Slashdot Mirror
Old Man Murray Wikipedia Controversy Continues
An anonymous reader writes "As discussed previously on slashdot, the Old Man Murray article was deleted from Wikipedia. After much controversy, the article has been restored. However, the debate to delete the article continues, with both deletionists and Old Man Murray fans swarming to the article."
Who cares?
Where does the debate continue? There was no link in the summary pointing to any ongoing debate. Just the previous Slashdot story and the main wikipedia article. There have been no edits to the OMM talk page for a week.
Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy submission.
Maybe they're referring to the SignPost article that has a handful of comments from a few days ago?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-03-07/Deletion_controversy
Why is there even a debate? If the article is generating such a controversy, then OBVIOUSLY it's notable enough to stay there? Where the hell is common sense when you need it?
... who led the charge to take down OMM from Wikipedia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g6eUC2_-RA&feature=player_embedded. Yes, he talks about fire drills for a full fourteen minutes.
Working...
Here. Note that it has material that may be challenged or removed as it does not cite any references or sources.
And I was figuring it'd be the last place we heard about it. Slow news day? Or... month? Since it was restored a while ago. It's certainly notable, and the moderator that wants it gone is just on a power trip. So, yeah. Whateva.
There is no -1 Disagree.
And by swarm, you mean all 3 of you.
And then the cocksuckers have the balls to ask for money after pulling shit like this.
Wikipedia is not getting one fucking donation from me until they get rid of these deletion happy mutherfuckers.
Who the fuck cares if an article is notable to you, that the same bullshit, can't fucking call it reasoning because it isn't, that fuckers in Texass used to keep Ã"scar Romero out of their history books Kinda surprised Wikipedia hasn't cited the Texas State Board of Education and removed him from there as well.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
So when do we create a Wikipedia article about the OMM deletion controversy? I can't wait to see the THAT article's deletion controversy!
I am a former Wikipedian who stopped making substantial edits in 2006. I have seen so many articles that are covered by relable sources but are still deleted by deletionists. Just like how the idea of Linux on the desktop was destroyed by warring KDE/Gnome factions which further split up into Plasma/Classic and Shell/Spatial/Unity and Xfree86/Xorg/Wayland factions. Wikipedia deletionists destroyed the original goal of "imagine free access to the sum of all human knowlege, thats what we are doing" motto. Now Jimbo just facespamms every few months BEGGING for your money that could go to legimate educational institutions while letting deletionists and thug admins eliminate good faith editors.
Wikipedia needs to be blacklisted and replaced by an inclusionist project that bans deletionists and promotes legitmate edits. The closest is probably Wikia but it is advertising and has COI with Jimbo.
Internet is serious business, punk!
Why isn't there a wikipedia fork yet? We could leave the deletionists at the old rotten one, and welcome people who actually contribute to the new one.
Wouldn't it be glorious?
as a connoisseur of fine irony.
Before the Wikipedia brouhaha, Old Man Murray probably didn't meet Wikipedia's notability standards, which require citable external sources of information on a topic. Then the act of deleting the article caused such sources to spring into existence, thus making Old Man Murray notable if one follows the guidelines literally.
The reasonable intent of the citation rule is that a thing should not be considered just notable because some Wikipedia contributors *claim* it is. Yet, somehow, this reasonable rule doesn't seem to cover the possibility that a topic becomes notable because some Wikipedia contributors claim it is *not*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's hard to maintain deleted articles. The problem with deletion is that the contribution of the user is lost, not tagged as low quality and given a chance.
Also, I think Wikipedia is a fine example of why communism doesn't work. (i.e. the grouthink, and informal hierarchies)
It's pining for the fjords, that's where it is!
The point of this Slashdot submission just totally evades me. Apparently someone nominated the article for deletion with perfectly sound reasoning in January. No proponents responded (meaning: nobody cared for the article), so it was deleted accordingly. Wikipedia does not accept something being articleworthy just because you know the organization / website / whatever – you have to provide evidence that this phenomena is real and notable – otherwise Wikipedia would be just full of all sorts of hoaxes and articles someone wrote from the top of their head one Saturday. See, not all phenomena are well-known in all subcultures, so we need neutral standards to measure what phenomena is articleworthy.
The closing admin thought the amount of participation (two votes) was not enough to form consensus, so when closing the debate he wrote he would (quote) "restore on request." Someone went ahead and requested restore, and the article was resurrected. Then, after a grace period, it was renominated, and wider participation was achieved. This time the closing admin was a bit trigger happy, but the article was again resurrected after quick discussion.
The deletion debate has since cooled, and the article seems now well-sourced and no deletion nomination is underway. There is one non-bot edit in the talk page during the last week or so. It boggles me how did this submission get through the screening process? It is totally pointless, and the advertised "debate to delete the article" is nowhere to be seen. Only thing I can come up with is someone getting butthurt from the deletion debate and deciding to have hard-failing "revenge" on the admins.
I can' believe Slashdot actually bought into this.
Deletionists steal knowledge from the public.
I've been playing PC games since 1995 and before that on the Amiga and the Apple II. I have over 200 gaming or gaming related websites in my bookmarks. Some of them very obscure. I have read countless forum posts and articles on these websites. Not once did I ever encounter a mention of Old Man Murray. How significant could this website have been? I suspect that this website was popular among a very small but fanatical group of people who somehow gained influence in the gaming industry.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
If Wikipedia and its current admins had been around in 1890, they'd have deleted the entry for Vincent Van Gogh.
Encyclopedias have to restrict themselves due to their medium. They would love to be repositories of all knowledge if they could, but that's just not possible, it would take too much paper. Wikipedia has the potential to become what traditional encyclopedias can only aspire to be -- but they've decided instead to imitate as if it were a virtue what encyclopedias do out of unfortunate necessity. They've basically decided to self-limit themselves to make sure they don't transcend the limitations of their paper relatives, and for some reason consider themselves better off for making sure they are no better.
Studying history, it's often frustrating to go over what people wrote centuries before, because they often fail to note precisely what you're most interested in finding out. History shows people are extremely poor at determining what's actually worth noting at the time. The best service that could ever be provided to the future would be to try as hard as possible to note as much as possible. The catch, of course, is to keep from drowning the information in noise, but the answer to that is organization and search tools, not limiting the data. No one is going to miss the information they're looking for because a page for Old Man Murray is on the site, and if there ever were so many similar entries that this was at all a danger, an index page of "notable" writers would clear up the problem lickety-split.
They should be working on how to organize information to make sure whatever the current generation finds most notable is most easy to find, not on limiting information to what history tells us will inevitably be a large number of very poor decisions on what's actually worth recording.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I rarely get involved in deletion debates these days. The problem is the whole concept of "notability" is definitely screwed up. Notability on Wikipedia is supposed to be objectively decided, but that runs contrary to establishing notability in the first place. To some an article on a certain topic might be important, but other people it might be something that should be deleted.
Normally this is where editorial supervision would come into play. For better or for worse, this is how it works in professional publications. People higher up decide what gets put into the book, what makes the newspaper. But there's no editorial hierarchy on Wikipedia, so that's out. So we're forced to adhere to some vague notion of notability, which basically states that anything that's mentioned a few times on the Internet is notable, nevermind old topics that might only have print sources that may or may not exist.
But by maintaining Wikipedia's facade of "The encyclopedia that anyone can edit", they've refused to do things that would be the first steps in any large professional writing project. That is, relying on a set of topic experts, quality copyeditors, fact checkers and researchers and professional level editorial staff that decides what's in and what's out. Citizendium has tried to establish such a system, but as they're finding out it's hard to get quality editors to do this stuff for free. It's far easier to do what Wikipedia does and let anyone whose passions outweigh their expertise and ability to contribute on a short leash.
The result? An encyclopedia that's quite imbalanced. E.g. we get tons of people weighing in on the debate for the notability of an Internet games review site, and far less people working on stuff like Mathematics and Health-related topics, stuff people get paid top dollar for their expertise on, but wouldn't necessarily write about for their own leisure. If you look at the featured articles, you'll see that there's lots of articles on pop culture stuff, recreation and warfare (stuff people like to write about for fun), but far less on seemingly cornerstone topics like Education, Math, Healthcare and Chemistry.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Who decides what qualifies as editorial control? How does a source demonstrate "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy"?
Looks like Pidgey actually does have it's own Wikipedia page again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgey
Make a web page with a bunch of links to other sites on it. Given enough time all those links will die.
Wikipedia requires that you link to other content on the web for an article to be "notable."
Given enough time, all the links on the wikipedia page will die away. Therefore nearly all content on wikipedia will go away, unless it is general information from established historical sites.
Wikipedia should never delete anything just because the old links went away. In fact, they should work with internet archive to ensure that anything linked to on wikipedia will exist for all time on the archive site.
Otherwise eventually most of the things we are doing today on the internet will be forgotten.
I've given $50 to Wikipedia two years in a row. I won't do that anymore. Holy fucking shit, look, the site's been taken over by five year olds with overly developed vocabularies. Sorry kids, if you want money go ask your parents.
And in 1890 - they'd have been right to do so. In 1890 Vincent Van Gogh was pretty much a minor figure, well known - but in a small circle. At the time of his death, he was one of dozens and dozens of such figures which might someday become interesting and influential.
His fame and influence didn't really begin to grow until almost twenty years after his death. The dozens and dozens of others - didn't. Such fame and influence is not a given, and is only obvious in hindsight.
While Wikipedia does not suffer from the traditional limitations of dead tree encyclopedias - that doesn't mean they don't suffer limitations of their own. While storage space and bandwidth are cheap - editors time is not. Pages of little value tend to drift into muck as they rarely get reviewed and maintained. (Making the exceedingly generous assumption they weren't inaccurate and poorly written muck in the first place.) Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Which is exactly why the original Old Man Murray article was proposed for deletion - it was noise (that is, unsourced and poorly written), not information.
Which means that what the 'current generation' doesn't find interesting soon descends into being worthless unmaintained noise. Wikipedia isn't interested in being a repository of poorly written and unmaintained noise.
Yeah, when you're living in a time period, everything is basically just like background: it's taken for granted. And not considered notable.
But it's highly notable for people from, say the future, looking backward. How did people in Rome, Greece, Egypt, etc. do daily stuff like wash their hands? Or did they even? Cut their food, etc.? And not just nobles, but ordinary people.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The sheer fact that it's deletion and the controversy are plastered all over should be indication that the magazine is, indeed, "notable".
What are your chances that your average porn star or manga character, many of whom have their won Wikipedia pages, could create even half as much of an uproar?
The problem with the deletionists is that they've gone far beyond reason. The time and energy consumed and the frustration (on all sides) created by this discussion alone is much, much more damaging to Wikipedia than leaving an article that maybe doesn't deserve it there. When your defense of a principle causes so much damage to the larger whole that your principle is claiming to protect, then something is wrong.
And, btw., we have a word for people who don't see that. It's "fanatics".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I mean I understand that you want to delete things that are false, or that infringe copyright, or are illegal, or things like that. Right, no problem. But why delete things just because they aren't notable? As you said, it isn't as though we are going to run out of bits. Also it isn't as though it clutters things up, since you access information via search and thus skip over shit you don't care about. Thus there's no reason not to include everything, no matter how trivial and "un-notable"
What's more, the standard is clearly stupid since there is some extremely un-notable shit in there. The amount of articles on fictions characters from literature, including some pretty obscure ones from anime and shit is legion. This is not notable under any standard I can think about but there you go, large articles with lots of information. Doesn't bother me in the slightest, in fact I like it because if someone mentions then and I go "What the fuck is that?" I can find out.
Well if you are going to allow trivial shit like that, then I'd say all bets are off. Let pretty much anything that is true and sourced on there. Fuck notability.
People wanting to delete over notability are just worthless whiners who would rather bitch than contribute. They are saying "I don't find this interesting so I want it to go away," which is crap. I see the same shit on forums. Someone will start a new thread on a topic related to an existing thread and someone else will say "I don't see why this needs a new thread." My reply is "You know we don't pay by the thread, right?"
The reason they are saying it isn't because they are actually concerned, but because they want to try and shut down discussion on a topic they don't care about or don't like. It is just stupid.
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
Actually common sense (by definition) is common. What's uncommon and (which isn't a tautology) sorely missing is good sense. The good sense it takes to make that distinction really ought to be more common :-)
in a story about Wikipedia citations. Niiiice.
editors time is not [cheap] [...] Given the number of pages that I regularly see that have tags months and years old indicating that they need sources, formatting, etc... I'd say Wikipedia is in the midst of an unrecognized crisis in this regard.
Your argument assumes that editor time can be freely shifted from one article to another. If I'm very interested in anime and manga (and nothing else), I'm not going to start editing articles about voting theory or cladistics and the tree of life, or whatever---I don't have the interest, and/or I don't have the knowledge. A similar argument has been applied to free software contributors: people do what they're going to do, and you can't boss volunteers around.
To some extent, people care about Wikipedia in general; to that extent, you can transfer editor work hours between articles. I think the policy that maximizes use of both flexible and non-flexible volunteer labor is to direct the flexible labor to where the marginal return is greatest, given a fixed and unalterable supply of non-flexible labor. Concretely: use a bug tracker or ticket system and auto-fill it with "Most visited [citation needed]", "Oftenest viewed [flag:foobar]". That way, flexible volunteer labor can be directed to where that's useful, and the seldom-viewed stuff can coexist and be crap, and no one will care because no one reads it anyways, and in that way everyone gets to have their cake and eat it too.
Very interesting. But the cynic in me says that this is a temporary development. The pages were present before and it is only a matter of time before they are removed again.
I also note that the list at the bottom has only perhaps ~30 Pokemon, whereas there were over 100 in the game. The criterion for inclusion does not seem to be very broad.
May the Maths Be with you!
osu-neko++
I recently attended a Jimbo lecture. During the Q&A bit, I asked him what challenges he thought Wikipedia might face into the future, as the number of articles approaches millions (I was asking from a data design, semantic web perspective - the number was hyperbolical). His response was something along the lines of "I hope it never reaches a million articles."
What. The. Frak.
I understand the desire to keep things reasonable, but new stuff happens/is created/is experienced every day. To me, this view is hopelessly short-sighted. What's the point of Wikipedia 100 years from now if we delete everything that any statistically insignificant portion of the population thinks is no longer notable, especially without a valid historical context? Shouldn't we instead focus on solving the inherent design problems that stem from using a 19th century taxonomic model in a paper paradigm? Seriously dude, it's a freaking database, not a book. Yes, MediaWiki+MySQL has limits, but nothing compared to a physical book.
In my view, this whole situation implies that Wikipedia is just operating at the fundamentally wrong level of abstraction.
Just because it doesn't face the same limitations as a physical book does, doesn't mean that there are no limitations.
In the case of a wiki, the critical limitation is the number of capable editors available to ensure the articles are well written, well sourced, and well maintained. Wikipedia is approaching this critical threshold - not only are the tags indicating problems with articles multiplying (that is, increasing numbers of articles are so tagged), the average age of the tags are steadily increasing as well.
The problem [is] that Wikipedia doesn't want the crap in the first place.
There is no "Wikipedia wants", it's not a person---that's the whole problem, people disagree about the direction wikipedia should go in.
and if the foundation is unsound, then the roof cannot be.
I cannot find any meaning to this which is relevant to what we're talking about. True, if the servers crash all day, even the best-written article is only going to be moderately useful. But bad articles don't somehow infect good articles. They don't even draw editing effort away (under my system)---the editing effort they attract couldn't be put elsewhere.
[Will be edited, most edits reduce quality, need editorial oversight]
So? What's the wrong in letting the few volunteers who want to write about some topic maintain those articles for themselves, at whatever level of quality they will bear?
lack of volunteer hours to maintain the article at the intended level of quality.
Intended by whom? And why do they get to dictate terms to others?
What my solution aimed at was giving the deletionists what they want (stars burning twice as bright but half as many), to the extent they can make people voluntarily contribute to that end, while at the same time giving the inclusionists what they want (the blooming of a thousand flowers) without detracting from the quality of the narrower core of high-quality articles the deletionists want.
I haven't seen you argue that this is unobtainable, nor why this isn't a decent compromise betweent the wishes of the people involved. I've seen you take the side of the deletionists (as I understand them), without really saying why, just asserting that it's "what wikipedia wants". Am I misunderstanding the deletionists here? If not, care to explain why the compromise is bad?
The policies come from Jimmy and Co. so the buck stops with them. To allow it to continue and not change the policy and cripple the delitionist cretins is exactly the same as agreeing with them.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.