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.
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.
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
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.
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.
One example is the YATE (telephony) article. It got deleted by an editor who is tied with Asterix.
The OpenPBX article went the same way (there was a lot of evidence that the deleting editor was tied to Asterisk and was attempting to delete a lot of articles about Asterisk alternatives). It's one of the reasons I've given up editing Wikipedia - I've seen far too many genuinely useful articles be deleted, even though they cite external sources.
I'm convinced the AfD process is utterly flawed because most of the people who take part are either deletionists (who will vote "delete" no matter what), or already connected with the article (who will defend it and vote "keep", and be immediately discredited by the deletionists as being biassed). Unbiassed people just don't have an interest in taking part in this sort of petty politics, so if an article is entered into the AfD process the chances are it's going to get deleted.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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!