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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Excellent. It took fewer than 20 comments to go from "interesting discussion of an important if abstract philosophical difference" to "ad hominem attack on anyone who disagrees with me". No wonder human discourse is so rarefied and refined these days!
"And furthermore, you're ugly!" Yeah, that rhetorical flourish really adds to the logical cohesion of a point.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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...
Um... no. The point of Wikipedia is to make a free encyclopedia that can be referred to easily. If Wikipedia can cover things that a normal encyclopedia can't, well, that's just a happy side effect of its method of expansion. As Jimbo Wales has stated many times, the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia (and add garbage or trivia) is a means to an end, not the goal itself.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
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.
Verifiable reliable secondary sourcing isn't exactly a "policy du jour" on Wikipedia, and it's generally the best way to determine the notability of a subject. Easily the most frequently deleted types of articles are spam/advocacy articles, self-bios, and articles about garage bands. In all three cases, the articles are often placed in hopes of increasing the fame of the author/subject, and in all three cases, sources are rarely if ever provided, hence the articles' eventual removal.
If you have an article topic that is well-researched and well-sourced, by which I mean the subject has received attention in reliable mainstream media, then write the article and cite the sources. But just remember that you don't own that article, and it will be ultimately judged by the Wikipedia community to determine its suitability for inclusion (or modification, merging with another article, etc.).
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.
If there's no such mechanism, the fucking commercial interests and spammers will take over, just as they have in the newsgroup, mailing list and email worlds.
If the material is still available, it can still be accessed by those who want it, just as you can set the level of replies you want to read on slashdot, so no one can freak out about "censorship". Sure it may lead to second-class-citizen kind of article, but, get real, these are articles, not people. It also avoids the problem of having the moderators or whatever they're called not being accountable.
For what it's worth, there has long been such a practice in writing e.g. ship's logs. If you want to make a correction, you're not allowed to obliterate the original entry. You draw a single line through it and add the new entry below. That way, the original is available for future review and evaluation against the replacement entry.
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?
I'd agree with that; just because something's "trivial" doesn't mean it's not credible. The compromise is to allow articles on anything, but to hold all articles to the same editorial standards.
I do think that Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a valid source for reference material in itself, but I don't think any other encyclopaedia should be either; on the upside, the last copy of the EB that I saw didn't have a list of external authoritative sources attached to each article.
If that is their only concern, then the simplest solution is to divide Wikipedia up into "Knowledge and Culture" and "Subculture and Trivia" sections and then give the job of policing the areas back to those who have the respective opinions. "Inclusionists" can monitor the sections they want included and "deletionists" have the stuff they don't feel important under it's own heading where they can ignore it.
Exactly. Many of the worse pages on Wikipedia have been edited by a handful of people and haven't been even been glanced at by someone who knows what their doing (e.g. can spell) or aren't horribly biased. Fan articles are particularly bad, as they tend to be written by uncritical fanatics who are more interested in gushing about their chosen subject and conveying everything they know about it and their interpretation of things. Notability, accuracy, neutrality and references barely get a look in. You want bad articles? Try browsing some of the professional wrestling or anime articles. They'd make you weep.
Each and every one of those pages are the kind of dross that gives Wikipedia a bad name for being an amateur collection of random opinions. They are the noise that is in danger of drowning out the knowledge and there simply isn't the people to tidy them. Far better they were removed.
Here, I'll find some for you:
No offense to the guy, of course - just puling an example of a lame Wikipedia article...
Even better is this one:
It's not as though Wikipedia is starved of bandwidth or storage space, so why can't it be a repository of all sorts of nuggets of informative gold? Why do things need to be reported in "mainstream media" to be worthy of inclusion? Slashdot's not mentioned on the nightly news or in newspapers, or even in many magazines, so does this mean it should be deprived of an entry in Wikipedia? Did Wikipedia have an article on itself in its early days, before it received "mainstram media" attention?
Uh, an article that gets deleted and resurrected a dozen times? Shouldn't that indicate that there is something fundamentally wrong with the process? Maybe we need a three-delete rule - or better still a one-delete rule? If an article gets resurrected it never gets deleted again for x years?
The paid moderators are a must, as long as they are prevented from adding new content (C.O.I). But I don't expect that this will ever happen in Wikipedia, which has almost run its course. If nothing else, Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of the wiki concept, but its inability to self regulate in weeding out sociopaths, POV warriors and petty authoritarians has led to the departure of many good contributors, who simply can't stand dealing with some of the obsessive and Machiavellian loons who populate the site. There's no better sign of the downfall of Wikipedia than the endlessly increasing sets of rules and the endless discussions over them. I guess they just lost sight of the fact that Wikipedia should be structured to serve its users and not the obsessive people who have made it their hobby. Secret email lists, cabals, evidence of admin dishonesty oversighted, rules bent to suit the ruling clique, etc.
But it's rare to see something so novel work perfectly the first time. No doubt someone will realize that there is money to be made in providing a better mousetrap, or at least one that doesn't so obviously reek of bongwater as Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia, but we can do better.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
"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."
Yup, there are some interrelated problems from my point of view.
I think a possible solution would be to leave stuff in, but somehow promote "good" articles to some sort of "official article" status.
I gave up trying to add to wikipedia a long time ago due to info I added getting deleted. Granted, I never added or tried to add complete essay articles. I added more like bulleted info on areas I knew something about and where I could find no info on the matter on the site.
My take is that some info is better than no info. And it might inspire someone to add a bit to it and things can grow.
So I came across Citizendium again the other day and decided to check if I could perhaps add something there. No, they only want complete articles it seems. That is not my bag. They are going to get nothing from me. I would like to contribute, but they are ruling my contributions out before I begin. Which, I guess is better than after I have spent and wasted time trying to contribute.
( http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Main_Page )
I think the dual status idea could help both sites.
Info can be added and remain even if not up to par. (Not talking seriously inaccurate here, just not complete and finished articles.) It can stay this way as long as it takes. When and if an article reaches a certain level of quality or completeness, it can get some sort of official article status.
Give viewers a toggle switch to limit views to only official articles should they so choose.
all the best,
drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Sure, there's a lot of stuff which would have to go because people read it or heard it offline and can't be bothered to find a dead-tree citation for the article, but if you want an encyclopedia to be authoritative, "citation or it didn't happen" is the way to go.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The problem is far too much conservatism on Wikipedia in general, but that it is inconsistent. You take the article on "Jimmy Wales". It says he was born August 7, 1966, but where is the citation? Stuff like that gets by while other uncited stuff is deleted because the Wikipedia trolls^H^H^H^H editors are on a deletion binge.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Bingo. One of the original motivations for the project was "Wiki is not paper". Originally they wanted the inclusive h2g2 approach. The current debate is one of image - if it is diluted by lots of borderline articles. Only a wikipedian could think that dodgy articles would somehow damage the "reputation" of the site, but that's a digression.
As the problem is simply one of image, create two brands, say "Wikipedia Core" and "Wikipedia Fringe". Keep everything, but only elevate articles into the core on some sort of vote / consensus. Keeps both sides happy. The inclusionists get every bit of trivia every recorded, and the deletionists get their pristine image of a "pure" encyclopaedia. Given that the project was initiated as a response to the problems of paper-based encyclopaedias I'm surprised nobody within the project has suggested this.
Seems vaguely reminiscent of slashdot around the time they introduced moderation. Reading the Fringe could someday be seen as browsing at -1.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
Yep. Some basement-dweller ruined Wikipedia for me. I spent (a little too much) time fleshing out a fictional article only to see it deleted because it didn't meet that kid's purity ideal. The article wasn't hurting anyone. Its presence didn't degrade the rest of the content - particularly not when you consider the lists of Pokemon and anime characters that are left alone - but one kid on a power trip got off on ruining it.
Nuts to Wikipedia. Until they get things under control, I want nothing to do with it and certainly won't be donating to its status quo.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Agreed, the deletionists really do seem like griefers or trolls.
What I like about Wikipeida is I can find info about virtually anything on there, from obscure books to general scientific knowledge. The deletionist jihad against fictional information is exactly the same as if doctrinaire librarians went through the library with torches burning all novels because fiction lacks notability. Says who? And again, it costs a library money and space to store books but new articles in Wiki cost damn near zero.
It seems like the smartest way to handle this is to use a classification system on the articles, that way if you only want stodgy conservative wiki, you set your filter and there you go. You'd never stray into the wider wiki unless by clicking a link from a stody article.
I just find the whole unilateral nature of the deletionist thing so arrogant. It's no different from the various religions when they get into sectarian pigfights and one side starts burning the books (and sometimes members) of the other side.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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?
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.
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
While the Economist article is not bad, The Charms of Wikipedia, a recent article by Nicholson Baker, of "Vox" fame, is the better of the two.
In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists--some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the "web-comic articles purge of 2006." A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: "I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others' sand castles." Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: "'Notability purges' are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors." Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: "Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you've destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face."
...
As the deletions and ill-will spread in 2007--deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, Web sites, lists, people, categories, and ideas--all deemed to be trivial, "NN" (nonnotable), "stubby," undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic--Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia's history, told a Canadian reporter: "The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow."
Apologies to Mr Baker about quoting slightly more than my personal standard concerning fair use, but it couldn't be more pertinent to the discussion at hand.
The core problem with deletionism is deletion itself. There is a certain totalitarian satisfaction available in the deletion of something one doesn't like. Furthermore, it's a complete failure to approach the situation from a systems theory perspective: the only viable long-term test of quality is to allow the stub to sit there and see what comes of it (if any accepted topic once existed at the same preliminary state within the spectrum of "doubtful", "outside chance", or "maybe never").
Worse, once a potentially viable stub is deleted, editors show up to make additions, and find history erased. Resurrect the article from scratch, it will likely be deleted again (with the added prejudice of the previous deletion(s)).
On the other side of the coin, there are many articles at Wikipedia below the standard that Google should be indexing. Perhaps there are only a million English articles at Wikipedia worth inclusion in the Google index.
Deletion is hugely problematic as an enforcement mechanism in a society built around consensus and incremental improvement.
The problem with having a large quarantine area of content not yet ready for prime time is that no one wishes to invest in vandal patrol over a vast wasteland where only 10% of the content is likely to graduate to core. Make it such that the only way for an IP-based user to arrive at these pages is type to the full name of the page in the Wikipedia search bar. Users who log in can set a preference so that links from core to non-core are functional. IP-based users would be regarded as full users during an article edit (the search box that precedes article creation and edit previews).
I've been contemplating whether the genius of Wikipedia consists of inverting the normal social order. In most human social structures, the peons are fenced off into sandboxes of the trivial, while the only the eminences and power-users can "submit" to