4 ms·

Which is partly why I kind of mourn the fall of Wikipedia. By having an arbitrarily defined criterion of "meaningful" knowledge is spread across hundreds of wik

by zanny 11y ago

Which is partly why I kind of mourn the fall of Wikipedia. By having an arbitrarily defined criterion of "meaningful" knowledge is spread across hundreds of wikis rather than being in the singular copyleft originator. Why couldn't the Pokemon Wikipedia articles be as extensive as the Bulbapedia ones? There is demonstrable demand and interest in maintaining such extensive information as evidenced by the commitment of the contributors to Bulbapedia to keep it so up to date and pristine. If an article rots where nobody wants to maintain it or cannot write it with sufficient information to justify it's existence that is a very different situation to this. But that is not an arbitrary line of relevance someone pushes upon everyone else. You could just have a minimum length and minimum sources and be done with it.

anupamsr 11y ago
A lot of people weren't probably editing Wikipedia when it was still young and cool and not a place to get abused for changing anything beside grammar. Let me tell you. Wikipedia is the way it is today because if it weren't, no body would use Wikia. After launching Wikia there has been a concentrated effort from the top to encourage new editors to open their own wikipedia or shove off. By its very mechanic, Wikipedia is now a den of socially unfit.
badloginagain 11y ago
I would expect the contributors of Star Wars wikis, Pokemon wikis, etc, would want self-determined rule- doing best for their particular wikis. Wikipedia, with a broad reach, will have different rules/needs than a very specific/focused wiki.
msbarnett 11y ago
> Why couldn't the Pokemon Wikipedia articles be as extensive as the Bulbapedia ones? There is demonstrable demand and interest in maintaining such extensive information as evidenced by the commitment of the contributors to Bulbapedia to keep it so up to date and pristine. Cynically, because if all of this popular high-traffic content were on Wikipedia instead of Wikia, it wouldn't deliver ad views. Jimmy Wales runs both, and the editorial policy just happened to shake out such that his non-profit pushed a ton of high-traffic content onto his for-profit service. Go figure.
- arm 11y ago
  Although, in this case, it’s on neither (Bulbapedia isn’t hosted on Wikia).
NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago
How can Wikipedia pretend to be the successor to Britannica though, unless they're as snooty and serious as that deadtree encyclopedia?
chris11 11y ago
Why does it need to be that extensive? I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information. I think finding information would be too noisy otherwise. For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character. Getting good search results is definitely a problem that a ton of people have spent time working on. But I don't really think that it is that important of a problem in some cases. Sure, it might be nice if wikipedia could accurately distinguish whether I wanted info on wood ash or Ash the fictional character, but that creates problems. It basically makes implicit assumptions about what I am interested in. And sometimes it can be nice to have less intelligent results.
- fao_ 11y ago
  > I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information. That is why wikipedia has a piece of text saying something along the lines of "This page only covers Foo, for any other usage of Foo see: Foo (Disambiguation)". > For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character. One of the things that is nice about using Duckduckgo in conjunction, is that you can use the `!w` bang, and do something like `!w Ash (Name)` and Wikipedia's naming is usually predicable enough to get to the right article first time.
tptacek 11y ago
"Mourn the fall of Wikipedia"? Who is Wikipedia losing to? What was it before that it isn't anymore? I last spent significant time on WP in 2007, and "deletionism" was very much the mainstream principle of the site back then. Wikipedia has extensive coverage of Pokemon; it covers Pokemon better than it covers abstract algebra! What it doesn't do is cover every single aspect of Pokemon in its own article. The reason it does that is because there's a tradeoff in managing an encyclopedia between reliability and expansiveness, and Wikipedia has tacked towards reliability. If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they aren't lies.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they aren't lies. If this were a risk that we were correctly balancing against, you'd expect there would be some notable base rate of unreliable articles causing readers problems. But I never have this sort of problem. I'm never frustrated because I found something unreliable on Wikipedia, because I can always be skeptical of uncited information. Elsewhere you asked for examples of damage done by the deletionists. So let me flip it around on you. What are example articles right now that you think are putting a large burden on the community that should be cut? (As an aside, note the asymmetry: When too many hard-to-police articles are kept, there's ample examples to discuss. But when too many niche articles are deleted, I can't point to anything. I just say "huh, I guess my local taco stand doesn't have an article". And I can never know if it's because no one was interested to write one or because it wasn't notable enough to make the cut...or because the person who was interested enough to write it new it wouldn't make the cut.)
  - tptacek 11y ago

by zanny 11y ago

anupamsr 11y ago

A lot of people weren't probably editing Wikipedia when it was still young and cool and not a place to get abused for changing anything beside grammar. Let me tell you. Wikipedia is the way it is today because if it weren't, no body would use Wikia. After launching Wikia there has been a concentrated effort from the top to encourage new editors to open their own wikipedia or shove off. By its very mechanic, Wikipedia is now a den of socially unfit.

badloginagain 11y ago

I would expect the contributors of Star Wars wikis, Pokemon wikis, etc, would want self-determined rule- doing best for their particular wikis. Wikipedia, with a broad reach, will have different rules/needs than a very specific/focused wiki.

msbarnett 11y ago

> Why couldn't the Pokemon Wikipedia articles be as extensive as the Bulbapedia ones? There is demonstrable demand and interest in maintaining such extensive information as evidenced by the commitment of the contributors to Bulbapedia to keep it so up to date and pristine. Cynically, because if all of this popular high-traffic content were on Wikipedia instead of Wikia, it wouldn't deliver ad views. Jimmy Wales runs both, and the editorial policy just happened to shake out such that his non-profit pushed a ton of high-traffic content onto his for-profit service. Go figure.

arm 11y ago
Although, in this case, it’s on neither (Bulbapedia isn’t hosted on Wikia).

NoMoreNicksLeft 11y ago

How can Wikipedia pretend to be the successor to Britannica though, unless they're as snooty and serious as that deadtree encyclopedia?

chris11 11y ago

Why does it need to be that extensive? I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information. I think finding information would be too noisy otherwise. For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character. Getting good search results is definitely a problem that a ton of people have spent time working on. But I don't really think that it is that important of a problem in some cases. Sure, it might be nice if wikipedia could accurately distinguish whether I wanted info on wood ash or Ash the fictional character, but that creates problems. It basically makes implicit assumptions about what I am interested in. And sometimes it can be nice to have less intelligent results.

fao_ 11y ago
> I think that it might be more useful to keep very specific information walled off from general information. That is why wikipedia has a piece of text saying something along the lines of "This page only covers Foo, for any other usage of Foo see: Foo (Disambiguation)". > For instance, if I'm searching for ash on wikipedia I probably want wood or volcanic ash. But if I'm searching for ash on a pokemon wikipedia I want info on the main character. One of the things that is nice about using Duckduckgo in conjunction, is that you can use the `!w` bang, and do something like `!w Ash (Name)` and Wikipedia's naming is usually predicable enough to get to the right article first time.

tptacek 11y ago

"Mourn the fall of Wikipedia"? Who is Wikipedia losing to? What was it before that it isn't anymore? I last spent significant time on WP in 2007, and "deletionism" was very much the mainstream principle of the site back then. Wikipedia has extensive coverage of Pokemon; it covers Pokemon better than it covers abstract algebra! What it doesn't do is cover every single aspect of Pokemon in its own article. The reason it does that is because there's a tradeoff in managing an encyclopedia between reliability and expansiveness, and Wikipedia has tacked towards reliability. If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they aren't lies.

jessriedel 11y ago
> If you're going to have a reliable encyclopedia, where there's a pretty good chance that any sentence in the site is true, then there's a negative externality to forests of related articles: each one of them is an independent entry point to the site from Google, and each will attract its own edits, and all of those edits need to be policed to make sure they aren't lies. If this were a risk that we were correctly balancing against, you'd expect there would be some notable base rate of unreliable articles causing readers problems. But I never have this sort of problem. I'm never frustrated because I found something unreliable on Wikipedia, because I can always be skeptical of uncited information. Elsewhere you asked for examples of damage done by the deletionists. So let me flip it around on you. What are example articles right now that you think are putting a large burden on the community that should be cut? (As an aside, note the asymmetry: When too many hard-to-police articles are kept, there's ample examples to discuss. But when too many niche articles are deleted, I can't point to anything. I just say "huh, I guess my local taco stand doesn't have an article". And I can never know if it's because no one was interested to write one or because it wasn't notable enough to make the cut...or because the person who was interested enough to write it new it wouldn't make the cut.)
- tptacek 11y ago