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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."
More of a social concern about having too many articles; monitoring articles takes time, and having articles on topics that they consider worthless, but that still need to be monitored, causes the amount of eyes watching each article to decrease. This allows, in theory, more vandalism to sneak by, and decreases the average quality of Wikipedia articles, or so I've heard
You may want to read the Deletionism page on Metawiki for more info.
Yes, I think there is not too much harm done this way. There are already importance scales, there is a release version. It's not like Wikipeda is a mess of various data having no structure.
Ezekiel 23:20
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?
The most reasonable justification I've heard is "the criteria for notability is verifiability". That is, wikipedia doesn't need unverifiable articles because thanks to vandalism, there's a good chance they aren't true.
Therefore, the only articles wikipedia wants are those that can be verified. They also prefer verification come from someone credible - such as a newspaper, magazine, academic journal, etc - rather than something like a blog post which could easily be fabricated by vandals.
If I start a Wikipedia page about myself saying "Mike1024 is a well known athlete, porn star and rock band guitarist" it should probably be deleted because, though all those things may individually be true, I have no evidence they are true.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
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.
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Me too, which is why I've started includipedia, an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia.
My thoughts exactly
i will just remind you and everyone else here of the webcomics debacle. the biggest problem in my mind here are
a) why only let citations on mainstream media count? is the imdb mainstream? is slashdot mainstream? is technorati mainstream? is the register? there are countless good sources on the internet, why only trust the "old" ones?
and
b) the above-mentioned policy is everything but strict. search for a pokemon, ANY pokemon on wikipedia. search for a character, ANY character of the simpsons, or family guy, or whatever is "hot" among geeks on wikipedia. wikipedia HAS a geek-slant, it is a geek-encyclopedia and - at least in the foreseeable future - will stay like that. but some articles get deleted, because the admins don't think they're notable by the admin's standard. that's simply not right.
of course, ads and egotism needs to be deleted, BUT the biggest problem on wikipedia is that there is no way to achieve a real consensus. they admins, wiki-geeks and those with simply too much time on their hands will always be able to push their views against those wo are interested in certain topics, but cannot sacrifice that much time for it to be treated well in the wikipedia. that's an inherent flaw in the wiki-system, and fuck knows if there's a solution to that dilemma.
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?
I don't know why the parent was modded troll. I used to be very active on Wikipedia, but gave up after getting one two many things I'd worked hard on deleted by power-tripping admins.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
Your link doesn't work. This link does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth
The problem is that you use the "auto-link" url style. This adds a slash to the end of the link, which results in an error. I had this problem myself a while ago.
It's already easy to sort through. Go to the article on the subject you wish to read about, and don't click on links to articles that don't interest you. Pokemon character articles do not jump out and grab you and make you read them when you are trying to research high energy particle physics. And vice versa, if Pokemon is what floats your boat.
On top of that, there's a very useful category system.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Basically deletionists view with bad eyes everything that is fiction related, and dismiss it.
Which is really a very silly position to take.
*troll mode on* What's next, are they going to delete all pages on the Christian Bible? *troll mode off*
Less trolly, I know for a fact that Britannica has entries on Greek Mythology, and Shakespearian characters.
Is fiction only acceptable after a certain period of time?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'd also like to add that most of the deletionist notability policy, which in my opinion is highly subjective and subject to administrator whim and fancy, is centered around what they are able to find through google hit searches. They don't seem to take any consideration that something might have been notable through means that do not exist in a documented form on the internet.
There have actually been a fair number of sites that have appeared because of wikipedia/wikibooks excluding information. There have been tons of wikia sites created to hold all sorts of info that was deleted from wikipedia. And after wikibooks decided to delete half their content and ban most books about gaming, most of it was moved to other sites, like StrategyWiki or egamia. For other non-gaming related stuff, there's also (not sure if they could handle a /., but) WikiKnowledge, though they haven't gotten very big.
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.