The question is whether it would be profitable in a free market, not whether it is profitable in the existing market. Clearly it is not profitable in the existing market because nobody is doing it.
I'm generally not a "government solutions" kind of person, but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
How is essential defined here?
Which of the following goods and services are essential?
insulin for a diabetic
acetaminophen for someone with a broken arm
acetaminophen for a child with muscle pains
a refrigerator at home to prevent food spoilage
hospice for a terminally ill patient
a liver transplant
a sex-change operation
a mammogram for a 55-year-old
a mammogram for a 16-year-old
genetic testing for Huntington's
jaw surgery to eliminate TMJ
a high-quality mattress
a quadruple bypass
a gastric bypass
cholesterol-lowering drugs
anxiety-reducing drugs
an electric toothbrush
sex
setting a broken leg
Every single one of these things could save lives or drastically improve one's quality of life. Some of these are commercially available, some are available in hospitals, some are neither. Is it the presence of a doctor that turns some of these things into "essentials" and others into goods? Which of these should we allow profits on? If a government system does not cover any of these things, is it unethical?
If profits are unethical, should we allow profits on anything? Why?
I know this is a smarmy post—I'm not trolling, honestly. But I find people come into these conversations with a pre-existing mental framework that "health = essential" and therefore "profiting on health is unethical" without much exploration. Not everything offered in the health care industry is essential or life-saving, and many goods and services which are absolutely essential and life-saving are offered privately with no objections from anybody (e.g., refrigerators). What makes "health care" exist outside of the framework of goods and services in general? Most health care spending is dedicated to gradually improving quality of life, not saving people from axe wounds. If allowing profit and unrestricted competition is a bad way to improve people's quality of life, why are we even talking about health? Shouldn't we jump to the conclusion that anything that improves people's lives should be strictly non-profit and centrally planned?
And next you'll tell us that of course it just so happens all criticism of wikipedia is based on misunderstanding, thus making it invalid. Round and round we go.
The "there is no such thing as legitimate criticism of wikipedia" crowd is something else that always pops up in these discussions.
There is legitimate criticism of Wikipedia. A shitload of it. I'll be the first to say that some aspects of Wikipedia are absolutely horrendous.
But I almost never see that legitimate criticism in these threads. All I see is:
"Its completely arbitrary as to what the mod of the day thinks is 'notable' or not." No, it's quite consistent. There's a discussion where people list reasons (read: do not vote) why the article should be kept or deleted. If the discussion clearly shows why the article should be deleted, in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy (namely, Wikipedia's notability guideline, which editors are told to readbefore writing the article), then and only then* is the article deleted by an admin. If the discussion does not reach a clear conclusion, the article is not deleted. The above comment is clearly based on misunderstanding of how the deletion decisions are made.
"How can you be sure there's a general rule deciding which is notable and which is not?" Well, it's easy to be sure. Click here. Now you can be sure. In fact, if you read any deletion discussion, someone will link to the rule, because that's what those discussions are about. When you create a page, there's a boldface link to it. Every major page on Wikipedia's guidelines links to it. The above comment is clearly based on misunderstanding of whether there's a rule or not.
"It's all up to the individual reader. For 90% people an article explaining compiler design is of no notability." (Really? 600 million people are interested in compiler design? But that's beside the point.) Wikipedia's definition of "notability" is different from the colloquial definition of "notability", just as the electrical definition of "potential" is different from the colloquial definition of "potential". All fields have jargon, Wikipedia has its own. Reading the above guideline would make this clear.
"...it leads to Eastern European weightlifters being deleted because pimply-faced American 'admins' haven't heard of them, but that every single Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon card ever created has its own separate page." Actually, articles are not deleted because admins have not heard of them,* but because of the above process that I mentioned. The case would've been better stated with a link to said weightlifter's discussion, but few in these threads can be bothered with supporting facts (remarkably, it's those same people who keep getting their articles deleted! what a weird coincidence!) Furthermore, not one of the 9000+ Magic cards or the 5000+ Pokemon cards has a page, so this comment was not only based on misunderstanding, but on the commenter being a person who enjoys making up complete bullshit.
"Unfortunately, "I think this is silly" is the unspoken reason that a lot of articles get deleted." That doesn't explain why so many silly articles are not deleted, or why so many articles that get deleted are completely mundane.
"What the Wikipedia administrators should realize is that an online encyclopedia doesn't have to fit into a given shelf space." The problem is 1) assuming Wikipedia admins don't understand basic physical facts, and 2) responding to an arg
I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
So what's a better criterion? An arbitrary "I've heard of it before" vote? Ghits?
Yeah, I'm curious too. Lendrick, if you agree that it's OK to delete articles on some topics, how would you decide what to delete?
A majority vote wouldn't be fair, because admins would delete anything they hadn't heard of.
A Google search wouldn't be fair, because it would be radically biased toward modern topics and internet culture.
The current policy's as fair as you can get. Something's notable if it's been covered in reliable, independent sources. That precludes two-week-old blogs that no notable sources have written about, but allows for obscure topics that are fairly well-known to specific subcultures.
Great idea in theory. But in practice, it leads to Eastern European weightlifters being deleted because pimply-faced American 'admins' haven't heard of them, but that every single Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon card ever created has its own separate page.
Not one Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon card ever created has its own separate page.
And I'm gonna take a stab and guess that you don't actually have an example of an Eastern European weightlifter being deleted because an American admin hadn't heard of him.
But don't let the facts get in your way. Those "pimply-faced" admins obviously have no idea what they're talking about.
What the Wikipedia administrators should realize is that an online encyclopedia doesn't have to fit into a given shelf space. With disk space costing pennies per gigabyte, having any "notability criteria" at all is just stupid.
God, that's some obnoxious condescension right there. Those poor, well-meaning fools just haven't realized that an internet website can be bigger than a book! They just don't understand!
Deleted pages are kept on the server. No one's ever said it was a storage issue.
Photos on Wikipedia are rarely analyzed (except on articles about specific photos). When photos are included in an article, they're just filler to say "This is what this subject looked like."
Wikipedia is rarely so specific as to address a single photo, on a subject as broad as WWII. That would be the artistic domain of a dedicated history book, not an encyclopedia.
On Wikipedia, the original caption of the picture doesn't really relate in a sensible way to the rest of the article. The article's not about the picture, the picture is about the article's subject, so its caption should be factual, understandable, and neutral. If you include what the picture's caption was in the 1940s, you're just drawing attention to the photo itself, which takes away from the article.
On the Commons gallery itself, the original caption should be included, since a Commons page is about the photo, and not the subject of the photo. So yeah, I would include the original caption there, but also include a modern, neutral caption that is relevant to today, so that people can understand what the photo is actually about.
As far as I see, that's exactly what the plan is. Both captions are being included on Commons, but on the encyclopedia, only modern captions are used. It's not about being politically correct (whatever the fuck that stupid phrase means), it's about being informative and clear.
I can NOT emphasize this enough.
There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of
random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be
tagged with a "needs a cite" tag. Wrong. It should be removed,
aggressively, unless it can be sourced.
(Full disclosure: this is not an official ultimatum on Wales' part, just his own interpretation of the rules he wrote for his own site.) This is being applied more strongly in the last few years than it was at the site's inception, but the site's only 8 years old. Wikipedia's going to be around for a very long time. It's just getting started. The rules, as written, have always been clear on the need for sources. The direction Wikipedia is moving in is toward higher standards, toward following its own policies, which is how it was intended.
If something happened on an episode of Pokemon, it happened! It's a fact. Why does it need a reference?? Really the reference should be the show, and before deleting the article you should have to view the show to disprove the points of the article. Why should a secondary source be used?
You might want to read the article (that's what was in the article when it was deleted). It barely touched on Torchic's appearance in the show. Most of its content had to do with its name, its "biological characteristics", its appearance in the games/manga/whatever. None of that can come from the cartoon. Most of the article's sources were fansites which could have pulled their information from anywhere.
Deletionists are the reason Wikipedia has turned to shit. Imagine if back in the early days everything was deleted. People barely referenced anything originally - if all that info was deleted automatically Wikipedia would never have got off the ground.
No, shitty articles are the reason Wikipedia has turned to shit. There were shitty articles when it started, there will be shitty articles ten years from now. As the number of articles increases, the ratio of shittiness will increase, as the long tail of articles is an inevitable shit storm of shittiness. The point of enforcing strict standards is to at least allow a few good articles to rise from the overwhelming abyss of shittiness that is Wikipedia. The point of deletionism is to say "hey, stop ignoring the rules that have been in place since day one, because you're turning Wikipedia to shit".
You cite their being lots of pokemon fansites as a reason for not including pokemon articles in wikipedia.
I didn't say that at all. I said there are lots of Pokemon fansites with no sources, so the fact that Wikipedia doesn't include this information doesn't prevent that information from existing. Wikipedia's higher standards aren't preventing anyone from learning anything about anything.
That same justification works for excluding math, as well. Why go to wikipedia when there's mathworld.wolfram.net, etc? Why go to wikipedia when there's Encyclopedia Britannica and others?
I wouldn't, since math articles on Wikipedia are terrible. I certainly wouldn't read a math article on Wikipedia which only had other wikis and personal websites as sources.
Redundancy is not a reason for exclusion.
No, it's a reason to keep Wikipedia's policies the way they are -- and not change them to be the same as any other wiki.
Besides, an article on Torchic doesn't make an article on World War II any less informative.
Yes, it does. If the Torchic doesn't require reliable sources, then neither does the World War II article. Unless you're seriously suggesting that every article needs to start with a majority vote on whether it should require reliable sources or not. Wikipedia doesn't do majority votes, it has foundational guidelines which are applied equally to everything, and that is a damn good policy.
You complain about slashdotters making unfounded accusations and ask for links to articles. I provide links and then you say that if wikipedia allowed those articles that wikipedia would be ruined. Well, wikipedia did allow those articles at one time. Is it so much to ask that you provide links backing up your claims just as I have done mine? Oh - that's right - wikipedia apologists don't need to provide evidence but wikipedia critics do. Yay!
Blah, blah, strawman, blah. What "claims" are you talking about? You (not you, people in general) claimed something happened (a fact), I asked for proof. I said Wikipedia's policies are fine (an opinion), you can't ask for proof of that. Wikipedia sucks in a lot of ways, but I don't think the academic standards are causing any of its problems. It just doesn't make sense to me that saying "you know what, nevermind, let's just let people do what feels right to them" will suddenly let it blossom into some futuristic beacon of academic leadership.
He seems to be the media's go-to person for quantum computing. E.g. here [physorg.com].
It was rhetorical, I don't give a crap who he is or what he's done. My point was, on Wikipedia, it's not enough to say "he's so respected". The point of the article is to give real information derived from real sources, not arbitrary assertions that the majority of editors think is correct. If a bunch of people on Slashdot say he's respected, I have no problem believing that. But the point of Wikipedia is to be a little more academically stringent than the rest of the Internet.
Just means the article [is/was] incomplete, not that Aaronson isn't notable.
Of course. The existence of a deletion discussion doesn't mean the article subject's not notable, just that there is doubt as to his notability. Since the article's creators failed to provide any proof of notability (which they are obliged, not encouraged, to do), the deletion discussion was set up to determine whether Aaronson was a notable subject.
The article, at the time the discussion began, didn't contain any secondary sources that indicated his notability. That's a perfectly valid reason to say, "hey, this guy doesn't look notable". Nothing unfair about that.
Stubs usually don't manage to convey the importance of their subject.
No, they usually don't. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they're supposed to do.
Note that the deletion debate [wikipedia.org] was closed early because there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell [wikipedia.org] that it would be deleted.
That doesn't mean the deletion debate was invalid, if that's what you're implying. At the time the deletion debate began, the article didn't have a single valid source, and contained almost no useful information about Aaronson other than a summary of his CV. Editors correctly voted "Delete", because the article (at the time) met Wikipedia's guidelines for deletion.
After the discussion began, the article was drastically improved. Editors who had correctly voted "Delete" at first, correctly changed their vote to "Keep" once the article was improved (notice the changed votes in the debate, and the run of "Keep"s at the end). It was only after reliable sources were added that everyone agreed. It wouldn't have been a snowball vote if the article had remained in its existing state, and -- (the important part) -- the article would not have been brought up to its current state if the vote hadn't happened! It would have remained as useless as the majority of stubs on Wikipedia. Now it's full of links to things he's done and people talking about him and his works. Now someone can have an actual understanding of him in a way they wouldn't have been able to if Wikipedia wasn't so stringent and the "deletionists" weren't so trigger-happy.
Of course, now that the debate ended, there have barely been any further edits to the article. It'll languish well into the future, I'm sure, but at least it's at least slightly useful now.
Thanks for proving I'm not a raving lunatic. And your edit summaries are awesome.
Just for full disclosure, I've had edits reverted plenty of times. But in every case, either a) the other person had a better argument, and convinced me; or b) I had a better argument, and convinced them.
What's very poor, here, is your ability to read. The OP said "every episode, save that one". In other words, "every episode, except that one".
Egg on my face. But let me try again, because this still doesn't make sense to me:
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
So, he failed to do something, whereupon he did some other things that don't affect the first thing. What's your point? What "backroom deals" are we talking about? He gave the administrators money? Cocaine? Blowjobs? Political influence?
Oh, he got rid of the articles that weren't properly sourced. What a bastard.
Have you been reading the comments in this article? Most people, here, think that is the problem. Asinine notability requirements. You're given an example of what people don't like about wikipedia and your response is, essentially, "good"?
I have. What I keep seeing over and over are comments like:
"There's an infinite amount of space, why can't my article be included?"
"Deletionists delete anything they don't like"
"They make up crap about 'notability'"
...which all betray a complete misunderstanding of what the notability and verifiability requirements are and why articles get deleted. I've never read anyone on Slashdot say "I disagree with Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Fan sites should be considered reliable sources." All I see is miseducated crap like the above.
That said, I don't know how anyone could disagree. I could start a Pokemon fan site right now that says Torchic is based on a mythical Korean bird guardian creature whose baby chicks could spit fire from their stomachs, which Satoshi Tajiri had a wooden statue of in his room that was carved by his dying grandfather, and this complete bullshit would be eligible under your encyclopedia and not eligible under Wikipedia. How do you defend against that? Can I make a fan site saying I invented Torchic? Am I notable then? Isn't it completely subjective, then, to say that I'm not eligible for inclusion, but any fact I make up about Torchic is eligible for inclusion? How would disputes be settled, a majority vote? How do you defend the one expert against the 100 idiots?
I mean, there's a reason Wikipedia is the first search result for the majority of Google searches. Wikipedia is good. It's not great, but it's good. Why radically undermine it to make it more like the rest of the Internet? There are enough Pokemon fan sites. This is one site that doesn't want to parrot those sites, it wants to take the best of the Internet and the best of the old world of publishing. That's how it got to where it is today.
Using wikipedia policy to justify wikipedia is just circular reasoning.
Absolutely. But using Wikipedia policy to justify the decisions of editors who are following Wikipedia policy, which people on Slashdot constantly misrepresent as inconsistent or subjective or mob-rule or political or they're-picking-on-me or whatever-they-want-to-call-it-ism, is reasonable.
It should read something like, "the encyclopedia that anybody can spend a lot of time and effort creating an article, only to have some other jackass delete it for no good reason."
Can you name an article that was deleted without a good reason?
Vandalism, including inflammatory redirects, pages which exist only to disparage their subject, patent nonsense, or gibberish
Advertising or other spam without relevant content (but not an article about an advertising-related subject)
Articles which cannot possibly be attributed to reliable sources, including neologisms, original theories and conclusions, and articles which are themselves hoaxes (but not articles describing notable hoaxes)
Articles for which all attempts to find reliable sources to verify them have failed
Articles whose subject fails to meet the relevant notability guideline (WP:N, WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:CORP and so forth)
Any other content not suitable for an encyclopedia
These all amount to "subject must meet the notability requirements." The last one's a little chilling but it's just rhetorical, it's never been invoked to have an otherwise acceptable article deleted.
Copyright violations and other material violating Wikipedia's fair-use policy
Articles which breach Wikipedia's policy on biographies of living persons
These are legal concerns.
Redundant or otherwise useless templates
Categories representing overcategorization
Images that are unused, obsolete, or violate fair-use policy
Any other use of article, template, project, or user namespace that is contrary to the established separate policy for that namespace.
Content forks (unless a merge or redirect is appropriate)
These are all technical things, not for articles. I'm not sure what that last one means exactly, but it doesn't sound like the type of thing that would be abused.
So yeah, they all amount to a) notability requirements must be met, and b) don't get Wikipedia sued. Both reasonable.
In fact, it looks to me like the exact article you link to about "Blood Angels" was deleted not because of "sources", but for being "cruft" or "non-noteable".
OK, let's look at this now. Here's every Delete vote against the "Blood Angels" page. Everyone read along at home and make sure I'm not lying. There are 11 "Delete" votes on the page.
This article does not cite any reliable sources which attest to the notability of the subject matter... As an individual item or as a collection with other legions, none of these items have any real world notability, nor have any of my attempts to find sources to the contrary borne fruit. The notability of this topic cannot be verified by reliable sources, and should deleted as has been done in the past.
Primary sources can be used to verify information but not to establish notability.
As with each of these 40K nominations, it helps to note that all of the referenced sources are from Games Workshop or through contract with them--sufficient for WP:V, but not WP:N. This information (insofar as it is not a copyvio) belongs on a dedicated warhammer wiki without the guidelines for notability that wikipedia has.
The only way to rewrite the content so that it does fit a real-world context is to frame the individual books. Individual Codexes do have a real-world component in the way they have influenced the game, the background, and the community. Their fictional content can be verified by direct references from other GW publications, and made notable by references to third party publications that share their background.
No assertion of notability through reliable sources, and no legitimate assertion that any will be found or created in the future.
Aaronson is one of the few CS researchers whose name keeps coming up again & again.
Where?
He's at least as notable as many of the other CSists who have articles.
Notability's not really a spectrum. Either his importance has been established by reliable, secondary sources or not. The only source in that article is some gigantic database site saying that he got a Ph.D. Clearly not sufficient.
It has nothing to do with "a lack of space". All information on Wikipedia must be backed up by reliable, independent, secondary sources. This is fundamental.
An article is deleted if and only if there are no reliable, independent, secondary sources that discuss it.
So if you want an article on a Simpsons episode, find the sources that discuss it -- IGN, EW, TV Guide, all reliable sources not directly owned by Fox Television -- and it's good. Even though not every sentence in the article is properly cited, the topic as a whole is suitable for inclusion because it has the potential to be expanded.
If an article has never been addressed in any reliable secondary sources, it gets deleted, because not one sentence can ever be properly verifiable. There is no potential to ever meet Wikipedia guidelines. So for the sake of Wikipedia's quality, not quantity, it is removed.
It's not about space, it's not about geekiness. It's about sources and nothing else.
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
Nonsense. He was reverted within a few hours, and the article has been up ever since. That's a very, very poor example. Actually, it's a great example of Wikipedia working the way it's supposed to. People disagree, the people who follow the guidelines (not necessarily the majority) win. That's the way I've seen it happen over and over again. But you won't ever use this as an example of how Wikipedia works properly, right? You'll just keep using it as an example of how Wikipedia doesn't work even though I just clearly disproved it.
Of course, that doesn't top Torchic [wikipedia.org]. 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.
The Torchic article was non-notable. Not, as so many people confusedly insist, because it is obscure or video-game-related, but because the sources used were horrible.
Look at the list of sources. An article needs reliable, secondary sources to be notable (it may, of course, supplement these with primary sources and other secondary sources where appropriate, but not exclusively). If we pull out primary sources (non-secondary) and Pokemon fan sites (little editorial control, not sufficiently reliable), we get: Time.com, discussing Pokemon in general (never mentioning the word "Torchic"), and IGN, discussing Pokemon in general (never mentioning the word "Torchic"). This was after the entire league of Torchic defenders scrambled to find as many sources as possible. Not one reliable secondary source even mentioned Torchic. So if there are no reliable secondary sources, which are supposed to be the basis for every article, how can there be an entire article about it? So it got merged into another crappy article. Even though "List of Pokemon" sucks, it is at least a notable subject, since Pokemon as a whole is discussed in reliable secondary sources.
Are you joking? Guidelines for inclusion are incredibly lax.
If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.
Are you reading that? Any subject that's been mentioned in a magazine/book/journal/newspaper/website with some amount of editorial control is acceptable.
That's every video game, every book, every television show and every episode of each, every politician, every rock band, rapper, and hit song that's ever been on the radio, every school, and every city, in the entire world, forever and ever,
and that's without even starting an argument! The number of fictional characters and abstract concepts on Wikipedia is absolutely staggering.
You really want it to be laxer than that? Here's where you can find that stuff: THE REST OF THE INTERNET.
Deletionists are following the Golden Rule that summarizes the purpose of Wikipedia and all of the debates that have ever occurred on it, the one part that no one seems to get, no matter what:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that summarizes research from reliable secondary sources.
That's what it is and that's all it's ever going to be. If someone's doing something you don't like, either a) you're wrong or b) they're a troll and you shouldn't give up so easily. How is that any different from the rest of the Internet? How is that any different from real life? How could Wikipedia possibly pursue its goal better than it does without restricting people more?
I was going to sarcastically point out that you just completely supported my post by claiming it's happened to you many times but not posting an example.
But then I realized you could not possibly be that colossally retarded, so you must just be trolling. Right?
That's the trade-off for letting anyone edit the encyclopedia. Scientific journals have a smaller writer base, and can individually verify the academic validity of new research.
Wikipedia users can't make sure that every new piece of research is valid. That's outside the scope of the project. So more information (in terms of topics) is allowed, but with stricter guidelines (in terms of verifiability) for inclusion. Makes sense to me.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think it's an unconscionable mess.
And fax machines work, but that doesn't mean anything in the universe that's not a fax machine is worse than a fax machine.
The question is whether it would be profitable in a free market, not whether it is profitable in the existing market. Clearly it is not profitable in the existing market because nobody is doing it.
I'm generally not a "government solutions" kind of person, but I do wonder how private insurance is allowed to exist for essential things like health care.
How is essential defined here? Which of the following goods and services are essential?
Every single one of these things could save lives or drastically improve one's quality of life. Some of these are commercially available, some are available in hospitals, some are neither. Is it the presence of a doctor that turns some of these things into "essentials" and others into goods? Which of these should we allow profits on? If a government system does not cover any of these things, is it unethical?
If profits are unethical, should we allow profits on anything? Why?
I know this is a smarmy post—I'm not trolling, honestly. But I find people come into these conversations with a pre-existing mental framework that "health = essential" and therefore "profiting on health is unethical" without much exploration. Not everything offered in the health care industry is essential or life-saving, and many goods and services which are absolutely essential and life-saving are offered privately with no objections from anybody (e.g., refrigerators). What makes "health care" exist outside of the framework of goods and services in general? Most health care spending is dedicated to gradually improving quality of life, not saving people from axe wounds. If allowing profit and unrestricted competition is a bad way to improve people's quality of life, why are we even talking about health? Shouldn't we jump to the conclusion that anything that improves people's lives should be strictly non-profit and centrally planned?
And next you'll tell us that of course it just so happens all criticism of wikipedia is based on misunderstanding, thus making it invalid. Round and round we go.
The "there is no such thing as legitimate criticism of wikipedia" crowd is something else that always pops up in these discussions.
There is legitimate criticism of Wikipedia. A shitload of it. I'll be the first to say that some aspects of Wikipedia are absolutely horrendous.
But I almost never see that legitimate criticism in these threads. All I see is:
No, it's quite consistent. There's a discussion where people list reasons (read: do not vote) why the article should be kept or deleted. If the discussion clearly shows why the article should be deleted, in accordance with Wikipedia's deletion policy (namely, Wikipedia's notability guideline, which editors are told to read before writing the article), then and only then* is the article deleted by an admin. If the discussion does not reach a clear conclusion, the article is not deleted. The above comment is clearly based on misunderstanding of how the deletion decisions are made.
Well, it's easy to be sure. Click here. Now you can be sure. In fact, if you read any deletion discussion, someone will link to the rule, because that's what those discussions are about. When you create a page, there's a boldface link to it. Every major page on Wikipedia's guidelines links to it. The above comment is clearly based on misunderstanding of whether there's a rule or not.
(Really? 600 million people are interested in compiler design? But that's beside the point.) Wikipedia's definition of "notability" is different from the colloquial definition of "notability", just as the electrical definition of "potential" is different from the colloquial definition of "potential". All fields have jargon, Wikipedia has its own. Reading the above guideline would make this clear.
Actually, articles are not deleted because admins have not heard of them,* but because of the above process that I mentioned. The case would've been better stated with a link to said weightlifter's discussion, but few in these threads can be bothered with supporting facts (remarkably, it's those same people who keep getting their articles deleted! what a weird coincidence!) Furthermore, not one of the 9000+ Magic cards or the 5000+ Pokemon cards has a page, so this comment was not only based on misunderstanding, but on the commenter being a person who enjoys making up complete bullshit.
That doesn't explain why so many silly articles are not deleted, or why so many articles that get deleted are completely mundane.
The problem is 1) assuming Wikipedia admins don't understand basic physical facts, and 2) responding to an arg
Because it's an _encyclopedia_, not a "free data compendium". Duh.
Then, maybe they should purge all freely contributed data and write their own damned encyclopedia.
Maybe people should just read the goddamn policies before submitting data.
I still think the policy is fundamentally flawed. It's one thing to delete an article that some douchebucket writes about his two-week-old blog; it's another to delete something that's fairly well-known to a large but specific group of people.
So what's a better criterion? An arbitrary "I've heard of it before" vote? Ghits?
Yeah, I'm curious too. Lendrick, if you agree that it's OK to delete articles on some topics, how would you decide what to delete?
A majority vote wouldn't be fair, because admins would delete anything they hadn't heard of.
A Google search wouldn't be fair, because it would be radically biased toward modern topics and internet culture.
The current policy's as fair as you can get. Something's notable if it's been covered in reliable, independent sources. That precludes two-week-old blogs that no notable sources have written about, but allows for obscure topics that are fairly well-known to specific subcultures.
Great idea in theory. But in practice, it leads to Eastern European weightlifters being deleted because pimply-faced American 'admins' haven't heard of them, but that every single Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon card ever created has its own separate page.
Not one Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon card ever created has its own separate page.
And I'm gonna take a stab and guess that you don't actually have an example of an Eastern European weightlifter being deleted because an American admin hadn't heard of him.
But don't let the facts get in your way. Those "pimply-faced" admins obviously have no idea what they're talking about.
God, that's some obnoxious condescension right there. Those poor, well-meaning fools just haven't realized that an internet website can be bigger than a book! They just don't understand!
Deleted pages are kept on the server. No one's ever said it was a storage issue.
Photos on Wikipedia are rarely analyzed (except on articles about specific photos). When photos are included in an article, they're just filler to say "This is what this subject looked like."
Wikipedia is rarely so specific as to address a single photo, on a subject as broad as WWII. That would be the artistic domain of a dedicated history book, not an encyclopedia.
It depends on what you're using the photo for.
On Wikipedia, the original caption of the picture doesn't really relate in a sensible way to the rest of the article. The article's not about the picture, the picture is about the article's subject, so its caption should be factual, understandable, and neutral. If you include what the picture's caption was in the 1940s, you're just drawing attention to the photo itself, which takes away from the article.
On the Commons gallery itself, the original caption should be included, since a Commons page is about the photo, and not the subject of the photo. So yeah, I would include the original caption there, but also include a modern, neutral caption that is relevant to today, so that people can understand what the photo is actually about.
As far as I see, that's exactly what the plan is. Both captions are being included on Commons, but on the encyclopedia, only modern captions are used. It's not about being politically correct (whatever the fuck that stupid phrase means), it's about being informative and clear.
Before deleting the Torchic page, you should have to prove that the information is false.
Prove Torchics don't exist.
Otherwise everything that is not referenced would be deleted! Wikipedia never used to be like that.
Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia (May 2006):
I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative "I heard it somewhere" pseudo information is to be tagged with a "needs a cite" tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced.
(Full disclosure: this is not an official ultimatum on Wales' part, just his own interpretation of the rules he wrote for his own site.) This is being applied more strongly in the last few years than it was at the site's inception, but the site's only 8 years old. Wikipedia's going to be around for a very long time. It's just getting started. The rules, as written, have always been clear on the need for sources. The direction Wikipedia is moving in is toward higher standards, toward following its own policies, which is how it was intended.
If something happened on an episode of Pokemon, it happened! It's a fact. Why does it need a reference?? Really the reference should be the show, and before deleting the article you should have to view the show to disprove the points of the article. Why should a secondary source be used?
You might want to read the article (that's what was in the article when it was deleted). It barely touched on Torchic's appearance in the show. Most of its content had to do with its name, its "biological characteristics", its appearance in the games/manga/whatever. None of that can come from the cartoon. Most of the article's sources were fansites which could have pulled their information from anywhere.
Deletionists are the reason Wikipedia has turned to shit. Imagine if back in the early days everything was deleted. People barely referenced anything originally - if all that info was deleted automatically Wikipedia would never have got off the ground.
No, shitty articles are the reason Wikipedia has turned to shit. There were shitty articles when it started, there will be shitty articles ten years from now. As the number of articles increases, the ratio of shittiness will increase, as the long tail of articles is an inevitable shit storm of shittiness. The point of enforcing strict standards is to at least allow a few good articles to rise from the overwhelming abyss of shittiness that is Wikipedia. The point of deletionism is to say "hey, stop ignoring the rules that have been in place since day one, because you're turning Wikipedia to shit".
You cite their being lots of pokemon fansites as a reason for not including pokemon articles in wikipedia.
I didn't say that at all. I said there are lots of Pokemon fansites with no sources, so the fact that Wikipedia doesn't include this information doesn't prevent that information from existing. Wikipedia's higher standards aren't preventing anyone from learning anything about anything.
That same justification works for excluding math, as well. Why go to wikipedia when there's mathworld.wolfram.net, etc? Why go to wikipedia when there's Encyclopedia Britannica and others?
I wouldn't, since math articles on Wikipedia are terrible. I certainly wouldn't read a math article on Wikipedia which only had other wikis and personal websites as sources.
Redundancy is not a reason for exclusion.
No, it's a reason to keep Wikipedia's policies the way they are -- and not change them to be the same as any other wiki.
Besides, an article on Torchic doesn't make an article on World War II any less informative.
Yes, it does. If the Torchic doesn't require reliable sources, then neither does the World War II article. Unless you're seriously suggesting that every article needs to start with a majority vote on whether it should require reliable sources or not. Wikipedia doesn't do majority votes, it has foundational guidelines which are applied equally to everything, and that is a damn good policy.
You complain about slashdotters making unfounded accusations and ask for links to articles. I provide links and then you say that if wikipedia allowed those articles that wikipedia would be ruined. Well, wikipedia did allow those articles at one time. Is it so much to ask that you provide links backing up your claims just as I have done mine? Oh - that's right - wikipedia apologists don't need to provide evidence but wikipedia critics do. Yay!
Blah, blah, strawman, blah. What "claims" are you talking about? You (not you, people in general) claimed something happened (a fact), I asked for proof. I said Wikipedia's policies are fine (an opinion), you can't ask for proof of that. Wikipedia sucks in a lot of ways, but I don't think the academic standards are causing any of its problems. It just doesn't make sense to me that saying "you know what, nevermind, let's just let people do what feels right to them" will suddenly let it blossom into some futuristic beacon of academic leadership.
He seems to be the media's go-to person for quantum computing. E.g. here [physorg.com].
It was rhetorical, I don't give a crap who he is or what he's done. My point was, on Wikipedia, it's not enough to say "he's so respected". The point of the article is to give real information derived from real sources, not arbitrary assertions that the majority of editors think is correct. If a bunch of people on Slashdot say he's respected, I have no problem believing that. But the point of Wikipedia is to be a little more academically stringent than the rest of the Internet.
Just means the article [is/was] incomplete, not that Aaronson isn't notable.
Of course. The existence of a deletion discussion doesn't mean the article subject's not notable, just that there is doubt as to his notability. Since the article's creators failed to provide any proof of notability (which they are obliged, not encouraged, to do), the deletion discussion was set up to determine whether Aaronson was a notable subject.
The article, at the time the discussion began, didn't contain any secondary sources that indicated his notability. That's a perfectly valid reason to say, "hey, this guy doesn't look notable". Nothing unfair about that.
Stubs usually don't manage to convey the importance of their subject.
No, they usually don't. Unfortunately, that's exactly what they're supposed to do.
Note that the deletion debate [wikipedia.org] was closed early because there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell [wikipedia.org] that it would be deleted.
That doesn't mean the deletion debate was invalid, if that's what you're implying. At the time the deletion debate began, the article didn't have a single valid source, and contained almost no useful information about Aaronson other than a summary of his CV. Editors correctly voted "Delete", because the article (at the time) met Wikipedia's guidelines for deletion.
After the discussion began, the article was drastically improved. Editors who had correctly voted "Delete" at first, correctly changed their vote to "Keep" once the article was improved (notice the changed votes in the debate, and the run of "Keep"s at the end). It was only after reliable sources were added that everyone agreed. It wouldn't have been a snowball vote if the article had remained in its existing state, and -- (the important part) -- the article would not have been brought up to its current state if the vote hadn't happened! It would have remained as useless as the majority of stubs on Wikipedia. Now it's full of links to things he's done and people talking about him and his works. Now someone can have an actual understanding of him in a way they wouldn't have been able to if Wikipedia wasn't so stringent and the "deletionists" weren't so trigger-happy.
Of course, now that the debate ended, there have barely been any further edits to the article. It'll languish well into the future, I'm sure, but at least it's at least slightly useful now.
Thanks for proving I'm not a raving lunatic. And your edit summaries are awesome.
Just for full disclosure, I've had edits reverted plenty of times. But in every case, either a) the other person had a better argument, and convinced me; or b) I had a better argument, and convinced them.
And now I know more about both Warhammer and Wikipedia details that I ever cared to.
Amen.
What's very poor, here, is your ability to read. The OP said "every episode, save that one". In other words, "every episode, except that one".
Egg on my face. But let me try again, because this still doesn't make sense to me:
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
So, he failed to do something, whereupon he did some other things that don't affect the first thing. What's your point? What "backroom deals" are we talking about? He gave the administrators money? Cocaine? Blowjobs? Political influence?
Oh, he got rid of the articles that weren't properly sourced. What a bastard.
Have you been reading the comments in this article? Most people, here, think that is the problem. Asinine notability requirements. You're given an example of what people don't like about wikipedia and your response is, essentially, "good"?
I have. What I keep seeing over and over are comments like:
...which all betray a complete misunderstanding of what the notability and verifiability requirements are and why articles get deleted. I've never read anyone on Slashdot say "I disagree with Wikipedia's verifiability policy. Fan sites should be considered reliable sources." All I see is miseducated crap like the above.
That said, I don't know how anyone could disagree. I could start a Pokemon fan site right now that says Torchic is based on a mythical Korean bird guardian creature whose baby chicks could spit fire from their stomachs, which Satoshi Tajiri had a wooden statue of in his room that was carved by his dying grandfather, and this complete bullshit would be eligible under your encyclopedia and not eligible under Wikipedia. How do you defend against that? Can I make a fan site saying I invented Torchic? Am I notable then? Isn't it completely subjective, then, to say that I'm not eligible for inclusion, but any fact I make up about Torchic is eligible for inclusion? How would disputes be settled, a majority vote? How do you defend the one expert against the 100 idiots?
I mean, there's a reason Wikipedia is the first search result for the majority of Google searches. Wikipedia is good. It's not great, but it's good. Why radically undermine it to make it more like the rest of the Internet? There are enough Pokemon fan sites. This is one site that doesn't want to parrot those sites, it wants to take the best of the Internet and the best of the old world of publishing. That's how it got to where it is today.
Using wikipedia policy to justify wikipedia is just circular reasoning.
Absolutely. But using Wikipedia policy to justify the decisions of editors who are following Wikipedia policy, which people on Slashdot constantly misrepresent as inconsistent or subjective or mob-rule or political or they're-picking-on-me or whatever-they-want-to-call-it-ism, is reasonable.
It should read something like, "the encyclopedia that anybody can spend a lot of time and effort creating an article, only to have some other jackass delete it for no good reason."
Can you name an article that was deleted without a good reason?
It's more than just "sources and nothing else."
There's a whole list of "Reasons for Deletion"...
OK, let's see:
These all amount to "subject must meet the notability requirements." The last one's a little chilling but it's just rhetorical, it's never been invoked to have an otherwise acceptable article deleted.
These are legal concerns.
These are all technical things, not for articles. I'm not sure what that last one means exactly, but it doesn't sound like the type of thing that would be abused.
So yeah, they all amount to a) notability requirements must be met, and b) don't get Wikipedia sued. Both reasonable.
In fact, it looks to me like the exact article you link to about "Blood Angels" was deleted not because of "sources", but for being "cruft" or "non-noteable".
OK, let's look at this now. Here's every Delete vote against the "Blood Angels" page. Everyone read along at home and make sure I'm not lying. There are 11 "Delete" votes on the page.
Aaronson is one of the few CS researchers whose name keeps coming up again & again.
Where?
He's at least as notable as many of the other CSists who have articles.
Notability's not really a spectrum. Either his importance has been established by reliable, secondary sources or not. The only source in that article is some gigantic database site saying that he got a Ph.D. Clearly not sufficient.
It has nothing to do with "a lack of space". All information on Wikipedia must be backed up by reliable, independent, secondary sources. This is fundamental.
An article is deleted if and only if there are no reliable, independent, secondary sources that discuss it.
So if you want an article on a Simpsons episode, find the sources that discuss it -- IGN, EW, TV Guide, all reliable sources not directly owned by Fox Television -- and it's good. Even though not every sentence in the article is properly cited, the topic as a whole is suitable for inclusion because it has the potential to be expanded.
If an article has never been addressed in any reliable secondary sources, it gets deleted, because not one sentence can ever be properly verifiable. There is no potential to ever meet Wikipedia guidelines. So for the sake of Wikipedia's quality, not quantity, it is removed.
It's not about space, it's not about geekiness. It's about sources and nothing else.
Some guy nominates Heavy Metal (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. You see - this user knows he couldn't get consensus by an AfD so he engages in backroom deals to gain support.
Nonsense. He was reverted within a few hours, and the article has been up ever since. That's a very, very poor example. Actually, it's a great example of Wikipedia working the way it's supposed to. People disagree, the people who follow the guidelines (not necessarily the majority) win. That's the way I've seen it happen over and over again. But you won't ever use this as an example of how Wikipedia works properly, right? You'll just keep using it as an example of how Wikipedia doesn't work even though I just clearly disproved it.
Of course, that doesn't top Torchic [wikipedia.org]. 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.
The Torchic article was non-notable. Not, as so many people confusedly insist, because it is obscure or video-game-related, but because the sources used were horrible.
Look at the list of sources. An article needs reliable, secondary sources to be notable (it may, of course, supplement these with primary sources and other secondary sources where appropriate, but not exclusively). If we pull out primary sources (non-secondary) and Pokemon fan sites (little editorial control, not sufficiently reliable), we get: Time.com, discussing Pokemon in general (never mentioning the word "Torchic"), and IGN, discussing Pokemon in general (never mentioning the word "Torchic"). This was after the entire league of Torchic defenders scrambled to find as many sources as possible. Not one reliable secondary source even mentioned Torchic. So if there are no reliable secondary sources, which are supposed to be the basis for every article, how can there be an entire article about it? So it got merged into another crappy article. Even though "List of Pokemon" sucks, it is at least a notable subject, since Pokemon as a whole is discussed in reliable secondary sources.
Are you joking? Guidelines for inclusion are incredibly lax.
If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article.
Are you reading that? Any subject that's been mentioned in a magazine/book/journal/newspaper/website with some amount of editorial control is acceptable.
That's every video game, every book, every television show and every episode of each, every politician, every rock band, rapper, and hit song that's ever been on the radio, every school, and every city, in the entire world, forever and ever,
and that's without even starting an argument! The number of fictional characters and abstract concepts on Wikipedia is absolutely staggering.
You really want it to be laxer than that? Here's where you can find that stuff: THE REST OF THE INTERNET.
Deletionists are following the Golden Rule that summarizes the purpose of Wikipedia and all of the debates that have ever occurred on it, the one part that no one seems to get, no matter what:
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that summarizes research from reliable secondary sources.
That's what it is and that's all it's ever going to be. If someone's doing something you don't like, either a) you're wrong or b) they're a troll and you shouldn't give up so easily. How is that any different from the rest of the Internet? How is that any different from real life? How could Wikipedia possibly pursue its goal better than it does without restricting people more?
I was going to sarcastically point out that you just completely supported my post by claiming it's happened to you many times but not posting an example. But then I realized you could not possibly be that colossally retarded, so you must just be trolling. Right?
Exactly.
That's the trade-off for letting anyone edit the encyclopedia. Scientific journals have a smaller writer base, and can individually verify the academic validity of new research.
Wikipedia users can't make sure that every new piece of research is valid. That's outside the scope of the project. So more information (in terms of topics) is allowed, but with stricter guidelines (in terms of verifiability) for inclusion. Makes sense to me.