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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."
So that's like... meta-deletion?
The politically correct term is "Intelligent Unpublishing".
Is the website notable? Has the mainstream media reported on it? Does it meet the requirements listed in WP:WEB, the guideline for website notability?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(web)
This should be all anyone needs to know to !vote on the issue. There is no 'special pass' for things that have been on Slashdot, or are about Wikipedia.
But what if an article should ever be deleted from Deletionpedia?
I sense the LHC is becoming redundant here!
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
So you're saying that all you have to do is pass some 'notability' threshold, or buy the necessary media coverage (don't bore me with claims of journalistic integrity), and you're done?
Great. We all know what kind of site Wikipedia has evolved into, we just haven't settled on the price.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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
It needs to be deleted, just to ensure that it ends up in Deletionpedia.
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).
Make an Includopedia and a Deletepedia. That way everyone is happy.
The debate is over. The result of the discussion was keep. See talk page.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Wikipedia has competition. The problem is pagerank. Google calculates pagerank on the basis of the site, not individual pages. Wikipedia has a ridiculously overinflated page rank -- especially when you consider many individual entries are total crap.
In most cases there are better quality pages available, however the Wikipedia page will be in the top 10 of search results, no matter how good or bad it is.
It's Google that needs competition. That will stop monopolies in a number of areas -- not just Wikipedia.
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.
We apologise again for the fault in the deletion. Those articles mentioning the deletion of the articles that have just been deleted, have been deleted.
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.
If you saw some of the absolute crap that comes in as new articles on an hourly basis, you would quickly see the merit of deleting at least a few things. I've lost count of how many articles about garage bands that formed a month ago, childish "_____ is the coolest person ever!!!", vanity articles, and loony diatribes that I've marked for speedy deletion.
Well... it's not your statue, remember it.
The whole debate is caused - IMHO - by having a bad versioning system as the Wikipedia's backend. Deleting and undeleting whole articles should be as transparent and open as deleting and undeleting paragraphs within an article. The history feature provides such transparency. Currently, instead, deleted articles are zapped: inaccesible, unreadable, unrecoverable. Allowing history access (and an option in "advanced search") for deleted articles would make this issue a lot simpler.
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.
A couple years ago a wiki page was created about a friend of mine who ran a website, in addition to a wiki page about the website itself. It appeared to have been made by some fan who never made themselves known.
It wasn't long of course before these deletion-happy admins nominated it for speedy deletion. The decision was proving to be unanimous. And, I for one didn't blame them. A wiki page for an administrator of a website seemed rather silly.
My friend agreed. He didn't feel that he really should be on the site and decided to go to the deletion page and weigh in on the issue. He told the wiki admins who he was and that he wanted the page deleted thinking this would solidify the consensus that had for the most part already been reached. I think the quote was something along the lines of "I don't want to be on your gay-ass site, so I'd appreciate it if you just hurried up and deleted it before I leave you all with a fist-sized, mushroom-shaped bruise on all of your faces."
Not surprisingly, all of the admins had a change of heart and all decided they wanted to keep the page.
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 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.
The existence of, members of, and list of songs by Fred's garage band are all facts, yet you won't see them in the Britannica, as most people wouldn't consider them worth looking at.
But! Say the council of Anytown decides to compile a local encyclopedia. Fred may well make it in, being of local interest.
For both the Britannica and the Anytown-pedia, space was a limiting issue. What made Wikipedia so promising was the idea that it didn't have such space limitations- you could include articles on anything. Sadly, they seem to have decided that some objective standard of notability exists, and define it rather narrowly at that.
This just in: New Wikipedia 'Deletionpedia Deletion Contorversy' deletion controversy erupts as the Wikipedia Deletionpedia Deletion description is nominated for deletion. Delegates describe dangerous double dealings during dastardly deceptive deletions.
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
Wikipedia is not a repository of things that are useful
Why not? In a paper encyclopedia, there must be some criteria to keep the size down, but Wikipedia doesn't need such restrictions. If a page is well written and accurate, who cares if it meets some notability criteria - it's probably useful to someone, even if it it isn't useful to you.
I'm afraid I've seen far too many really useful pages be blown away for being "non-notable" over the years - so much so that I don't bother to contribute to Wikipedia these days. Why should I spend the time contributing to improve the articles and make them really useful if someone who isn't interested in the subject matter is just going to declare them to be non-notable and blow them away?
My experiences of AfDs is that the only people who participate in the discussions are the deletionists, the people who wrote the article and *very occasionally* a few of the readers of the article. The views of the people who wrote the article are usually swiftly discounted because they are seen as having a vested interest in keeping it around and the readers of the article are usually called out as sock-puppets, because as readers, rather than contributors, they usually have very little edit history.
Wikipedia was a nice idea, but it is slowly being destroyed by petty politics and posturing.
http://blog.nexusuk.org