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.

Comments

It's not just geek stuff

[jlechem]

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.

What Deletionpedia Has and Wikipedia Hasn't

[Spencerian]

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.

Who decides that?

[Moraelin]

The problem is that all the articles become unnavigable messses of shit trivia and geek mastubatry nonsense. The idea is that this should be a usable reference for a general audience, not a competition against other nerds to crap up articles.

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.