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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.
if it uses mediawiki, it has wiki functionality. just not for you
also. i think it's slashdotted.
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There, fixed that for you.
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. This argument is pretty stupid, given the nigh-unlimited space in their database (Wikipedia themselves have said not to worry about performance).
Somoene's going to come in here and say that the problem isn't the topic, it's that the articles are either original research, aren't verifiable, or aren't "notable" (the latter is the worst argument I've heard), but IMNSHO there is a definite bias, especially among admins, against these types of articles.
Oh, and tell the Wikitruth.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'm certain there is quite a bit of interesting information that's been excised from still-existing topics that should also be explored.
a page listing every chalkboard gag in The Simpsons opening credits
Sad, that's actually a useful list! And surely socially and culturally relevant too.
I find it childish of Wikipedia to actually delete articles that would be interesting to some people at least.
There used to be an article on the notable unix programmer Norman Waslh before they deleted it. They also deleted the article about "Rubbish, King of the Jumble" as not notable despite being a popular cartoon on CITV in the 1990s. If you want your knowledge to stay, use inclusionist wikis instead. I like websites such as Wikia because they have a lot of articles about what Wikipedia calls cruft and also many independant wikis such as mariowiki and bulbapedia. Remember that all Wikipedia articles have been licenced under the GFDL so transwiki as many articles as you can, exploiting the streisand effect.
I have also been blocked from Wikipedia for a year because of a vandal sharing my IP address and the admins won't unblock.
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
They're about to hit 65536 articles.
This is not a normal encyclopedia where having an entry takes up literal space on a page, and technically slows you down when finding the article you're actually looking for. This is the internet, where if you don't care about the many variations on the RX-78 Gundam, you don't have to ever see them. Unless wikipedia is running their fucking site off of an old 20 gig IDE hard drive, there's no reason to be deleting entries that are well-written and useful to someone.
Deletionism is just one big stupid power trip.
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.
That's what Wikia is for - to hold all the fancruft. Wikia hosts the Star [Wars|Gate|Trek|Craft] fancruft. It's almost all popular culture. It's become Wikipedia's slush pile. Wikia takes advertising, but since its demographic lives in their parents' basement, the ads aren't worth much.
Personally, I'd like to kick most of the popular culture out of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia isn't very good at it. Wikipedia is worse at movies than IMDB. It's worse at music than Gracenote. It's worse at fancruft than Wikia. Export the articles for each Pokemon to Wikia and be done with it.
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)
Heretics! How dare you question the great Wikipedia's policies! They are infallible!
*cough*
Maybe we're not ignorant. Maybe we just disagree.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Dismissing all primary sources as unreliable a priori would be silly, if it weren't so intellectually bankrupt.
how to invest, a novice's guide
See if that doesn't convince you of the soundness of Wikipedia's judgments (which, perhaps I should say, are not made by administrators, but hashed out in group discussions to which all Wikipedia editors may contribute).
"Sean Cragg is the coolest dude alive. he thinks. And he sneezes like he is Vomiting :P"
"Normo: A derogatory term to refer a person (Normal) who fears people with mental disabilities"
"Josh Himberg the man. He runs the NHS like its his bisnuss."
These are buried treasure?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a directory of everything.
If you want a directory of everything, try here:
No deletionism!
paintball
Oh, I don't know. I can think of examples, such as one where the subject of a Wikipedia page had to argue with Wikipedia editors about the preferred spelling of her name because she was not a reliable third-party source.
how to invest, a novice's guide
What really gets me about wikipedia is stuff like I Am Rich. Nominated for deletion, the consensus wound up being to keep it. Not to redirect it but to keep it. Then, the nominator, having failed in his attempt to delete it, merges it, despite consensus to the contrary, into App Store. Later, another user comes along and deletes it, saying it's not important".
But wait - it gets better! The same guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) for deletion and fails in his attempt. So what does he do? Merges every episode, save that one, into Talk:List of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episodes. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
Of course, none of this tops Torchic. A front page featured article with 20 paragraphs and 46 citations now reduced to redirecting to a list of pokemon, with 2-3 paragraphs (depending on whether or not a one sentence paragraph counts) and no citations. Amazing stuff.
Basically, the admins of Wikipedia are trying to make WP into a 'legitimate' encyclopedia. Unfortunately, no high school or college prof in their right mind is ever, ever going to allow Wikipedia as a source in any sort of assignment. WP is useful for a quick lookup of something but considering it's about as reliable as Tom Cruise's sanity, anyone who relies on it is getting what they asked for.
So all these attempts to make Wikipedia a 'legitimate' information source are hilarious at best and sad at worst. Being a 'wikipedia admin' is not going to give you academia cred, ever, and it's not going to make for any sort of remotely useful e-peen. These deletions are just people trying, desperately, to make Wiki into something it never will be.
Whatever happened to Wikipedia being 'Everything about Everything?'
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Better check it fast, though-- within one minute of writing it, I notice it's tagged for Speedy deletion!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Which in this case is ridiculuous, Games Workshop created the Warhammer universe and retain creative control over it. It is thus impossible for an authoritative source listing the 'Weapons of the Imperium' to exist independently of GW; in fact, it is precisely the 27 books published by GW which should be considered the reliable source, and anything else is potentially unreliable.
To do otherwise is the same as deleting any entry about Harry Potter because the only source is the author, J K Rowling, or any entry about Star Wars which is based on the 6 movies, since that would not be 'independent' of George Lucas, leaving only the non-Lucas stuff. Clearly mad.
There's not even a compelling bandwidth argument. The notion of whether something is encyclopedic might make sense when drawing a cut line for a print edition, but sending an elaborate 404 page isn't much different than sending a narrow-interest article in terms of bandwidth.
Granted, the supporting media isn't a limiting factor on on-line encyclopaedia like it is on dead-tree version. *but* there is still a limiting resource : netizens with enough interests to maintain the article.
I don't see what Wikipedia loses by keeping around narrow-interest articles as long as they're factual and neutral. If I happen to catalog all of the chalkboard gags, that takes nothing away from anything else. {...} Wikipedia does lose when there's a large number of truly worthless or misleading articles. Those should get the axe. But those are worthless or misleading because their data is absent or inaccurate.
Well, that's exactly where there's a conflict.
If you're the only single person interested in writing a list of chalkboard gags for wikipedia, chance are there won't be anyone else to maintain it and make sure it stay accurate and correct.
When a subjet is *definitely* too narrow, it's best to only leave in wikipedia itself a short summary (as a standalone article or a section in the Simpson's article) explain *what* these gags are, and then reference this list through a link pointing a separate wiki which is specialised in Simpson (I'm not sure but there's bound to be one somewhere).
That's already the case for lots of other stuff, StarWars universe is only described superficially in wikipedia and everything more detailed goes in Wookipedia. Star Trek doesn't need a full standalone page for every single minor caracter ever mentioned in the show : those usually are better living on Memory Alpha.
Even "House M.D." episode are shortly summarized with links to external blog which go into deep exhaustive details criticizing the medical accuracy for absolutely every detail.
Writing an article that mostly nobody does give a damn about doesn't stop at the writing. There's a lot of subsequent maintenance that needs to be done : fixing vandalism, removing spam, keeping it up-to-dat, correcting mistake, etc.
If a subject isn't popular enough, the article is going to rot.
There are already thousand of ultra specialised wikis out-there maintained by hard-core fans that are suffisently dedicated and no-lifers to attend correctly to such article as those articles deserve.
That's also why Deletionpedia plays a capital role : as a temporary graveyard where to store such kind of too much specialised lists, which are too much details and not enough interest for wikipedia. But don't have yet an actively maintained copy somewhere on some hardcore-fan wiki.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In my experience at Slashdot (and I have quite a bit, if you look at my user summary... I think I started in 2001 or 2002), if you present an argument against the general consensus in a way that is thought-out, well-spoken, and most importantly not insulting , you'll get modded up.
Here, though, I think you're missing the point, and that is that I posted in several threads, if not my initial comment (I was the OP), that a) there is a bias in what administrators will vote to delete even if they find other policy reasons to do so, and b) that verifiability itself needs to be opened up so that first-party sources like the ones in the Warhammer article are accepted as sources in certain circumstances.
Let's take a look at what you said.
Your first line exclaimed your shock that many people did not look at (or possibly even know about) Wikipedia policies, and were thus simply going along with the "Slashdot flow". You then proceeded to beat us over the head with it by copying in place the notability guideline.
I made it very clear in my initial comment that I knew about Wikipedia policies (by mentioning three of the most common reasons for deletion); I've also been a Wikipedia contributor for a long time, though not nearly as much as a Slashdot user. I'm fully aware of the varying guidelines that Wikipedia has in place. You made the assumption that I, and those who agreed with me, did not know about the guideline you posted.
This, in itself, is insulting, and probably why those who modded you down did so.
You then proceeded to call those interested in such 'fancruft' topics "poor, oppressed sci-fi trivia cataloguers."
You then went on for a while about how Wikipedia was the be-all and end-all of websites, and how dare we think differently from their policies? (Of course, you shaded this by making the straw man that we want Wikipedia to accept everything we type into it, which nobody in this discussion has said.)
And to finish up, you claimed that "the sobbing ignorance on this whole page is depressing," again insulting those who would argue with Wikipedia guidelines.
I never directly insulted anyone in my initial post, and made my assumption in a positive direction -- that most people reading this article already have a basic grasp of Wikipedia policies, and, like I do, may disagree with them.
In summary, when debating, if you want to win minds over, do not:
If you avoid these things, and present a well thought-out idea (which, if you had written things differently, your initial post could have been), the idea might actually contribute to the discussion, rather than being mixed in with insults and assumptions about those with whom it disagrees.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
The whole point of moderation is to keep a certain non-negative tone of discussion on Slashdot, which, IMHO, is why people keep coming back. For all its faults, the moderation system brings interesting, insightful posts to the forefront while keeping those posts that have degenerated into immature arguments from being seen. This is what has happened to you here.
(PS: It looks like your default posting karma has been taken down to -1. You could probably make a new account if you want to start posting at 1 again.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs