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Debating "Deletionism" At Wikipedia
Ian Lamont writes "In a strange turn of events, the Wikipedia entry for Deletionpedia — an online archive of deleted Wikipedia articles — is now being considered for deletion. The entry for Deletionpedia was created shortly after the publication of an Industry Standard article and a discussion on Slashdot this week. Almost immediately, it was nominated for deletion, which has sparked a running debate about the importance of the Wikipedia entry, Deletionpedia, and the sources that reference it. For the time being, you can read the current version of the Deletionpedia entry, while the Wikipedia editors carry on the debate."
To keep it in check. Maybe two or three.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I really love Wikipedia and I sure hope I'm wrong, but I think we've seen Wikipedia at it's peek. As with many ventures that become successful they move from innovation to stability and with that become widely popular which creates new pressures and brings in other interests, and then in turn leads to the degradation of the service as people squabble about how things should be done. I've seen this with special interest groups and clubs of all kinds. It can be particularly difficult to counter. An organisation either survives these things and becomes stronger for the learning the members have done, or else it succumbs to the storm of shite and fades into insignificance.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If the highlighted phrase is true, then it indicates that the high priests at Wikipedia are totally beyond control and beyond the pale.
There is no more important function in a community encyclopedia than self-criticism. It is part of its foundation, a self-referential examination of its integrity and transparency.
I am really hoping that that line from TFA is false, and that the discussion about deleting the Deletionpedia page from Wikipedia is unambiguously declared invalid by WP editors.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Wikipedia's notability guideline (note it's not actually an official policy) has all sorts of loopholes built in to it to allow a clique of editors to kill something they don't like. In this case, they would argue that Deletionpedia was not really notable in and of itself, but was only notable because of some notable incident which might be worthy of having a separate article (but that article would likely never be written, or would itself be deleted on some other grounds).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. There are too many deletion-happy admins at Wikipedia speedy deleting way too many pages that people have put a lot of effort into. And the deletion review process is a crock. The people who regularly check in on deletion review pages are the same people who delete as many pages as they can, so they will almost always vote for a page to stay deleted. Anybody else who speaks up in support of a page will get ignored because they're not one of the group, and if they're not an active Wikipedia member, they'll get labeled a sock-puppet, whether or not there's any evidence whatsoever that they are not a real person. And in my experience, the admins consider online-sources to be non-notable, and print sources to be too difficult to track down, so it's a catch-22. It makes creating pages on Wikipedia far more effort than it's worth.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
The problem with deleting articles on Wikipedia is that as long as it isn't spam it should honestly have a place in Wikipedia. When it comes down to it, a few kilobytes of information even on every single SourceForge project is unlikely to amount to more than a terabyte or two. I'm all for deleting spam but even small 200-500 word articles on something that isn't spam should be kept. And unlike a print encyclopedia where a few more pages could really add up, I doubt that even a terabyte of HD space or a gigabyte of bandwidth more is going to make much of a difference.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Wikipedia has long ceased to be an accurate source of information, and more of an elitist bureaucracy. I had to call out one particular mod on his discussion page and on the Jonathan Ive page, because he considered my changing of the iMac's introduction from 1997 to 1998 "vandalism" (a change I had to make FIVE times), and it was FINALLY changed.
After that ridiculous incident, I stopped relying on Wikipedia for anything substantive. Its accuracy can not be assured due to the bureaucratic toolboxes that moderate the site.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
People like you are why Wikipedia is a failure if what it had intended to be.
How many people have to find something relevant or useful in order to stop it from being deleted from Wikipedia?
A hundered? A thousand? A million?
Nothing like that. Wikipedia is controlled by those what get off on deleting the work of other's, ignoring 'notability' or 'value' or 'usefulness' or 'relevance' entirely. If these few high priests of Wikipedia deem an article, whether it's about Pokemon or CNN, to be something they have a personal bias against, it will be deleted.
Frankly, it seems like Wikipedia has about as much credibility these days as Fox News.
So, that might be an interesting question: Given the fact that Wikipedia is controlled by a very few people with a very narrow view of what's notable, and use that to control what information is contained in Wikipedia, regardless of the truth, veracity, or notability of that information, should Wikipedia be regarded as a source of useful information, or as a propaganda machine to be avoided at all costs?
It's a painful question to have to ask - at one time, I espoused Wikipedia as, well, one of the best examples of the strengths of the internet.
More and more, however, I'm finding that, given the nature of those in control of Wikipedia... I just don't know anymore.
The problem with that is, what does that gain Wikipedia? Nothing. It loses facts. Granted, they might be badly written, or some might be poorly-researched, but deletion doesn't gain Wikipedia anything. Granted, deleting obvious spam written like an advertisement gains Wikipedia something, but deleting articles gains Wikipedia nothing
Ok, I'll admit, it might save them a few kilobytes of bandwidth or a gigabyte of storage, but honestly, bandwidth and storage are dirt cheap these days.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Well... it's not your statue, remember it.
Deletionist: "Bah, this statue you people created has too many rocks sticking out..."
*Snap*
Artist: "But... those were arms..."
Deletionist: "NO U SUXORS I MAKE BETTR."
I agree with you 100% that Wikipedia has peaked. The quality of most articles is dropping over time, because anybody halfway sane doesn't want to pore autistically over a watchlist of cherished articles to make sure they don't succumb to entropy.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that every dispute on WP is pointless, or that either side could be right on every issue. One bogus argument that's always posed by people who don't want their articles deleted is that it's not a paper encyclopedia, so there's no reason to keep the whole thing under a certain page count. Well, suppose Fred creates an article on his high school band, Fredsband, which only actually consisted of himself and his golden retriever. Every single time a user searches for "golden retriever," one of the hits is going to be the article on Fredsband. Also, when you have an article that's non-notable, it tends not to be linked to any other articles, and you get these little disjoint subsets of WP that are unhealthy. They can become havens for crackpots, or honeypots for spam links.
Find free books.
I will end this post with a quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Notable to you no. Notable to someone who lives in the town, yes. Wikipedia isn't to be judged by how it relates to your own small world. If it is irrelevant to you then leave well alone, rather than trying to force others to conform to your own standards.
If the size of Wikipedia reduces it usefulness to you then the problem is that the search engine you are using is broken. Don't fix a broken search engine by slashing and burning the target of the search until it fits within the engine's limitations. Fix the search algorithm instead.
There seems to be a group of folks who like to "purify" a community website, and to be honest I don't even know what makes these kind of folks tick.
I tend to be an inclusionist/separatist in my attitude toward wiki projects and content. By this I mean that content ought to be given time to develop, even if it seems crazy and off the wall. By being a separatist, I think the mergist viewpoint is full of logical errors and that most calls to merge two articles together are mainly a variant of deletionists who think that such petty articles about obscure topics need to go... but with the "good vibes" that somehow the topic will be covered in some huge all-encompassing article.
There are some things that do need to go on occasion, but I've also seen some of the most creative applications of Wiki technology get developed when somebody pushes the edge of a project and develops something way out of bounds. Indeed some of these extreme projects have become out right independent Wikimedia projects of their own, including things like Wikibooks, Wikinews, and even Wiktionary that all had their origins on Wikipedia until some deletionist decided to kick them off.
This phenomena unfortunately isn't even limited to Wikipedia and the WMF sister projects either, but is widespread in nearly any wiki project I've been involved with. Indeed, I've found that the relatively flat peer-editing model of Wikipedia tends to keep the worst of these issues in check as opposed to much worse sorts of community editing models like the Open Directory Project.
Deleting ANYTHING from wikipedia is stupid. If something is PROVEN to be inaccurate, then that's another story.
Prove it's true. Otherwise it gets deleted. That's not deletionism, that's not fanaticism, it's intellectual honesty. If it's good enough for the last two centuries of scientific and historical academia, it's good enough for me. I don't want an article on how the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe just because no one can prove it's not true.
I've written a couple of articles about places of interest in a notable city in England. They've been deleted each time as the "moderators" don't know the city and think the places are of little note. Talk to the residents and visitors though and it's a different story. While there are submissions worthy of deletion it should *not* be up to the elite, and quite often uninformed, few to judge this.
Silly rabbit
Did you even read what he wrote? He was for keeping it in wikipedia.
If I could rearrange the keyboard, I'd put U and I together.
Leave those new band wikipedia entries alone.
I'm a music writer, and I'm also section editor of an online music/movie reivew website. The section I edit is the "new artist" section (we call it FIND).
My job is to find all the information I can about new bands. Here's the problem:
1. often press releases are insufficient or leave out pertinent, possibly negative information (understandable, that's what p.r. people are for)
2. band websites are often run by labels. labels don't give each artist the same ammount of attention, and often really good bands fall through the cracks because of it. many 'official' band websites are 'under construction' for years
3. myspace is unreliable...it's good to hear some tracks and keep up with show dates but like press release, sometimes important info that a journalist needs to know is left out
wikipedia is an invaluable starting point for the research I do...save the 'indie' band entries!
Thank you Dave Raggett
You're shirking your responsibility as an editor to actually edit pages, in favor of lazily deleting out of hand. That, right there, is what's wrong with the Wikipedia.
I think he agrees with you, in that the notability guidelines are next to useless. If a perfectly useful and valid in all other respects page can be made, who cares if it is notable at all? One could argue that anything meeting the requirements for a source is notable, as the source proves someone somewhere finds it a topic worthy of being notable.
You're not taking that analogy literally enough. Think of the point behind book burnings - to destroy and censor information deemed unfit to be in print or published. Deleting web pages fits this perfectly.
Article history and talk page history are oddly prone to being reset. Particularly by petty admins. Or, let's be honest, moderators.
>Also, there are no "mods" on Wikipedia. There are Administrators, but they don't moderate content except in very unusual circumstances
Read it. Then think about what you just wrote. You know, there is a reason why GP got a +5 and you rate at most a +3.
10 WHY IS WIKIPEDIA SO INACCURATE
20 "Well, let me just delete all the unsourced material to leave it with a balanced summ-"
30 NO STOP DELETING STUFF KEEP IT IN I CANT BELIEVE YOU EVIL DELETIONISTS WANT TO DESTROY ALL MY HARD WORK
40 GOTO 10
I was an editor there for a while until I just couldn't deal with the constant rehashing of "these are the rules/guidelines, they are displayed prominently on all relevant pages" on every single AfD, as well as the stupid drama and the infinite patience the community had with clear vandals ("*USER* IS A FAGGOT NIGGER" = "Please do not make test edits outside of the sandbox"). Users whine about having their 5 page manuscript on their cat's behaviors deleted as a ten second destruction of all their hard work but show total disregard for the infinitely more people patrolling New Pages, AfD, PROD, etc's time being wasted. This is mostly because the system has been built up to have multiple levels of redundant band-aid processes. For example, there are three ways to delete an article:
If it meets certain criteria that apply to a lot of unsuitable pages, you can "speedy delete" it - since you're not supposed to tag anything if it doesn't clearly meet those criteria, deleting the tag itself is an act of vandalism, you're supposed to copy paste a {{hangon}} template and then justify your reasoning on the talk page. This never works: editors misapply the tag repeatedly, users don't bother to read the template or don't have enough time to write out anything detailed because the article will be deleted quickly.
Then you've got PROD, which is speedy-lite: you tag it, give a short justification, and if the thing isn't "challenged" by the article's creator or anyone else by removing it, it's deleted after a set period. If it is, you're supposed to always take it to AfD, but many people will just give up because nominating something for AfD is a 15 step process which involves collecting rare plants and taking them to seven pillars, then casting a spell and defeating a goblin in hand to hand combat. People don't browse the PROD queue, so the only people that end up taking off the tag are...surprise! The original creator of the article! PROD is essentially just a series of bets that the original creator won't delete the tag and take it to AfD before the time expires, and the admin isn't tired enough from deleting crap all day that they'll agree with the justification.
And then there's Articles for Deletion, which consists halfway of stuff that should be handled through either of the two above processes (if they worked properly), short vanity articles that end up having one or two "delete" comments and then are closed, or spiral into large debates in which each editor's opinion is supposed to not be a "vote", but if the closing admin rejects a pure tally, always seem to agree with toward the most simplified, spoon-fed argument. As mentioned above, nominating one is a rather tiring and complex set of edits which involves making three separate template changes on three separate pages, putting in a arbitrary "category" that is never useful to anyone, and writing a hopefully detailed summary of why it should go poof at the same time. This is "Web 2.0", right? Why can't I click a box or a dropdown? Is this a modified "security through obscurity" thing where deletionism is purposefully put through so many different steps that nominating a sequence of articles (never try to nominate more than once at a time, the syntax is a nightmare) is discouraged with the time-wasting complexity of it?
Plenty of this relies on templates and user-mediated process that would be made completely moot overnight if the MediaWiki developers got off their asses and started working on and implementing features that go beyond "flagged revisions" such as tagging articles for deletion via a tab and dropdown menu, then putting "speedy" articles in a queue where one or two other editors give it a check to make sure it's properly tagged and the article goes poof (without an administrator needin
Not necessarily. Notability could be based on number of citations by other wikipedia pages, by external pages (check the referrer) and number of visits by distinct IPs. I've seen a page on Wikipedia deleted that I used to regularly give out to people for background information on the subject (I actually created my account specifically to vote against deletion - when the vote failed, there was another vote two weeks later saying 'ignore all of the people who voted against, they're sock puppets!' which then passed since no one who voted against the first time was allowed to vote the second). To my mind, any page that is useful to someone other than its creator should not be deleted unless it contains material that it is illegal or unethical for Wikimedia to host.
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