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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.