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The Battle For Wikipedia's Soul
njondet recommends an article at The Economist that sheds light on the identity crisis faced by Wikipedia as it is torn between two alternative futures. "'It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between 'inclusionists,' who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and 'deletionists' who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries."
Personally I get annoyed when I see a comment in a Wikipedia article which was obviously added by someone promoting some product, or some stupid viral video attempt they posted on youtube which was peripherally related to the article in question. I feel that deletion of these kind of trivial things is important to maintain the integrity of Wikipedia. Sure, it could strive to be a record of all human knowledge... but then, some humans have some pretty useless "knowledge" which I don't really want to read about.
I found it, it's here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul.
No, but seriously...this is an issue that's really not all that easy to decide. Those in control (the admins) have the right to remove "insignificant" entries, but they boast a wide set of rules about non-censorship and such. Overall, the admins have the say, and can change the rules or strictly enforce them (remember the Muhammad article issue?). Now, whether they think it'll affect readership or whether they carefully calculate how it will affect it - that's a whole different story.
Because I really like the trivial and sometimes weird articles on Wikipedia. I like the articles that probably would not make it into any other resource.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it's DRM free.
That which may be trivial today could end up being very important in the long run. Vincent Van Gogh only sold one single painting in his lifetime, as he simply wasn't very popular. If we leave out articles on certain people or events based on our perceptions of their current importance, that information could be lost forever. Let history judge what is or is not trivial, we're just too biased to do so in the present. I'm a fan for inclusion, all the way.
are the scum of the earth
watch as they mark every article relating to Gundam for deletion (easily the single most influential anime of all time), including the main
but then they leave bucketfuls of TIE Fighter variations untouched
good job biased assholes
I guess I fall under the "inclusionist" type as I wholeheartedly believe that
nuking the content in a favor of a formal compliance with a policy du jour
is a wrong thing to do. Deleting is easy, creating is hard. And re-creating
is nearly impossible. If you tried resurrecting a deleted Wikipedia article,
you know what I mean.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
This is being reported as if it's a new thing. It's not. Far from it. I've been at Wikipedia for nearly 5 years now, and this debate has been raging as long as I've been there. In 2003/2004, it centered around high schoolers. By 2005/2006, it was individual Pokemon and TV shows. Now it's individual TV episodes and characters thereof.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I can understand why someone might want lots of strange and "trivial" articles on Wikipedia. They want it to be a resource that they can always turn to for pretty much any and all information.
Why do the deletionists care if there are trivial articles on there? If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
Do they base their stance purely on how "trivial articles" may affect Wikipedia's public image, or do they have some sort of technical concern about having too many articles?
Isn't wikipedia designed to cover the things that a normal encyclopedia may be unable to cover?
I have noticed lately that I was subconsciously searching google with keyword + wikipedia, such as web based cms wikipedia because i was getting better results that way.
What makes wikipedia worthwhile is the amount of information available. Wikipedia credibility isn't in peril because it contains TNG episode descriptions (and it does). It's in peril because it contains inaccurate information. The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information. If it had been wrong on star trek related information, it would still be unreliable. If it didn't have any star trek information, it would still be providing wrong information on that topic.
What that tells you is that the current system works. Any encyclopedia works like that. I wasn't allowed to cite hard-copy encyclopedias when I was doing projects in school, they were meant as a starting point to gather information. Same thing I do with wikipedia. When I want quick information, I go there (and I go there quite often). If I need the extra reliability, I may look at the papers cited at wikipedia and decide if they're good reputable starting points, or go elsewhere.
Wikipedia is tremendously useful if you use it as an encyclopedia is meant to be used. A repository of tons of information for quick reference. If editors continue doing a good job requiring citation sources and checking for accuracy of information on topics they understand, it will continue to grow. If editors start removing information because "it's not worthy" I'm going to have to start going elsewhere for that information and they've accomplished nothing to increase their reputation.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
In reality, Wikipedia is too large to have cohesive policy of this type. Rather, it is very fragmented with a large number of groups and projects, each with its own standards of quality, reliability and notability. In Mathematics, Wikipedia has become the de-facto first reference for definitions. I wouldn't use it for research results, but if you need to know what a contravariant functor is, or the basic construction of Hausdorff measure then starting at Wikipedia works. The same holds for some fields of theoretical physics. And this is perfectly compatible with there being large swathes of the encyclopedia devoted to debating the special power sof minor characters in little-known Japanese manga, written using in-universe language. The point is that most users can easily tell the difference between the two kinds of pages.
Just because some random people determine something is "trival" doesn't mean it is.
There are a lot of things that are marked as such, that I don't think they are. Episode lists of TV shows for instance. Watch a show, want to know what season it was in, Wikipedia can tell you...at least for now.
I've always considered that the whole IDEA of Wikipedia. A site with every meaningful and meaningless piece of information you want. You need to know the particulars of the 1980 Presidential election? Wikipedia. You want to know the in-depth backstory of G-Man in Half Life? Wikipedia will tell you that as well. The latter may be called trivial by some, but I'm sure a lot of people have read it as well.
The fact that there ARE all these types of pages mean two things. People want to write them, and people want to read them. If wikipedia starts to delete them, there will be another wiki that will host them.
Have a "core" set of articles which is held to very high standards, and an "extended" set which is less stringent and which allows additional information on core content as well as completely unrelated non-core.
Isn't the whole point of doing this collaboratively allowing people to experiment, and breaking the bonds of the traditional encyclopedia?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The solution to this mess would seem to be to trash everything unsourced or transwiki it to a place that doesn't care about reliability, but that's not going to happen. Wikipedia sets down all these rules and then tries to weasel out of them in any way it can anymore - anyone (esp. an admin) that attempted to actually follow its rules to the letter (delete unsourced content on sight) would get blocked within a couple hours. If you're an established editor and you add something unsourced, it's fine, but if you're an IP it gets rolled back. The whole thing is silly and I don't edit there anymore.
In addition, nobody really understands the point of an encyclopedia anymore. It's to condense and collect information into a generalized mess so that someone can come along, find a snippet or less deep version of the info they need, then follow the source. The "OH MY GOD IT'S THE WEB WE CAN ADD ANYTHING WE WANT LET'S MAKE A BUNCH OF TV SHOWS" mentality snuck in pretty fast. Wikipedia has put way more emphasis on "wiki" and thrown the "pedia" part out the window years before, and *surprise* it's an issue!
A few years ago, no one imagined that we'd have accomplished what we did here on Wikipedia. Compared to the entrenched encyclopedia companies, we were far behind, and we always knew the climb would be steep. But in record numbers of entries, we came out and wrote so many articles. And with these articles and discussions, it was made clear that at this moment - in this fight for intellectual freedom - there is something happening on the Web.
There is something happening when men and men pretending to be women in Des Moines and Davenport; in Lebanon and Concord come out of their basements to write and rewrite and edit and correct because they believe in what this medium can be. We can be the new majority who can lead this world out of a long intellectual property darkness - Communists, Free-marketeers, and Furries who are tired of the high prices of Britannica and the inadequacy of Funk and Wagnalls; who know that we can disagree without being disagreeable; who understand that if we mobilize our voices to challenge the money and influence that's stood in our way to knowledge and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there's no obscure minutia we can't illuminate - no minor character we cannot flesh out.
Our new Web encyclopedia can end the outrage of unaffordable, unavailable encyclopedias in our time. We can bring doctors and patients; workers and businesses, Democrats and Republicans together for discussion and consultation; and we can tell the big name encyclopedia players that while they'll get a seat at the table, they don't get to buy every chair. Not this time. Not now.
All of the inclusionists and the deletists on this site share these goals. All have good ideas. And all are valuable contributors who serve this website honorably. But the reason Wikipedia has always been different is because it's not just about what I or they will do, it's also about what you, the people who love knowledge, can do to increase it.
We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics who will only grow louder and more dissonant in the years to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of the world false hope and bad information. But in the unlikely story that is Wikipedia, there has never been anything false about participation. For when we have faced down increasing attacks on our credibility; when we've been told that we're not a valid source, or that we shouldn't even try to be the be all and end all, or that we can't, thousands upon thousands of Wikipedia authors have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a free and liberated people.
Yes we can.
What's so hard to imagine about the idea of having two sites that people always have to bring up this false dichotomy? The foundation could simply start another project that borrows directly from Wikipedia. They could even rename the old Wikipedia to Wikipedia Beta or the new one to Wikipedia Verified and sound snazzy (in a geeky way) in the process. In fact, just doing a google search I found Veropedia.com, which seems to be attempting just that.
And if so, why?
I'm all for including every little piece of info as long as it's possible to organize, and right now it seems to stay quite stable having all kinds of "minimalistic" pieces of data.
However, what called my attention upon entering the commentaries is that most people here were "inclusionists". Is it the aversion to censorship? The interest in unpopular areas of human knowledge?
I think a poll about this in Slashdot would be interesting.
ranks before handling content. As it is now there are strong evidence of bias among editors, causing deletion of useful information - and you can't restore deleted articles, information is lost forever.
One example is the YATE (telephony) article. It got deleted by an editor who is tied with Asterix. On top of that, the user original writing the article had a copy on his own journal - that also got deleted. Now the article might have been substandard, but instead of letting problems being fixed it got downright deleted by someone with a very biased opinion.
I for one have stopped using wikipedia.
I think the solution is fairly simple. Just add an option to filter out the ones that are not marked by Wikipedia as 'significant' or 'trustworthy'. That way, you'll have the best of both worlds. It will also encourage people to write better articles, because they want their's to be of 'premium' quality. In short, the answer is: don't delete, just filter.
It doesn't matter how many articles Wikipedia has or what subjects are or are not covered nearly as much as whether what they say is true. If all nine million articles are full of mistakes and/or lies, no one is going to say "Yeah, but they're still a trustworthy and credible reference source because all of the articles are about serious subjects."
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Would you rather our youth learn about cameltoe on the streets?
The whole point of Wikipedia is that it has something about everything. If I want to know about a random 1980's toy, I go to wikipedia. The lack of respect for wikipedia isn't because of the inclusion of other things. It is the distrust for the entry writers. If you get rid of pop culture entries, that problem still exists. I am an editor for my school's law review. Law academia differs from most departments because everything is student edited rather than peer reviewed. Even in this case, students are unwilling to allow wikipedia sources. Either Wikipedia will change who can make entries or people will finally accept the wikipedia paradigm before it will be a valid source. This is a shame, because often academics are slow in figuring out what the hell they are talking about. This is most obvious when sources are needed for technical/scientific information. The geeks who write the updates know what they are talking about much quicker than Dr. English Phd who can't even use Word...
If you want to have a minimalistic but lengthy and well-written index of fundamental concepts, you need a traditional encyclopedia, not Wikipedia. If you want a searchable database of all human knowledge, you need a search engine, not Wikipedia.
Personally, I think of myself not as a deletionist or an inclusionist but as a AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTDist. For example, I like the articles that outline specific, well known mathematical proofs (like the proof that e is irrational, but I think many of the articles like "List of Magical Aliens in [insert random series here]" need to be merged (but not necessarily deleted).
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
If only there was some way to include the "trivial" information yet not see it unless specifically looking for it. Maybe if there was some sort of ranking system that could be used to filter what information was deemed trivial, like a score or rating system. Possibly even some kind of description tags to aid in this, like "insightful", "funny", "interesting", or "troll". Then those who were not interested in the trivial information could browse at a higher filter level, and those who were searching for it could still find it when desired.
Nah that would never work.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
A lot of the stuff people write in Wikipedia that gets deleted could be put into annotations or a comments section. Then, inclusionists could, in fact, include a lot more stuff, while the main body of an article still fulfills the purpose that an encyclopedic article should fulfill.
I don't see the reason why Wikipedia cannot document every trivial human knowledge and still be a trustworthy and credible reference source.
For the lack of a better sig.
In many mays, I believe Freebase is a better platform for different kinds of trivia. Not only do they not delete data that isn't "important", they also organize the data semantically, and have fancy API:s to get the actual information, not just the text, from the database. This makes it easy to write applications on top of that data. The semantic data seems to be incomplete quite often (there is also a plain text description imported from Wikipedia that of course is quite complete), but that isn't something that couldn't relatively easy be fixed with a few more users.
I'm not saying Freebase is The Best platform, just that if Wikipedia doesn't want the content, give it to someone who actually do want it. And you get some extra benefits in the process.
When an open, collaborative project faces a major division in the pursued goals, an option allowed by the open license is following both goals. Deletionists shouldn't strive to destroy any content provided by inclusionists, but these in turn shouldn't expect to have all their contributions regarded to the highest standards. Both positions have their merits, and the advantage of digital media is that it's possible to have the best of them, given a basic agreement to collaborate instead of fight.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The Economist article is wrong on at least the following points.
In any event, the Inclusionist/Deletionist divide is really ancient history. Almost no one is purely one or the other these days, except the occasional troll who gets off on nominating dozens of articles on AfD.
Well that's a battle they will never win. Some way along the line it was decided by the average person that Wikipedia is not trustworthy. This idea is strengthened every day by academedia. And it doesn't help that people often link directly to Wikipedia and still not even use a perma-link to so that people get to read what you read when you made the link. And really, one should link directly to the source if it is available online.
The problem is not that people think Wikipedia is trustworthy, but that Britanica etc are trustworthy. At best they are just less untrustworthy than Wikipedia if only because the processes at play are less transparent.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If an article is supposedly too 'trivial' to be put in, then the way it will 'suffer' is from not being linked from others pages inside Wikipedia. Might as well leave it in - it won't harm the rest of the encyclopedia.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Because someday, in the near (or far) future, the birthdate of Smokey may be of critical interest. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/50902 ;)
geek. lawyer.
It's bad enough we gave the prols the vote. But to give them the press too is just too much.
Who cares whether there are articles about trivial subjects in the Wikipedia. If you're not interested, ignore it. For most people, most of the entries are too trivial not to ignore.
As for trivial content inside a less trivial article, that's what the community is for: removing article info that's not good enough to include. Whether because it's trivial, uncited, biased, or just wrong, anyone who isn't barred can clean it up.
If Wikipedia wants to do both, and encourage trivia entered by people who understand its status to be kept out of the main article, it should just add a "trivia" section that's hidden by default, perhaps linked at a separate page. Then people adding trivia can do so without bothering anyone who wants to ignore it. And it will make it easier for later editors who clean it up to move it somewhere from which it's not as likely to be just moved back in.
The standard practice of giving everything that exists the respect it deserves, even if just a small amount, is almost always the solution. Anywhere. On the Internet, we have the luxury of infinite space for everything, and infinite degrees of respect. The Wikipedia attitude started out working like that. It can continue.
--
make install -not war
If the community decides that a page isn't notable, just label it thus and move on. There's no reason to delete the page.
The same thing goes for page locking: although there are still some extreme cases where pages need to be locked, many of the reliability problems would be mitigated by labelling recently-changed parts or frequently-changed parts of pages. Readers can then take responsibility for their own level of trust.
Both cases are about matching expectations to reality: the situation can be improved by changing the content OR by making expectations more accurate.
* require users to have an account to edit- is that so difficult to do? It adds accountability. At least you've gone through the effort to create a gmail account and a wikipedia account. It won't cure vandalism, but might prevent some of the bot vandalism.
* allow users to declare a field of expertise (or multiple fields). As these users make edits, their ranking goes up the longer the edits go without reversion- or some other way for users to say "yes, this guy seems to know about astrophysics".
* Perhaps create a non-profit entity to verify backgrounds (confirm Ph.D's, etc) and add a trust metric which is offset by user rankings.
* on top of the above, have a mode to view a page color coded by the contributor's expertise. Edits by good editors get a certain color in that particular page view. Allow pages to be restricted to users with a certain level of credibility.
the above ideas (only ideas) might serve to help rank pages reliability. Then inclusionists could have their way and the exclusionists have less reason to exclude.
I don't see what the problem is.. it should just split off a sister project - the main site will stay more like a real encyclopedia and be a more trusted source of information -- and the spinoff can become a trivia book. Maybe that would even be for the best - articles could start out in MiscWiki, and once the sources have been verified, they can be copied to Wikipedia (in whatever chunks the editors think necessary).
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
What I don't understand is why someone like Britannica doesn't edit pages in wikipedia and cite their own articles. This would serve two purposes-
* Britannica gets relevance
* Articles get concrete data that is reliable
everybody wins?
Just introduce a rating system where trusted editors can rate the ACCURACY of the information in an entry, and you can screen out entries with low ratings when searching, or just ignore results with too low ratings. This way the 'trivia' is still there and can be found (and later upgraded if nessesary) and is easily ignored if you don't care for it. This way, everybody's happy. Well, except for those (IMHO) morons that would like to censor information just because they don't like it, don't care for it or find it 'useless'.
:)
Face it, information is never useless or trivial. It may be uninteresting to someone but you mileage may vary and one mans useless trivia is another mans treasure - and of course information always wants to be free...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
What Wikipedia needs to do is figure out if it wants to be the Encyclopedia Britannica of the 21st Century, or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I can see an argument for both. On the one hand Wikipedia could be the easiest to use, most readily available, reliable source on the internet. However, as it currently stands anyone can edit it anytime, anywhere, which makes for a library of information even if it is biased and sometimes inaccurate, but very interesting and unique.
...when you remove the trivial stuff from Wikipedia?
A standard encyclopedia with a lot more suck.
I don't see how having "trivial" information (whatever that means) could be considered bad. It's not as if you're being forced to read about it, and there will always be people who find it useful/interesting. If you don't want to read about a certain subject then don't search for it or read it, what's so hard about this? It's sort of like buying a book about gardening, then complaining that you don't care about gardening. Maybe you shouldn't have bought the book, eh?
I find it funny and sad that Wikipedia is moving towards a state where content is controlled by a few editors. Isn't that the whole model that Wikipedia was trything to get away from in the first place? c.f. Encyclopedia Britannica. Call the deletionists what you will. I call them overly-anal folk who, perhaps for the first time in their lives, have achieved some level of power and are trying desparately to keep the unwashed Pokemon fans out.
The soul of Wikipedia is obviously inclusionism. If you start picking what stays and what goes, then it will become just like every other encyclopedic resource out there. The problem is that people are treating Wikipedia as if it were supposed to be "the" resource rather than just "a" resource. If you use it knowing that the information within is not meant to be authoritative, than it can be a great resource to use as a starting point or for situations where incorrect information is not going to cause problems down the line. The word "wiki" itself means "quick" or "fast", as in, an encyclopedia for quick answers, not necessarily absolute answers.
As far as my daily light research needs are concerned, if Wikipedia becomes a deletionsim camp, then they better change the "wiki" part of their name; because even by their supposed competitor's definitions of the word "wiki" it would be a lie. And seriously, what would you prefer? One of the ad laden, content starved, dead ended, upselling pages at the previous three links? Or this one?
...Let the people decide what should be on there...
I do see the point that Wikipedia, without proper moderation, would become a junkyard. But why do trivial articles need to get deleted? Why not just flag them as "trivial", and let the users decide if they want to see trivial articles or not? Or, better yet, let users rate articles based on the importance of their subject, and automatically sort the "disambiguation" pages according to that.
Hdd space is cheap so the only problem with allowing anything and everything is in making it easy to sort. Making a Slashdot-like rating system would help quite a bit. Users could then mod stuff up and down and flag certain types of content. Users with high karma would get an auto flag to the top.
On top of that I'd add paid moderators and experts to enter content and double check that no users cheat the karma/mod system into letting them inappropriately get material miscategorized or misrated.
Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through. If someone wants to see every stupid thing anyone has put in then let them. If someone wants to see only expert content then let them. Isn't that the whole point of allowing every user to customize their own experience? Just make the default something reasonable such as all expert content and all content of a reasonably high karma/mod value.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The question is, basically, do we want Wikipedia to be a Encyclopaedia Galactica, or do we want it to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe?
I, for one, prefer an encyclopedia that includes the recipe for the best drink in existence.
- Francis Ocoma
Please wait while Sig Request is being processed...
I wrote a few articles myself, that are of very specialist branch. Certain obscure print enrichment techniques and tools of poligraphy. They are partially against the rules of Wikipedia because they could be called "original research". The trick is there are -NO- reference'able sources of these whatsoever, on the net, in libraries, anywhere. They are a knowledge that is passed as word on mouth, master to apprentice, craftsman to customer, "If you want it to work, you need to..." stuff. There are no websites dedicated to it other than commercial offers pages which are forbidden in Wikipedia.
I was writing the articles by recalling my direct knowledge of the facts, adding photos of things I made myself, documenting knowledge I gained from the master of the craft, things he shown me and talked about, but he had his own notes, I had my own, but there was no handbook of any kind - not that any would be printed ever, because there would be maybe 10 customers in my whole country to buy it.
I think this is where Wikipedia can be important, a place to store knowledge which doesn't belong anywhere else and is easily lost permanently. Deletionists, please provide a viable alternative if you think it's wrong.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I wonder if the Ancients ever had debates like this when they created the repository of all their knowledge...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Just mark it as "deleted". ;)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The French wikipedia is usually even pickier about qualité; I witnessed some articles disappear there without so much of a discussion. What ever happened to laisser-aller?
Say out loud: I'm an Aspie and I'm somewhat proud, I guess. Uh. Can I write an email in all caps instead? Hm...
I'm definitely in the inclusionist camp, I got fed up and quit editing (although I may rejoin under a new name) because of the deletionists, who hold the upper hand because only certain popular editors get nominated for the power to delete (and lock, etc.).
When I joined in '04 wikipedia was largely inclusionist but since it reached around 750,000 english articles, became increasingly deletionist to the point that it is now largely deletionist.
Also, the "free" part of its motto "the free encyclopedia" also means open-source, so anything with a hint of not being GDFL approved is deleted with prejudice. "Fair use" at some point became "fair game", nevermind that I (and others) spent time sourcing fair use images only to have them all deleted.
Wikipedia's policies on notability and verifiability are rather elaborate and subjective, but there's a gem on the verifiability page:
If no reliable, third-party sources can be found for an article topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.
Isn't that amazingly elegant? If actually enforced, and used as the sole criterion for notability, it would kill off most of Wikipedia's fancruft and original research ramblings at a stroke.
A fictional character biography on Will Riker? If the only citations are the show itself, that's not thirdparty, so it's gone. Random Keenspot comic nobody's ever written anything about? *ping*, out of existence. On the other hand, if somebody's published a book on the symbolism in The Matrix, then wham, that article can be made legit. Chex nightmare? No end of good webcomics media coverage there. Deletion-proof! Focussing on other sources' views (rather than the current scenario of editor opinion, but backed up by others if challenged), would greatly improve the quality of articles and reduce the frequency of edit wars too. So the rule does away with the subjective concept of notability, and replaces it with the simple idea of "can we make actually a good, verifiable article out of this?".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The problem with 'credability' isn't that the information is right. Rather, the problem with schools is there are so many possible credits, you can't do it. Sure, I don't completly agree, but meh. Down with the man!
we have TOO many of the 'restricted' 'controlled' 'edited' information sources. way too many. and all of them are VERY limited. because, an accredited finite set of contributors can only contribute to an information source to a certain extent.
wikipedia has to battle with the verifiability and credibility issues, find solutions to make open contribution system work. for, what wikipedia does have not been done over the course of mankind's history on this scale. its very important.
Read radical news here
Instead of filtering for trivial information, perhaps a ratings system would be better? You could search above a certain threshold, and reveal only the more commonly interesting articles (and perhaps even the better maintained articles), or you could search the repository of human knowledge and possibly trawl through lots of useless junk if you so wished. The rating system could be based on number of hits on individual pages, plus recommendations by the Wikipedia editors.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Two points: what's the harm in minutia? So you might have to go through the odd disambiguation page (and Wiki tends to show you the most popular one anyway, with a disambiguation link near the top). Most people (myself included) never use Wiki's horrible search, but just google " wiki" to find the good articles anyway; pretty easy to sift through irrelevant facts (especially if you toss in another keywork, like "film").
One thing I always thought would be a great use for Wiki, is for learning the details of a second language. Yes, something might be a meaningless detail to a native speaker, but for someone learning the language, reading the details on a given word or subject, with a "on the street" slant to it, is far more helpful than wading through a dictionary definition of it. It seems like that is an incredibly valuable use for Wiki, which is greatly boosted by including more, not by being overly selective.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
If Wikipedia wants to be the authoritative source of knowledge of everything, what's the harm in letting the bullshit in? It's still the user's choice which rabbit hole they follow when killing time at work. Personally, I'm not above clicking that "vodak" hyperlink while I'm trying to learn more about Russian diplomacy, but that's just me.
There is simply too much glass..
I was recently trying to find a link to the classic internet meme Zombo.com. Of course they nuked it. I suppose when something falls out of fashion it'll be gone. We all know that fashion is more important than info.
fork the project, allow the inclusionists to add as much information about trivial subjects in one and let the deletionists exclude this articles in the other.
coultn't then mediawiki be extemded to allow people to navigate from one wiki to another with a single click... allow to compare articles between both pedias... and, if an article in the trivialpedia get noteworthy enough, export it into the delete-o-pedia
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
- every film
- every TV programme episode
- every book
- every catalogued species
- every minor band
- every small-circulation magazine
- every restaurant, fish-and-chip shop or takeaway
- every pub or bar
- every business
- every open source software project
- every club, church, place of worship, or other voluntary association
etcWay too conservative, I'd say. They deleted whole, complete and well researched articles on the Warcraft universe because it wasn't "encyclopedic". Also a lot of Star Wars stuff has been deleted too. Basically deletionists view with bad eyes everything that is fiction related, and dismiss it. Basically anything that is not traditionally accepted as "knowledge" has no place in Wikipedia in their eyes. It is an extremely prejudicial position, not to mention that deletion of articles should be done by consent - but it isn't. Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try.
Based on the difficulties Wikipedia has had to raise money lately, I'd say most people don't like their stand. Fork wikipedia already, I say, and create an all inclusive wiki, before there is only a handfull of articles left which reference Britannica as their only reliable source. Sigh.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Wikipedia is great for what it is, it shouldn't be changed as we already have certified sources of justified "non trivial" knowledge. If in the instance of searching for "infallible" knowledge, say for scientific research or formal education than we know better to cite wiki. Wiki isn't a medical dictionary but it is a starting point for your inquiries as it is serves it's purpose exceptionally as a generalized source of knowledge.
first let the inclusionists decide what to include. then deletionists has the "right" to "mark" certain articles, so that the reader will see what is more "open" and what is more "scientifical".
Includipedia (my inclusionist fork of Wikipedia) will contain all (or nearly all -- some actually deserve deletion) deleted Wikipedia articles. This will be implemented by a semi-automated process that goes through Articles For Deletion daily.
if there's anything wrong with wikipedia, it is YOUR FAULT. yes, you. if you see vandalism you don't like, delete it. inaccurate information? fix it! how absurd! participatory means PARTICIPATE. it's not costing you anything but time, and i would wager it's time well-spent.
at the moment i forget where i read this or what the notion is called...
wikipedia is based off of the idea of an encyclopedia, but by now it has become so much more - by virtue of it's participatory nature, wikipedia has superseded and almost trivialized the print encyclopedia - the medium it intends to emulate. the only thing keeping wikipedia from being an 'online print encyclopedia' is strict editorializing of its content. it is regressive to place wikipedia alongside britannica, or any other form of print encyclopedia, as it is by nature a different thing altogether. at it's fullest potential, it is an up-to-date resource for everything - the compendium of human knowledge, no matter how trivial. it's not up to a small group of people to judge what information is trivial and what is not. that's an awful explanation. it's early.
Let's split the articles into 'tranches' and rate each tranche, so AAA for high quality articles and so on. Seems to have worked for the credit markets...err, oh scrub that.
problem easily solved(1): article features big stamp "verifiable information" or "non-verified" . everyone wins.
Or just have a forked entrance screen - one search field gos to properly referenced data, the other to insufficiently referenced data.
(1) Martin, L. (2008) Problem solved, bitches. Some Journal. 1-1.
Actually, the very idea of collect any sort of content, most of them initially superfluous or with a low quality, will eventually feed more interesting content and allow a whole new kind of social experiments. For example, articles about celebrities could be used to track the public perception of those celebrities and science related articles with poor quality might be a good indicator of what is the actual understanding of the general public about some scientific concepts.
So, just let's keep tracking everything and let's start tagging it with the appropriate trustworthiness indicators.
I took linguistics in college. This reminds me of the age-old argument between linguists and grammaticians. Linguists argue that language was spoken and existed in a fluid form before anything was ever written, and therefore, grammar should be subserviant to the linguistics. Grammaticians argue that language must be kept pure and guided by academic professionals, new words and parts of speech only be added by a select few.
In the end, I side with the linguists, especially when you learn that the end-product of the grammatician's arguments make practically any form of language incorrect. I remember a quote from one grammatician that Shakespeare represents the very worst for of English and should be abolished....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I've said it before in an obscure forum post that no one in their right mind read, and I'll say it again:
Create a layered Wikipedia, where the top layer contains the refined or lay-person content, and the lower layer(s) contain technical or esoteric details on particular topics. Users looking for more information can drill down to lower topic layers.
It wasn't flamebait it was deliberate hyperbole to get a response, like this...
"It got deleted by an editor who is tied with Asterix....it got downright deleted by someone with a very biased opinion."
Reading that I would expect a search of WP to turn up an elaborate page for Asterix (telephony), but it doesn't. I can only conclude the deletion was not a corrupt attack on your article, nor is WP biased against YATE in particular. Worst of all you have wasted my time with a wild goose chase.
BTW: This says nothing about the usefullness of a page on either product, or your wasted efforts in producing content.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It has been taken over by liberals, who are spreading the gospel of liberalism. I mean really, when I have to jump thru hoops to prove such a trivial error as John Kerry only ending as a LTjg, rather than a full LT, you know that bias has creep in. (And yes, I did manage to "prove it" to Wikipedia's satisfaction - I used John Kerry's own published records from John Kerry's website.)
Too bad the other documents were removed from his website, which coupled with facts about the Navy promotion system prove that John Kerry was given a dishonorable discharge - that's why JK pulled those documents from his website, and from the wayback machine.
But, try and get the garbage about George Bush being AWOL pulled from the Bush entry. No facts and it stays there, because "everyone knows" it is true.
Talk about a double standard.
And yes, I do have Karma to burn here, so go ahead and flame away, you know you want to, because the same thing is true here too. (By that, I mean that liberals rule here too. And this post, true as it is, will get flamed away. It is why I don't post that much anymore.)
The reason Wikipedia succeeded in the first place (and subsequently contributed much to the "Web 2.0" culture) was because of its editorial policy. You can't simply build up a project and then say "we're now going to renounce what made this possible". If they do that, the project is going to end up forking. Again.
This article seems to suggest that a substantial number of Wikipedians would like to see more serious and less trivial content. But what about the more interesting articles that are being held back? For example, during the past two years I've tried very hard to advance a series of natural history articles to a higher level, paying particular attention to the taxonomy involved. Unfortunately, there seems to be little desire for a systematic and hierarchical approach in writing such articles. At least in my corner of WP, it's like there's a glass ceiling that most editors would rather not see anyone break through. If this trend continues, IMO large sections of WP will remain quite average at best.
Who decides? If they delete 'trivial' articles then I am certain they will delete important stuff because 'triviality' is to a large degree subjective, who knows what the importance of an article will be.
What we may regard as trivial today may become quite an important piece of history in even 5 years. Like those old photos you sometimes see, where the most interesting thing is not what is in the foreground but in the background. Wikipedia is, whether it knows it or not, documenting our global society in real time. I was particularly pissed off that they removed the original article about slashdot culture which I found both funny and true.
If I had a vote I'd say they have the capability of both keeping the 'trivial' and setting standards. Why can't Wikipedia have levels of authenticity: technical articles that are easily verified, or other articles that are lower levels of confidence but are still interesting anyway (and even useful). Even official encyclopedias can't maintain the same standard for all articles, established scientific ideas do not have the same reliability as controversial but important ideas, but I would expect an encyclopedia to contain both.
Bitter and proud of it.
Instead of deleting allegedly "trivial" articles, why not mark them? Wikipedia already has a system in place where articles are marked as "stub", "controversial", etc. There can be other markings that indicate that articles are problematic in the ways that "trivial" articles would be; for example, I could imagine an article being marked as "rarely visited", with an explanation that this means the article has had less peer review than is desirable and thus might be inaccurate.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This debate was very hot in Sweden five years ago. Maybe it is time to start a global version of susning.nu , which contains important articles like http://susning.nu/Hur_man_%E5ker_tunnelbana_utan_att_g%F6ra_bort_sig and http://susning.nu/Bullrunkning
Personally I hold the view that turning Wikipedia into some kind of accredited encyclopedia is absolute non-sense. There are plenty of Wikipedia clones, forks and derivatives out there attempting to do become the next Wikipedia. why try to duplicate their lack of achievement? (Not that I'm knocking the achievements of Wiki clones, forks and derivatives, but I can't think of one whose name is used as a verb.)
If the problem is that Wikipedia isn't a big kids medium who shouldn't specialize in anime trivia then the big kids need to sit down and write some articles, not hem and holler like a potential investor on IPO day. As long as the information is accurate (hell, not even accurate just "true" in the discreet sense) it shouldn't matter what the information is.
Having recently written a couple of small articles for wikipedia I have a encounter a few problems with the deletionist crowd. Firstly they seem extremely eager in their draconian approach. One administrator that I was crossing paths with was deleting articles at a rate that defied the possibility that the was even making any attempt at discovery. His logged showed that he was deleting articles at a rate of over 3 or 4 deletions in a minutes time. When you confront these administrators about this issue they have a tendency to simply ignore you and delete your article out of spite. I've also found that administrators are often highly subjective in their interpretations of policy. I've confronted administrators about this as well, asking them what makes two almost identical articles in terms of notability and instead of discussing the matter they copy/paste unrelated policy links and tell you to STFU. It was my impression that Wikipedia was a community effort yet the deletionists wont even give new articles enough time for the community to fill out the necessary information. Finally, if there is any sort of disruption to their dominance over content, they will simply block users from participation.
You can check out my interactions with wikipedia admin at these urls
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Tefosav
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Zenasprime
Due to this hostile environment, I've pretty much given up on any effort to participate in this "community" based effort.
Perhaps a good approach is something that seems to have already started. To use some current jargon, they could "refactor" wikipedia.org into a series of differently-named sites to cover topics that aren't "encyclopedic", but to some people are worth keeping around.
For example, the Pokemon and World of Warcraft articles, mentioned by others as obviously not appropriate. But to a cultural historian, they are well worth saving. Just not in a general encyclopedia. Instead of deleting the articles that some people put a bunch of time into, why not work closely with the people interested in such things, and move their articles onto another server with another name? Wikipedia itself could have some summary pages on the topics, with links to the other sites.
I've been making a lot of use of one of them that exists: wiktionary.org. Now, it's quite obvious that documenting every obscure word in every obscure language is utterly inappropriate for wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Traditionally, a books that does that is called "dictionary", not "encyclopedia". Wiktionary is an interesting take on this idea, organized as one big interlocking dictionary of all the world's languages.
It's pretty clear that wiktionary is the start of something very useful (though it's rather incomplete and in need of a lot of help from a lot of people). It's also clear that its material doesn't belong in wikipedia, except maybe for a few summary articles. There's also a lot of cross-linking between wikipedia and wiktionary. So I'd list this as a successful case of splitting off a significant chunk of human knowledge, kicking it out of wikipedia, and reorganizing it as a successful wiki in its own right.
As an amusing example of wiktionary's usefulness, a few weeks ago I noticed an apparent anomaly in the use of a 2-char Chinese word that I probably can't include here, but it's pronounced ai4ren2 in Mandarin and aijin in Japanese. Using the classical characters, wiktionary has an article giving the Japanese, Mandarin (and Min Nan) meanings of the word. They show two rather different interpretations of the characters whose basic meanings are "love" and "person". This could be a nice example of how a single writing system doesn't always make it possible for people who speak different languages to communicate in writing. In this case, they just might miscommunicate some significant information. You won't often find this problem mentioned in a typical single-language dictionary, but wiktionary's format makes for easy comparison of such borrowings.
Rather than just deleting articles from wikipedia because they're not "notable" (whatever the hell that might mean to the deleter), we could cool down the fuss by saying that they're more information on the topic than is appropriate for wikipedia, and should be moved to wikiX, for some appropriate X.
Of course, sometimes the classification is a bit fuzzy. Consider, for example, the word "truthiness", which has good articles in both wikipedia and wiktionary. Each article is (at least for the present) well written for its site. In particular, the wiktionary article gives 19th-century citations for the word's use, and also goes into its etymology, appropriately for a dictionary site. OTOH, the wikipedia article is nearly as funny as Colbert's introduction of the word, and includes links to related topics such as "big lie", "noble lie", and "consensus reality".
It's a pretty good example of how to handle a borderline case.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful
as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate
a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value
than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself.
(Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena v2)
Jason Scott (of BBS: The Dcoumentary fame) gave an interesting speech about the failings of Wikipedia, including the inclusionist versus deletionist debate.
If there is more content on Scooby-doo, it means people (or the subset of people that reads AND writes Wikipedia) are more interested in Scooby-Doo than Napoleonic Wars. Dismissing Scooby-Doo articles because they are "less important" than historical facts is subjective; different things appeal to different people. The existence of the so-called "fancraft" by deletionists do not prevent them from adding content to topics they judge important; so why don't they do it instead of deleting other people's hard work? As someone pointed over, articles on the Christian Bible may be considered fiction to an atheist. Conversely, the theory of evolution may be unworthy of figuring in an encyclopedia for some religious groups. Are you willing to delete it all, since consensus is obviously impossible?
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Wikipedia needs to classify information better. Rather than just having one big repository there should be multiple....
Science, Religion, Culture, Literature, People, Events, Geography, etc.
Articles can still cross-link but when you go off to culture.wikipedia.com you need to take off your analyst visor and get a bag of popcorn... yes it's serious stuff but it's also in the eye of the beholder and if you want facts about something in Culture - follow the links to the events section or the people section where the information is objective.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
If Wikipedia does not become all-inclusive it will die. most people I know , including myself, are alread jaded by the fact we've created and edited articles only to have them deleted. Simply because the editors think it's useless knowledge or facts cause they're not into it.
Or worse, the web-comic debacle.... controlled by a !@#$% who blatantly cuts out tons of comics and then, pimps out her own never heard of favorite by placing two images and two more references.
And no one can do anything about these editor twits....
Wikipedia sucks arse except for the plagiarized articles.
- The Saj
PS - sorry for the bad typing. It's hard to type with a 7-month old trying to pound on the keys as well.
Schopenhauer wasn't familiar with the concept of relational databases. Having articles on fiction do not mess with or make non-fiction articles less available, unlike a physical lybrary. It is all a matter of image; deletionists want wikipedia to have an image of a traditional encyclopedia. What bothers me is that they want to impose their ideals of relevance and value to everyone else.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
So I was banned without prior warning and all trace of what I had done wrong was deleted. No one could see if my comments were sourced or pulled out of my ass. When one person holds such power over information the potential for abuse is manifest. Can we trust Jimbo Wales to always use his influence benevolently? For me, the answer is a qualified "maybe." I was reinstated because no one could figure out why I had been banned in the first place and Jimbo didn't respond to inquiries. Hardly a confidence inspiring result.
When Jimmy Wales said "becoming a sysop is *not a big deal*", that was back when admins really did have to conform to consensus like you remember. Since the change from VfD to AfD and the introduction of speedy deletion, the admins have been given far more power than before. This and the "cabal" issue are starting to alienate a lot of editors who now feel like second-class contributors.
I've always considered Wiki to be a real life version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Sure it may not be the most reputable sort run out of a stuffy university somewhere by a bunch of old guys, but instead is a bunch of semi-random stuff that touches on everything from the important to the Mostly Harmless type stuff. Some of the suggestions about cleaning up vandalism I think would make more sense over excluding stuff simply because it's not academic enough or whatever.
If Wiki goes the way of an "old school" Encyclopedia, I think someone will take up the torch and give what the people want, a guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything in between.
Should we really limit the kind of articles in Wikipedia? How can we know now what is 'valuable' information and what isn't? When I look through old encyclopedias I see much that might have seemed higly valuable at the time, but which is strangely irrelevant now, information or scientific dead ends, in a way. And conversely, when we look back and try to learn about some aspect of life a hundred years ago, it is often the trivial things that give the most valuable insights; the scraps of newspaper, a love letter, adverts etc.
From that perspective I feel we should include everything and concentrate on the quality and neutrality of the articles instead. For the first time in history this is something that seems within our reach; letting go of this opportunity just to pander to some 'upper class notions' would be doing us all a disservice.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm a fan of Schopenhauer, but he is talking about paper libraries here. With a web-based medium, increasing the size of the library only makes it trivially more difficult (and possibly even less difficult) to access information because we have tools like hyperlinks and search engines that make getting at the topic in question very easy.
Wikipedia already has a guideline that articles be well-sourced and as long as this criteria has been met I don't understand why they shouldn't be included. I have run into this myself and it was a very frustrating experience.
In 2006 my daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. We had created a non-profit group and memorial fund in her memory and many media outlets had reported on the murder but some editors at Wikipedia did not consider an article on her to be "Wiki-worthy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente
One jackalope, in his successful attempt to delete the article, stated "Wikipedia is not a memorial. Murders of this type are lamentably common. Even the existence of memorial funds/scholarships does not confer notability."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente
I then took a different route and instead created an article about the charity I founded in her memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann's_Group
This article was also nominated for deletion with the comment: "Blatant promotional page."
Fortunately I was successful in my continued attempts to keep the articles - but only after we had worked to get two pieces of legislation passed, including one named for her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer's_Law
The process that I had to go through in order to convince people halfway around the world that this subject was "notable" was profoundly frustrating. The qualification to be fully-cited is an understandably objective criteria but to then apply a notability test is not only completely subjective but also thoroughly unrealistic.
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Someone else commented "The solution to this mess would seem to be to trash everything unsourced or transwiki it to a place that doesn't care about reliability, but that's not going to happen."
It's happening. Wikia, which is Jimbo Wales' commercial operation, is the other place that "doesn't care about reliability". Wikia claims to be an encyclopedia and a search engine, but all they are is a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Wars|Trek|Craft|Gate] wikis, the Yu-Gi-Oh wiki, the Marvel Comics wiki, and similar popular culture. They even have fan fiction. They don't have much else. The machinery is the same as Wikipedia, but the standards are far lower. Wikia has ads, but the reader demographic lives in their parents' basement, so the clicks may not be worth much.
There's now a push on Wikia (the "WP:FICT" debate) to move the fancruft to Wikia, where Wales can try to monetize it. Wales is still involved with Wikipedia, so this is a conflict of interest. It's probably good for Wikipedia to have a place to dump the cruft, but it's troubling that the nonprofit and profit-making sides have some of the same management. The IRS may have something to say about that.
Wikipedia was done around 2006. By then, almost all the subjects worth an article had one. New articles now tend to be self promotion (garage bands, mostly), minor historical figures ("member of the Ontario parliament 1936-1938"), atlas information ("State Route 152"), or utter junk ("I rule!!!").
Wikipedia's maintenance process is labor-intensive. It's the encyclopedia anybody can trash, and a sizable, ongoing effort is required to fight the trashing. That effort increases as the number of articles goes up, which is what limits the useful size of Wikipedia. If volunteers don't keep up the maintenance, the thing will turn to mush. The right size for Wikipedia is probably below 500,000 articles.
Deletionism - or at least, less inclusive activity - is a tendency that I think grows over time. Wikipedia's idea of quality takes some time to sink in, but after one too many edit wars, you learn to appreciate sources, and become wary of those articles lacking them - and this often includes pages of an inclusive nature. Of course, some people just don't like Pokemon, or furries, or Star Wars mucking up their encyclopedia. But that's fine - we can take our business elsewhere.
I've always seen this schism as "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" vs "Encyclopedia Galactica".
You should allow the trivial, if you ever want to see the back side of the controversy.
That's because the boundary between trivial and non-trivial is fractal, just like the boundary between the complex numbers inside and outside the Mandelbrot set. You can zoom in indefinitely and the boundary never looks simpler. And that's presuming that people can agree on criteria for what is "too trivial".
Personally, I think that a permissive attitude opens up the most promising avenue for Wikipedia's future: it's potential as a killer social networking application.
Social networking strikes me a great deal like e commerce was in the mid 90s. It's hot, but enthusiasm has outstripped the supply of really good ideas. In the end, the biggest drawback to social networking the the scarcity of interesting people. However, even uninteresting can have interesting things to say if they're writing about something other than themselves, especially when you consider them as a group.
A case in point, consider "Conservapedia", a right wing religious fundamentalist "fork" of Wikipedia. What this really is, is an attempt to capture a community of Wikipedia users, coalesced around a set of editorial policies that wouldn't satisfy most Wikipedia users. Set aside your view of their specific editorial slant for a moment and ask: is it valuable to allow groups to "fork" Wikipedia for their own ends? Does it hurt?
I think the best policy would be to recognize the inevitability, and in some cases usefulness of this. If you are looking at a weight loss article; it would be helpful to know there were forks of the article endorsed by the American Dietetic Association. Although there will never be an end to revert wars, it should be possible to channel some of this energy by recognizing that the views o the American Diatetic Association and Atkins Nutritionals Inc. aren't going converge anytime soon.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"the politics are so bad because the stakes are so low"
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
I left for the same reasons. But:
I honestly wouldn't mind the stringent notability requirements if WP had a system in place to prevent "non-notable" articles from being written in the first place. It's the way the site invites you to first do work and then have your work destroyed that's so maddening -- if you instead had to collect a few sources and then present them to one of the wikicrats for approval to create an article which you would then have a reasonable hope of WP keeping, I think there would be a lot less frustration and enmity among contributors to obscure topics.
Otherwise, it's like a city whose building permit system consists of "build first, then we'll check out your building to see if we need to demolish it."
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I'm quite inclusionist (see my user page), but I can see one good argument for deletionism: Wikipedia doesn't have enough editors to keep our articles in good condition as it is, and having a separate article about every episode of every notable television show ever broadcast would spread our workforce far too thin. As it is, a lot of our articles about popular culture are (to put it politely) in need of improvement.
On the other hand, I contend that Wikipedia's notability standards for things which do not get much mainstream media coverage (eg., webcomics, blogs) are also in need of improvement.
What someone should do is set up a wiki (or, better yet, a whole bunch of wikis) for pop-culture topics. Then people who want to write about Star Trek, the Narnia books, etc, etc could create as many articles as they want. Oh, wait.
Let the market figure it out. If Wikipedia restricts itself, and some other non-restrictive wiki-clone surges ahead in popularity, so much the better.
From recent developments, Wiki's route may actually be to sell themselves off for several billion, so they'll turn into a joke eventually, anyway, like Yahoo Groups did when they brought egroups or whatever it was.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I have made three minor contributions to Wikipedia. The first rewrote one paragraph for clarity and added a paragraph. The third replaced incorrect information.
My second contribution added three-sentences as the 27th bullet of a list. The entire section was deleted 32 minutes later with the comment "Removed trivia section". The "User Contributions" list of the "Administrator" is almost completely filled with entries like "Reverted edit by ???" and a few "Removed ???". Administrators are a group of trusted users with access to certain things not available to other users, for example the ability to delete pages and block users. Should Administrators only have negative contributions?
I believe the information should have been moved to a new article. The list is verifiable facts -- appearances of a car in popular media. Many people put effort into making that list. As a user, I want Wikipedia to contain everything relevant to the subject. How does removing this information improve anything?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
> use a classification system on the articles
Good point, though it would have to be smart about handling links posted by inclusionists, with not merely a "not found" but a "Would you like to change your option?" message
>> Based on the difficulties Wikipedia has had to raise money lately, I'd say most people don't like their stand.
Yes, I've stopped my support (both financial and monitoring of my watchlist) because of this. Not just fictional entities; I've had to defend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis twice against exclusionists, who were demonstrably ignoring Wikipedia's own rules in their quest for notability.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedic resource for everything including our culture and all of the products we produce, all of the creatures that inhabit the earth, their histories, our histories, important events, important people, important theories, pop-culture phenomena that provides important context to all of these events, etc. It's an encyclopedia of everything we can think of, all cross-linked. If we as humans could dump all of the reference we have in our minds into a searchable resource, I guess wikipedia is the closest we can come to that right now. It's invaluable, interesting and important.
In regards to various products and companies that show up on Wikipedia, I actually often prefer going to the wikipedia page about a product I want to purchase, because it's just more informative than all of the PR that shows up on advertisements. It's more logically organized and contains more details readily available, and oftentimes you get links to the companies and to reviews, important news articles about the products (recalls, scandals)...
I don't mind it so much because the benefits outweigh the negative. We now have a resource that catalogs all products we create. Often, corporate websites vanish and get changed around, and old product pages get taken down. Now we have a resource to find information about products we might have lost the manuals to and need contact information or info on errata or who knows what else.
Twinstiq, game news
I love it when journalists pretend to understand wikipedia... deletionism vs. inclusionism is so 2005. -Carl
This really reminds me of the Usenet battles of the 90's -- a relatively small group of admins spending huge amounts of time creating, maintaining, and defending a Kafkaesque series of processes to approve official Big-8 news groups. In the end, the process became so cumbersome and politicized that groups that really should have been created simply died due to the overwhelming red tape and bullying that went on throughout the entire process. The current generation of Usenet administrators now tries to encourage the creation of as many relevant newsgroups as possible using vastly simplified rules.
I personally prefer Wikipedia to stay the way it is. It is also the more trivial things that make Wikipedia a very handy tool. You want to look something up? Who needs Google if there's a good chance you will find info in Wikipedia? Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and as such it contains knowledge. It doesn't matter if that knowledge is trivial or not. What's trivial for one person is important to the next. Who decides what's trivial and not worthy of an encyclopedia?
Leave Wikipedia as it is.
Just my 2c.
I'm sorry, but /. is of notable interest only to a very small segment of society. Therefore this article will be deleted. Please see instead the new article on Britney Spears rehab.
In other news, a website named Slashdot has technology news stories.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
"I'm definitely in the inclusionist's camp... The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information."
See, you're actually a deletionist. You're *exactly* the kind of person who deletes articles I'm *very* interested in keeping. Please stop. You're making Wikipedia worse by doing this.
One of my hobbies is tracking the world of fringe science: claimed perpetual motion, free energy, antigravity devices. There's some *very* interesting stuff there, for the most part ignored and scoffed at and downright crusaded against by the mainstream science community. And yes, it's a world inhabited by a lot of strange people, kooks and fringers and frauds: BUT, like parapsychology and UFOlogy and cold fusion, it has some stuff which is very important to document and could lead to the next huge scientific breakthrough. At the very least this is a cultural history of the underside of science; it's conceivable that it could lead to more.
I don't care about Star Trek information (I can find that elsewhere), but the fringe science stuff is of enormous value. Please do NOT delete this. Mark it as 'probably wrong' by all means, tag it as 'citation needed', write scathing reviews about it on the Discussion page so that people know you're a Defender of True Science, but don't just vanish it into the memory hole. Honestly *describe* what the fringe theories are, who promotes them, when they appeared, and so on.
This is important.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
According to Wikipedia, nobody cares. Not even the inclusionists, which according to Google, is a valid word only according to Wikipedia.
Anyone remember 'Everything' (now Everything2)?
There's an example of a great website turn into utter crap through a policy of speedy deletion. Rather than letting entries stay visible and get moderated through their ratings system, there is now a group of editors that basically watch the new entries list and delete anything that doesn't meet their high standards. This turns off new (and existing non-editor) users that don't want to spend an hour crafting a page of text only to see it deleted thirty seconds after posting it. I have no doubt that is why Everything2 is the abject failure it is compared to Wikipedia.
It also exposes the editor's group to the criticism that they only accept articles written by each other - even if this isn't intentional, it is natural that the editor's group will tend to converge in style, and their articles will not be deleted at the same rate as other users (since they not only know 'the rules', they also write and enforce them).
WoW!
spell grammar typo and style checking could and should be automated
a whole lot of the editorial work of wikipedia should be automated
I've heard people talk about open source projects having this problem - a lack of solid, coherent vision, because there are too many people invested in the project mainly out of "interest". They don't get any cash out of it, so why should they stick around if the project doesn't go the way they want it to and they lose that interest?
The more internal politics in a project, the less stable it becomes.
But the solution is simple as I see it. There are two streams of knowledge relevant for Wikipedia. One is factual, historic, objective. The other is *cultural*. So they should split the project in twain, or at least allow articles to be flagged as one or the other and perhaps make that a democratic public process as well.
I do not believe you can mix the two in the same context. At least this approach should stop people leaving the project just because they're bummed out.
Apparently even exclusionists need to check the Notability criteria :-) This is being discussed here because it was covered in The Economist, and if that's not "the high-quality end of the market" [Wikipedia:RS], I'd like to know what is. The Economist's article [The Economist, 8 March 2008, "Technology Quarterly" p. 3] itself does not, of course, "report... as if it's a new thing." But you didn't cite your sources, so it's not clear what you meant, or if you read the article before objecting.
Wikipedia shouldn't contain non-encyclopedical info about fictional things. If I wiki for "Darth Vader" I should see some basic info about the film character and a LITTLE bit of fiction but NOT how he made "the evil emperor explode in a fury of dark energies". There are other wiki's created for specific subjects, or by fans of fictional worlds. I havent even googled but im dead sure there is a Star Wars Wiki. If im looking for Darth Vader in there, then load me whatever fictional thing you want. But in Wikipedia "dark energies" crap is unneccessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
;)
Wikipedia is currently suffering from an onslaught of restrictive and destructive rules and policies that make it's mandate, that the general public be able to contribute without any prior knowledge or understanding of the rules or policies. All those rules that exclusionists seek to use to manage and maintain control over wikipedia are in the long term, the very tools that will seal it's final destruction.
Only massive protests against the current exclusionist tyranny through general disobedience will save Wikipedia from becoming completely useless to the general public. I recommend that everyone who believes in wikipedia as a community project, go there and do everything that is reasonably possible to let those in power know that anything less then IAR will not be tolerated.
Minority rights, with majority rule. Relevance is entirely at the core of the issue - if it isn't relevant to English-speaking Wikipedians, then it won't be represented as thoroughly in text at Wikipedia's English volume. But, if it is relevant, as apparently Pokemon is, then there will be, and rightly should be, volumes of lore pasted on the intar-webs. It isn't as if one article is threatening to destroy another just because people are more interested in subject A than subject B - both are allowed to go about their merry way, so long as they do not violate NPOV, cleanliness, verification of sourcing, etc... other generally agreed-upon standards.
Resistance is NOT futile, it is Voltage divided by Current.
Why does everyone give Wikipedia credibility? Doesn't the idea of an encyclopedia anyone can change raise suspicion? It is the most ridiculous idea on the planet! Why has it taken off so well? It really does not make sense why it is always within the first few search results in Google and Yahoo. It is rejected and considered "unscholarly" by the academic community.
I was involved with Wikipedia once. Besides the inaccuracies, the whole thing is backed by debating elitists. Many people's ideas and contributions are rejected by these elitists. Wikipedia is dangerous, Orwellian, and holds incredible power over our minds. It is so much worse than the old tale of the New York Times making up stories and correcting them a day later.
Stop debating the future of Wikipedia and debate instead its positions in the search results and its infiltration into academia.
I would like to see them not discriminate as to the trivia nature of submissions (as long as they are not gibberish) but have the editorial/review staff rank each article as to how "verifiable factually sound" scale. They can use some formulation of credentials of submitters/reviewers or some-such to get a rough number. There might even be a variable for "popularity of reference" if that is possible. That way one might select the "level" that one searches and browses at - an Encyclopedia Galactica + Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe combo. To me more is always better as long as I can use some metrics for assessment. Starting to sound more like a Google-type project. Ads would not bother me either as long as I can still have a way (browser or site option) to block or limit them.
Be as you would have the world become.