recently deleted under the notability guidelines with very little notice (aka speedy deletion). This despite the fact that it's the most popular portable platform (more popular than the commercial ones), in the top 10 on SourceForge, in the top 5,000 websites in the world and has been extensively covered in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, PC Magazine, PC World, Wired, etc.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
A little over a month ago, the wiki page for Marvin Perry was nominated for deletion, based on multiple claims of "not notable." This is despite the fact that Perry has held at least 11 major titles in kickboxing, spread out amongst several large sanctioning bodies, some of them international. He is, simply, a true paragon in the field.
It ended up being even more absurd than that; in the course of the discussion, even after a slew of citations were noted, it was charged that kickboxing itself was not mainstream enough for inclusion in Wikipedia, that several international publications were either biased or fictional, and that the short length of the article made it deletion worthy in and of itself.
Something is obviously going wrong over at Wikipedia, and it seems like a coterie of users and admins are attempting to delete large swaths of material not within their immediate scope of knowledge, and they are using the notability standards to do it. A revision of that policy will probably serve the project well.
The best mixed martial arts training in Boston - www.redlinefightsports.com
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.
Misconception #1: It's not a "vote". It's a debate. There's no tally of votes and plurality has no meaning. The arguments presented are what is supposed to have meaning. If there are 10 "deletes" with no justification and 1 "keep" with a well-detailed and sound argument, the "keep" may be considered worth more than the "deletes".
Misconception #2: It's not a democracy and users are not equal in standing. Arguments from well-established and respected users are weighted much more heavily than users with 1 or 2 edits. This is to prevent the kind of astroturfing that was done in the linked discussion. It was incredibly obvious that the vast majority those "keeps" were from people who ONLY came to WP to "vote". They were not interested in or participants of the project and several created their accounts for the sole purpose of "voting" in this one debate. These people's "votes" were summarily discounted.
It also seemed obvious to me that these guys posted somewhere "Hey! This article is about to be deleted. Everyone come vote to keep it!" bringing a bunch of people to flood the debate with "keeps" who otherwise would not participate in the project at all. The administrator caught on and called them on it. So they got mad that their free advertising got deleted despite their astroturfing, called the administrator abusive, and made a call to
The
There has always been a battle between the inclusionists and the deltionists. The largest problem is when a couple of self-annointed "cleanup police" come to an article and try to get it removed on the grounds that they have never heard of the topic, therefore it is non-notable. This is a nearly a constant point on nearly every AfD that I've participated with, where those making the accusation of non-notability really are completely ignorant about the scope of the general topic that the article explains.
This is not to suggest that articles of a very obscure nature (and genuinely non-notable) don't get written but far too often, from at least my perspective, articles are nominated invoking this rule for reasons that have more to do with internal Wikipedia politics than any real justification of non-notability.
However if the nature of the content is informative or asynchronous, then often lists or tables ARE the most digestible and effective way to structure it on the page.
Wikipedia articles should be structured according to nature of the content, varying within an article as needed. But for some reason a cabal has decided that sequential paragraphs are the only valid form of writing on a Web site (which I must point out contradicts many best practices). If content exists as a list or table, in many case editors and admins attempt to shove it into narrative paragraphs. Sometimes they make it work, but most of the time what results is a wordy gray mess instead of clear organization. And when it clearly doesn't work, they simply delete the information instead of leaving it in list form.
I have no idea where this obsession with paragraphs comes from. Perhaps from comparison against print encyclopedias, which seems to be a larger obsession of the admins and leaders of Wikipedia. IMO that is stupid because Wikipedia is so obviously superior in concept and implementation. Trying to turn it into a "real" encyclopedia is counterproductive and ignorant of the core value of the product.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I did some recreating of articles, got warned, but not banned, and warnings were retracted and other users restored articles back to the original form. They may be subject to deletion - but they will go through a more fair process to do so.
:)
Please DO NOT do a donation boycott. Things are getting more fair and balanced as a result of Slashdot's attention and my actions on Wikipedia. They need money to maintain their organization and servers and to do badly needed upgrades (especially with them getting linked to by Slashdot!
Work within the system (even though it may have taken some direct action), don't starve it for funds - it isn't the enemy - it just isn't the best it can be.
The same could be said even of Slashdot.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
After drawing international media attention (print, internet, and TV) for our upcoming Star Wars fan film, we decided to add a Wikipedia article. We're not Wiki experts, but we tried to do our best with our first attempt, making a short article on the film, the coverage it had received, notable points about it, and sent it in. It was tossed as not long or detailed enough... apparently a few paragraphs was too little. So, we tried again, writing a long and detailed article about how the movie came to be, what it was about, etc etc. Again, tossed. Non-notable. I tried explaining how we'd received broad media attention (including Slashdot), and if I recall right, was ignored because the movie hadn't been released yet, and as such was non notable.
We wouldn't have minded cleaning it up, changing it, adding more references, doing whatever was required... but instead we were hustled off. We have thousands of preorders, thousands of visitors to our site every month, and coverage all around the world, all before even being released, all for an unfunded fan film made mostly with blood and sweat...but, apparently, we're not noteworthy enough.
I've had other, similar Wiki experiences, but this was enough for me to call it a day. I still use WP frequently, mostly for obscure stuff, but it seems the editors have an iron fist over the place. As such, I'll avoid subjecting myself to that.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.