Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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.
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!
I have to agree. I often explicitly search wikipedia for reasonably structured information on neo-culture subjects like characters in TV shows, books or cartoons.
Much of wikipedias usefulness stems from it's inclusivity; if any given subject had to have a related doctorate, we'd have to wait 50 years until academia decides to catch up.
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.
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.
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.
Don't misunderstand the playing field; "the admins" (or as some might say the evil cabal) do not have the right to remove insignificant articles, nor can they change the rules/strictly enforce them to their whims. Wikipedia operates on the idea of reaching a consensus among good-faith users who understand the current mechanisms.
What frustrates me lately is the attitude of a large number of editors who follow the mantra "Either facts are sourced or I delete them on sight, and if an article has fewer than x sources, it gets the axe one way or another". To me, that's a destructive attitude and non-condusive to covering the wide spectrum of knowledge.
And also, how do you determine what is "trivial" and what isn't? I am all for the inclusion of every bit of human knowledge.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
This would be an excellent idea. There could be a number of ways on rating articles, from the number of times accessed (likely to have a number of false positives in amusing trivia and miss esoteric encyclopaedic articles) or a "dig" style thumbs up/thumbs down rating for encyclopaedic relevance. Perhaps the best would be a 1 to 5 rating from "trivia" to "core encyclopaedic contents". This would allow changes as history progresses, e.g. cold fusion would have started somewhere in the middle and tailed out to trivia. Who knows what might happen in the future....
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.
To be semantic, every trivial piece of human knowledge includes the contents of my room at 2:47 AM. There's no real need for that information.
To be fair, the problem is with reliability. If I add something that I heard once (in the 'sum of human knowledge'), there's no way for someone to use that for research or even to check it back to someone reliable to make sure I didn't make the whole bloody thing up. Unless I can go to the library, grab the book and say "oh, wow, this is exactly like Wiki said it was! oh and look, hundreds of pages going into depth on the same topic! now I'm off to write a paper!", the information exists in a Schrodinger-like state of verifiable purgatory where citing it is a huge risk if I don't know anything about it in the first place.
There's really a reason that if you go grab a book off a shelf it has a giant bibliography full of references to other books. It's an implicit certification of accuracy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I agree, the massive amounts of geek-centric info available on wiki (Game myth/cosmology, sci-fi characters, exhaustive WH40K fluff etc. etc.) are some of the things I visit *the most* on wikipedia.
Machine9dotNet
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.
Deciding on what is 'trivial' is, I hope you'll agree, not so important as deciding what is 'biased'. Advertising is clearly a form of bias. I see no problem (other than logistics) with 'trivial' items sitting in the background, but any item that carries a bias (either way) should be 'neutralised'. You can either take that as in it's literal meaning or that used by rat catchers...
Way 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?
I'd recommend you start your project with one of Wikipedia's database dumps, then go through and start undeleting articles. Your homepage can even consist of links to good articles deleted from Wikipedia which were recreated in Includipedia. You can watch Wikipedia's AFD boards and contact the users defending their articles, suggesting that they recreate them on Includipedia and link to Includipedia in the footnotes of relevant articles from Wikipedia.
If you play it right, you might possibly even give Wikipedia deletionists something to recommend to those people disillusioned with their favorite articles getting deleted.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
The problem if you don't delete some pages is :
* Wikipedia will be quickly filled with balantant advertising, wanabe celebrities and marginal and hardly proved theories (this is alas sadly often already the case)
* Marginal entries are rarely visted, so they don't evelove that much (practice show that the most intersting pages are those which are often visited). Marigina entries are also at risk of being quiclky filled with spam and advertisement, in one word they don't get enough eyballs to be be correctly mainted. One solution to this is to merge marginal entries when this is possible to enhance their audience.
* They tend to lower the signal/noise ratio as if WP is filled with everything and anything important fact don't naturally evolve.
On the contrary allowing more entries tend to attract a larger public, but which public ? as in WP = Community = its language (in the boroader sens of the word), this community maintain it and make it evolve. So at the end of the day the question is : does WP want to be a large source of trivia about anything and everything or rather a more "elitist" society which bring a real added value to your knowledge.
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.
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.
the problem with this approach is that there is a lot of citation that does not exist in the digital realm. There are plenty of obscure in print citations that could be made to what would be considered reliable sources, but because it's not on the internet somewhere, it will get deleted.
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.
Yeah, Wikipedia was dead to me the day I went looking for information and discovered that someone had deleted the page because it wasn't important enough.
The cake is a pie
Here's a classic example: the band The Protomen. They're very well known for a non-mainstream band, but ask geeks anywhere and they know who they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=The_Protomen Yet, The Protomen article keeps being deleted because of one editor/admin who doesn't know who they are, then they set their wikibots who also magically have admin status to go around reverting edits and deleting random pages they don't like. This is a classic example of letting a few narcissistic individuals with an agenda to push have total power over information and content.
The problem is simple: Instead of figuring out what was wrong with the article, you conclude that it's the admins' fault that the article was deleted. There's no massive conspiracy; the articles just should have bare minimum of facts that tell us why we should care.
Let's hit Special:Undelete and see what was in the most recent version. Hmm, "American progressive rock band from Nashville, Tennessee who create music based on the popular video game series from the late 1980s, Mega Man. They have released one (self-titled) album as of yet and are notable for converting the storyline of the Mega Man video game series into a rock opera." List of members. Three external links (Myspace, official home page, interview with The Escapist).
Now, please read your comment again. Then read the article contents, quoted in full above. You may notice it misses one thing - specifically, the claim that they're "very well known" or that any geeks know them. Instead, the article comes across as "We've made one CD. And we have a MySpace." There's bazillion of garage bands that can make the same claim. I'm not a genius of persuasive writing, but I don't think the article quite communicates the greatness of the band (through neutral claims, of course).
Now, let's compare this to what the criteria say.
The article has now been protected against deletion. There are old deletion debates from June 2006 and yet again from June 2006. Note that our notability criteria have changed a bit since those days and these days and these days the verifiable sources are among the most revered of tools you can use to prove the notability. So, if the band really meets the notability criteria, please do bring it up on Deletion review.
And I do mean it. Please do bring it up on Deletion review instead of spinning fanciful conspiracy theories about the Admini
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.