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Saving Geek Lore and Other Wikipedia Castoffs
Ian Lamont notes an Industry Standard feature on Deletionpedia — a collection of 63,559 deleted Wikipedia pages that range from "vanity entries" or obscure points of reference to heavily edited topics that Wikipedia editors eventually deemed fan fiction, inadequately sourced, or otherwise lacking. Looking through the collection of removed articles, it's apparent that entertaining minutiae are often the target of Wikipedia editors: "Geek lore seems to be a particular target for deletion, with the deleted page of the month a comprehensive guide to 'Weapons of the Imperium (Warhammer 40,000)'. Deletionpedia provides links back to the Wikipedia deletion discussions, which are a lesson in magnification of minutiae; the Warhammer page was removed due to philosophical disagreements over what can be considered credible source material, while a page listing every chalkboard gag in The Simpsons opening credits spent 691 days on the site before being deleted as 'fancruft.'" Note that while Deletionpedia uses MediaWiki, it doesn't have wiki functionality — readers can't alter or update archived entries.
I'm certain there is quite a bit of interesting information that's been excised from still-existing topics that should also be explored.
Take a look at this article. Half of those lodges get articles deleted all the time and that article itself gets nominated for deletion all the time. Yet articles about Penny Arcade while a very funny cartoon I enjoy stays? WTF, there notion of notable is quite honestly fucked. Yes there is a general article about Freemasonry but each state's Grand Lodge have a long history that is often interlinked to the founding of that state. My own state of Utah has a very long history with freemasons and the Grand Lodge of Utah has a very interesting histroy that can be verified quite easily. So a Lodge with 100+ years of history isn't notable but a comic strip is? Sorry but PA isn't Garfield or Peanuts. It's nothing but a popularity contest and the people with the most amount of time to waste win the notable contest unless and admin (biased quite heavily) does something.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
A focus.
Smaller wikis tend to have a very specific focus and, thus, rational reasons to keep or delete. I work on the Battlestar Wiki, which obviously needs an article on Commander Adama but wouldn't keep articles on James Kirk on it...that's the Memory Alpha wiki's job.
Even Deletionpedia focuses on one thing...and does it so well, it doesn't need editing!
Wikipedia is trying to catalog the world as a general encyclopedia. But paradoxically they edit out things from the world.
The result? A reason to post elsewhere.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
The author Nicholson Baker wrote an interesting piece on the Deleteopedia earlier this year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet
Worth a read if you've not seen it.
For every item deemed not notable on Wikipedia, is some future dissertation topic for some grad student. Remember, nobody knows what is notable in any given time period until long after that time period is past.
So you don't like it, then?
The point is that it detracts from my ability to read about things that matter in the real world.
The whole point of an encyclopedia is to have the most pertinent information on a topic packed into a brief article. Information about anime is 99% of the time irrelevant to an article that isn't about anime. Whether you like the stuff doesn't figure into that.
If not wikipedia, where can I go for geek lore and fancruft? Is there a true "Geek Encyclopedia" out there?
So exactly how does removing an article from Wikipedia help improve other articles? I'm trying to follow the logic here, an article on "My Little Pony" will automatically insert "shit trivia and geek mastubatry(sic) nonsense" into unrelated articles? Wow I had no idea that Wikipedia was so fragile! I also didn't realize that those dang Wikipedia pages could get crowded like that. I thought you could just search for things but if you have to flip through them like a regular encyclopedia then that would be irritating. Thanks for few more reasons not to use Wikipedia!
You also say "Also, im(sic) just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."" But isn't the real beauty of Wikipedia is that it's the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit? So why don't you edit those offending articles and remove the "mastubatry(sic) nonsense?" Oh right because they were put there by other sci-fi articles and the editors are powerless to remove them except by deleting the original article. Now I got it.
Well I think I speak for everyone when I say I'm glad those hard working Wikipedia editors are there to protect all of us from information that you don't approve of. After all Wikipedia is really the free encyclopedia for gad_zuki!
Often it boils down to "I don't know much about this topic and I don't care about it, thus it's irrelevant". Thus you end up with entire fields of topics automatically getting marked for deletion - as happened to webcomics a couple months ago, with some fairly well-known comics getting tossed out for being not notable, while a page about the TV station the main character of a short-lived 80s TV series worked for survived more than thirty revisions over five years. I agree that Max Headroom was cool, but Network 23 didn't really have that big an impact in our culture, even the popular one.
The problem is that the Wikipedia editors and admins are still human beings with imperfect knowledge and opinions and while some people would say that The Simpsons or Schlock Mercenary have or had actual cultural impact* others would note that they only read SciFi books for entertainment and they had a perfectly fine childhood without ever telling someone to have bovines. Thus that article about neologisms coined by The Simpsons is only relevant to some fans and not notable -- but nobody dare touching that alphabetical listing of all characters found in the Foundation series! And then it devolves into a discussion over who has the bigger, er, childhood and thus gets to be right.
I have no idea to improve upon this situation. Correctly judging what's notable and what isn't requires superhuman wisdom and cultural insight. And the wisdom of the crowds only gets you so far, especially with a small crowd.
* E.g. The Simpsons by inventing new - although often short-lived - slang and Schlock Mercenary through the rules found in the in-universe book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates, some of which have since found their way into the wild.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Just the other week, I was wondering about bash.org (which has been down for quite some time) and looked it up on wikipedia. It was deleted because it "is not covered in reliable published works". But if you check out the deletion log, you'll see in it a user named Bit trollent that has "vowed to destroy Wikipedia" by voting to delete articles. *sigh*
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Well, so basically it should only contain the list of Britney Spears and Back Street Boys songs, plus the quick answers to high school tests? That's what the general audience is interested in.
Is quantum physics supposed to even be there, if we're talking about general audiences? As someone who had a genuine passion for physics, I can tell you that that shit is hard. It's abstract thinking at its finest. You can imagine bodies sliding down slopes in your head, or gases expanding in tubes, you can even picture relativistic stuff, but quantum mechanics pretty much requires you to not even try. Any kind of RL intuition you might apply to it is actually _the_ source of misunderstandings and getting it wrong.
So how many people genuinely need that on Wikipedia? For 99% of the population it's something they'll never really need, and would need more effort to understand than they're willing to put into anything. Some people probably aren't even wired to ever understand it. And I don't even necessarily mean that in an elitist or demeaning way, they're just wired for a whole other class of endeavours.
And whoever really needs to understand Hawking radiation, already has better sources than that. (And isn't that the mantra anyway? It's not a primary source, you need to check everything you read on Wikipedia.)
So is it a kind of geek masturbatory exercise too? It's most definitely _not_ for a general audience.
Seems to me like there isn't that much difference. If you don't want to read something, be it quantum stuff or the list of everything Bart wrote on the blackboard, don't look at those pages, right? It's not like someone drags you kicking and screaming to those pages.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I honestly don't get the whole hate that Wikipedia seems to have against sci-fi and geeky topics... I think it's an attack by people who figure that if they have too much of it that Wikipedia won't resemble an old media encylopedia.
It's not just sci-fi and geeky topics. It's the whole "low-brow" and "high-brow" battle that has always existed. It's pretty annoying, but anytime people add information that others consider "low-brow" (which happens a lot with pop-culture topics), people complain that it's diminishing wikipedia.
I personally believe Wikipedia's strength is in how it contains information about a large number of topics traditional encyclopedias wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. All that it needs is one editor that is interested in the topic and suddenly the article pops up. Nothing else comes close as a one-stop source of preliminary information or as a method to quickly satisfy your curiosity on a topic (if used correctly as a starting point in your research, even the issues of article vandalism and incorrect information are unimportant. You'll get the information as a starting point and sort out what's correct and what's incorrect later on in your research. Just don't use it as your sole source, which applies to anything really).
I'm glad to see somebody else agrees with me that filtering of information is a step in the wrong direction for wikipedia. As long as the articles are properly organized, if you're not interested in a particular section, you can just skip it.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Also, im just sick of reading a general topic, something unrelated to sci-fi and then seeing links like "He also shares the name of a popular Anime character" or "Nuclear aggression was also a topic on this episode of Star Trek."
Absolutely.
A definite pet peeve of mine is the cancerous In popular culture sections that sprout out of innocent articles of all kinds. Invariably they are a random mess of trivia informing us where this subject has been mentioned in various editors' favourite music/tv show/film. Of absolutely no interest to anyone else, completely unreferenced and unverifiable, and of zero significance to the actual subject of the article. It's almost as if people believe that some subjects require a passing mentioned by Homer Simpson to back up their notability.
Wikipedia aims to be a source for all human knowledge. This includes rather a lot of things you could find "trivial" or "unecyclopedic" ... and it wouldn't be worse for including it.
From my point of view, the worst modes of failure for wikipedia would be to give me wrong information, and to not have information I seek.
Deletionists have no impact either way on the first point, but directly oppose the second one. Having an article I will never look at is a much more benign problem than having deleted one I wanted to see.