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."
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...
Um, nerds. Thus /..
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Here. Note that it has material that may be challenged or removed as it does not cite any references or sources.
>Who cares?
My guess: 2 kinds of people. Those that say that this Murray thing was/is notable and those that don't want the biggest encyclopedia, and a free as in freedom one at that, to be governed by corrupt bureaucrats.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
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.
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.
For "Communism not working", Wikipedia works remarkably well, don't you think? Or -- what an heretical thought! -- maybe Wikipedia has nothing to do with Communism?
(The way some US-americans label anything and everything not adhering to some very strange voodoo economic theories as "communist" has striked me always as some odd personality trait. Probably because US-americans have never directly experienced the real existant communism, and have no clue what they are talking about.)
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.
The fork doesn't solve the problem.
An encyclopedia has to maintain some minimal level of substance and credibility if it not to become a vanity press.
Articles need to be well-written. Reasonably up-to-date and credibly sourced.
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."
Well, some people do, not neccessarily because they care about the content.
At the risk of repeating myself, I've mentioned the case of Pidgey the Pokemon before. Suffice to say that once Pidgey had his own page on Wikipedia, just like Old Man Murray, but now he does not.
Now, you may well scoff at the case of Pidgey(Or of Old Man Murray). After all, why should this trite children's toy be given space on an encyclopedia of any kind? But such views inevitably take us into rather different territory than Wikipedia's stated objective to become "A Repository of All Human Knowledge". If we accept that Pidgey can be excluded from the great library of the internet, then it follows that we can exclude a great deal more.
And indeed we have. Wikipedia has in the last three years undergone a great purge of information and content which would rival any Soviet censorship bureau. "What of it?!", claim supporters. "Why should we tolerate Pidgey's presence on the shelves of our glorious archive?".
And that's really what it comes down to. Information remains on Wikipedia, not because it is notable, (Pidgey was part of a $5 billion franchise), or maintainable (Sadly, Pokemon fans are still as numerous and eager as ever) . No; Information remains on Wikipedia only because it is tolerated . Old Man Murray is up for deletion because someone--anyone--simply did not want to tolerate its presence any longer.
That is what Wikipedia has been reduced to. The online book which anyone can burn. And they do. It is a great library who's primary task is destroying and deleting its own collections. That and streamlining the procedures which makes this possible.
Scoff at Pidgey if you like, but if a book about him sat on the shelf in any library, no librarian in the world would needlessly dispose of it. Indeed, many would be loath to do so, and would maintain that book as they would any other; diligently and with careful attention. The fact that Wikipedia, with its infinite shelf space and everlasting tombs, should so eagerly and callously destroy its volumes is nothing short of an international disgrace.
May the Maths Be with you!
It was their objective for many years, and you can still see mention of this objective in places on Wikipedia. Like in Jimbo's annual letter calling for donations, for example.
Who decides what qualifies as editorial control? How does a source demonstrate "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy"?
it has a large-but-finite space
I could be wrong about this, but as far as I'm aware, the full content (including edit history!) of wikipedia totals less than 5TB, which should by no means be difficult to house. Now, perhaps there are architectural considerations that I'm not taking into account, but even if that's the case, remember that these deletion discussions often grow to a size eclipsing that of the article being discussed.
This isn't about space. It's about image. Some Wikipedians don't want their encyclopedia hosting frivolous or trivial information, because that conflicts with the air of solemn academia they affect.
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.
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
It's not about image ... it's a social MMO and deletions are how you can prove you are winning.
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.
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.
So delete all articles without credible sources.
Oh, but don't delete articles! That's rude and makes people teh sadz.
So we start finding sources for the articles instead.
But that takes time. A lot of time. Much more time than making things up and creating Wikipedia articles. The list of unsourced articles is piling up. I can't use this crap.
So we stop all new submissions until all current articles are properly sourced.
Wikipedia just got incredibly outdated. I don't need an encyclopedia telling me Mubarak is the president of Egypt. And anyway, even when you're done, you're gonna get the same problem again.
So we create a process where all submitted articles and changes need to go through a process of proper sourcing, verification, and editing before going live.
Congratulations, you just created Citizendium!
So why don't you use that instead?
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
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.
I worked in a library for a long time. The only way a book got thrown out is if it's condition was really bad, ie it was puked on or had a significant number of pages torn out. A book could potentionally be sent into storage but it was never thrown away for space, even books that we had ~200 copies of due to their popularity. And those books remained in the system and could be pulled out of storage if a patron wanted it. Financially, it's cheaper to keep it in storage and still let patrons check it out via book search than it would be to throw it away, and then spend money ordering it when a patron came in looking for it.
There were books on the shelf in the library I worked at that had been on the shelf, not checked out, for over 10 years. One book had the metal shelf end piece permanently outlined via the sun bleaching it into the cover.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997