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?
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.