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."
Because the deletionists won't be happy until Wikipedia consists of nothing but an article on itself and vanity articles extolling the many virtues of the deletionists?
Common sense isn't as common as the name would imply, so the deletionists deleted it.
It looks like the deletion policy makes sense, if it's what's needed to get editors to add reliable third-party sources.
No it doesn't, as that is pretty much a classic case of the broken window fallacy. The energy and effort wasted in those deletion debates could have been spend far better and the fallout of those deletions is rather horrible, as you always lose some authors in the process.
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.
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!