8 ms·

This is a long but excellent article - well worth reading. By coincidence, I became aware of this bizarre "deletionist" culture at Wikipedia recently when I wa

• paulryanrogers 10y ago
  > Wikipedia had evolved from the early days when I was consistently delighted to find information on all manner of obscure topics IMO, encyclopaedias aren't meant for obscure topics. And any products or services with a focus on curation have to discriminate. Of course the criteria for doing so will probably always be controversial.
  • protomyth 10y ago
    "encyclopaedias aren't meant for obscure topics" I'm a bit confused by this reasoning. I can see space considerations in a paper environment, but not on a wiki. Why wouldn't Wikipedia try to be the home of all knowledge?
    • taco_emoji 10y ago
      Space has little to do with it. Wikipedia is meant to be a reliable compendium of knowledge, and it can succeed only to the extent that it contains easily verified information. Obscure topics will of course not have much in the way of verifiable information available.
      • protomyth 10y ago
        How much research is too much for "easily verified" information?
        • tptacek 10y ago
          If you have to do original research to justify a topic's inclusion, you're outside the charter of the encyclopedia. The only "research" Wikipedia accepts are direct citations to reliable sources.
          • protomyth 10y ago
            I was more thinking of finding the citations as opposed to research in the discovery of new knowledge sense.
  • mattlevan 10y ago
    That may be true regarding physical encyclopedias, which are, of course, limited by space and weight (ha!). With an online encyclopedia like Wikipedia, though, those limitations are gone. I'm looking forward to seeing Infogalactic give Wikipedia a run for its money!
    • duckingtest 10y ago
      >If you would like to edit articles on Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core, you may complete and submit the following form to request a user account. Please read the Terms of Service before requesting an account. Once the account is approved, you will be emailed a notification message and the account will be usable at login. Request an account?!? What an exclusionary language. How did I find that out? Because I tried to make a tiny edit. Then found out I need an account. Then that I need to 'request' account. Yeah, no, infogalactic just lost me forever. A very nice example of barriers to participation in action. >Infogalactic has the right to block or ban any user for any reason whatsoever. Even more totalitarian language... infogalactic seems to be less inclusive & open than wikipedia today.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• user5994461 10y ago
  Anything that goes on the TV or the radio will be seen by millions of people. Just because it's on TV doesn't make it worthy of an article.
  • namlem 10y ago
    Why not? It's not like having article costs anything. It's just a few kilobytes of text.
    • user5994461 10y ago
      I don't think you realize the amount of new stuff that pop up in the world every day. That would be a tremendous amount of articles if we wrote about every single little thing.
    • tsukikage 10y ago
      Having detailed discussion of "frivolous" topics costs the ability to be taken seriously as a source for less trivial information in certain circles. Whether the tradeoff is worthwhile is left as an exercise for the reader.
    • tptacek 10y ago
      This a very popular canard. It's true that an additional article on Wikipedia has zero marginal cost in terms of compute, bandwidth, and storage. But every article on Wikipedia imposes maintenance costs on the project, because every article is an opportunity for error, and it's the responsibility of every member of the project to eliminate those errors. You don't have to spend much time on Wikipedia to get a visceral sense of the validity of this argument, whether or not you agree with it. It is kind of a miracle --- not a small one --- that Wikipedia exists at all. It is one of the great achievements of the Internet writ large. And it exists in spite of: * Enormous numbers of articles written as advertisements designed to piggyback off Google's preference for Wikipedia articles on its first SERPs * Enormous amounts of casually malicious spam and vandalism, some of which is purposely designed to avoid detection as long as possible * Enormous amounts of agenda-driven bias working continuously to turn Wikipedia articles into advocacy pieces for one side or another of a given controversy The point of the notability standard isn't to reward people for fame, or to save hard disk space. It's to put some reasonable boundary on the subjects for which unpaid editors should be expected to mount the often-tedious defense against these forces.
• wolf550e 10y ago
  Wikipedia could have a rule that if a piece of media is notable enough to have an article on wikipedia, then everyone in the credits for that piece of media is notable enough to have an article on wikipedia. 99% of those people aren't famous, but why not?
  • tptacek 10y ago
    Can you reword this? I don't understand the suggestion you're making. I think you might be making a category error. Notability on Wikipedia isn't a reward earned by acquisition of fame; it's a level of status at which sourcing about a subject is likely to be reliable. The problem Wikipedia has isn't that no-names might get articles. It's that articles will be written about subjects for whom reliable sourcing is impossible, because no reliable source has ever deigned to write about them. This gets us to a fundamental principle of what an encyclopedia actually is --- and to a project rule that is as old as "NPOV". An encyclopedia --- at least Wikipedia's conception --- is a tertiary source. It's a roadmap that summarizes and points to other, more in-depth sources. By definition, if you don't have reliable sources to back the subject of an article up, it can't be hosted in an encyclopedia. The project's answer to this challenge would be, first create the reliable secondary sources you'd need to support an encyclopedia article, and then create the article itself.
    • wolf550e 10y ago
      Thank you for this explanation. You're right. For people who are only mentioned in credits for TV shows and not in newspaper articles, Wikipedia is not the place to list in which other TV shows someone was credited.
  • pwdisswordfish 10y ago
    So, every runner and key grip that has worked in production of a popular TV series is notable now? Someone please formulate a 'notability' version of Schneier's law.
• tptacek 10y ago
  What do you like so much about this article? What makes it excellent? What qualities of its analysis particularly appealed to you? What I read was a piece that centered on a single --- and I thought dormant --- controversy about the purpose of Wikipedia: that, because the marginal cost of a new article on Wikipedia is zero, its charter should include comprehensive character-by-character breakdowns of fictional works. Not just of Pokemon, but of every fictional work in which its editors have an interest. Reasonable people can disagree about this. But it's not the sweeping indictment of Wikipedia I'd expect from this comment thread. The article offers two empirical studies to support its argument that deletionism is harming Wikipedia. In the first, it collects the "External Link" contributions of an anime-focused editor and records the (very small) percentage of proposed links that were ultimately accepted into the bodies of articles. But the links he's highlighted appear to be of very low quality. I clicked through a random 10 of them, and most of them were 404'd. The ones that were alive all appeared to be UGC online reviews of individual episodes of anime films. I'm not surprised that editors who watchlist anime titles were reluctant to stuff articles with tens of links to individual "mania.com" review articles (none of which appear to live today). In his second experiment, Gwern selected a random set of Wikipedia articles and killed existing external links, to measure how long it would take for them to be restored. But by his own admission, the process of selecting random articles meant he was working primarily with articles nobody cares about. He suggests in the text that the median number of users watchlisting the articles he tampered with was 5 --- but links to the Wikipedia editor who informed him of that without noting that 5 is a very low number; by comparison, the Wikipedia article on Paul Graham (once notable on HN for being put up for deletion on WP) has over 125. But the bigger flaw with the experiment is that it misconstrues Wikipedia's position on external links. The WP:EL policy Gwern cited in his external deletions is direct about this: Wikipedia is not a collection of links. The project does not view sprawling collections of "External Links" as a good thing: what it wants are links to reliable sources that back up points made in the prose article itself. It's no wonder that article watchers didn't rush to add links back to stories; the links that he removed were marginal, at times totally disconnected from the stories themselves (as with the "nsplacenames.ca" link on Rockingham, Nova Scotia), or dead (as with the video link, unreferenced by the article, on the Shahrnush Parsipur article. This can't be surprising to Gwern: his methodology clearly selects for marginal links, by trawling for them in the disfavored "External Links" sections of articles far out into the long tail of interest on WP. This article was written in 2009, and makes predictions about the future of the project. Were those predictions accurate? It doesn't look like it: article creation has grown steadily, and editor participation has been remarkably stable for years. Has the Wikipedia community moved away from its "deletionist" stance? This comment thread sure doesn't think so, and I agree. So: what gives?
• deleted 10y ago
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• redler 10y ago
  Perhaps Wikipedia should approach this from another angle: loosen their baseline criteria, and then treat "notability" like Twitter's "verified" tag. Let the debate be whether or not an article should have the notability checkmark, not whether or not it should exist at all (within reason).
  • tptacek 10y ago
    Because of the way Google prefers Wikipedia articles over other sources in its SERPs, this would ultimately have the effect of turning Wikipedia into a UGC version of AOL: it would be overrun with crud (because the Internet incentivizes Wikipedia articles), and the project would have to expend significant effort at retraining the Internet to look for "verified" stickers on the things that actually were encyclopedia articles. For what benefit? Wikipedia's response to this problem is the right one: there's a whole big wide Internet out there, and if Wikipedia isn't the appropriate place for your article, surely there are many other places that are. UGC sites are falling over themselves to get people to write on them. Why force them on the one Internet project that doesn't want them?
    • jessedhillon 10y ago
      Google can easily retrain itself to weight verified Wikipedia topics higher than unverified. There is a lot of benefit to having these articles maintained by a non-profit; Wikia's load time on a phone browser is stupid long, mainly because of ads and tracking scripts. It is several seconds before they are loaded, then you start getting bombarded with full-screen ads. There are dozens of Wikia apps in the Play store, so effectively that means that, unless this is a topic that I have a deep and pre-existing commitment to, I can't have the accelerated app experience. Wikia is just not a replacement for Wikipedia. Yes, UGC sites are clamoring for content: so they can monetize the shit out of it with no respect for the content, community, creator, or reader. Your comment makes it seem like there's no merit to keeping the content on WP, but if you actually use some of these other sites I don't know how you can even compare the two.
    • redler 10y ago
      Good point on SERPs, and certainly nobody should force Wikipedia to act against what they believe is their strategic best interest. But isn't "the way Google prefers Wikipedia articles over other sources in its SERPs" an epiphenomenon? In an alternate universe where Wikipedia was more inclusive and used some kind of "notability" flag, Google could just as easily prefer those "notable" articles the way it prefers Wikipedia articles more generally in this universe. Edit: clarity.
• ubernostrum 10y ago
  Wikipedia is currently -- for the second time -- trying to delete its article about the actress who voices/sings the title character of "Moana", on grounds that she's only notable for that one film and thus doesn't "deserve" to be written about separately from it.
• Animats 10y ago
  This is someone who has a handful of popular-ish songs on streaming sites, all from television soundtracks, but hasn't really charted as far as I can tell That's what's called "fails [[WP:MUSIC]]" on Wikipedia. The basic criteria are two recordings on a major label, or some major award, or charting on some well known chart, or historical importance. These criteria filter out the several million garage and Myspace bands that would like to be on Wikipedia.
  • Mithaldu 10y ago
    Your kind of thinking is the problem. You state the rule, state one positive from it, and don't even bother to consider why it could possibly be a positive (or not). You also failed to consider any negatives.