6 ms·

I started editing Wikipedia in 2003. It was fun. Over the years it became less fun, I gave up on participating and quite a few articles I had started ended up b

by guaka 10y ago

I started editing Wikipedia in 2003. It was fun. Over the years it became less fun, I gave up on participating and quite a few articles I had started ended up being deleted. I also often found myself looking for articles I knew had been on Wikipedia, but had been deleted. In December 2013 I had enough of the deletionism. I spent a few hours to set up http://deletionpedia.org/ http://deletionpedia.org/ - to rescue articles from deletion. It doesn't deal with harassment, but it's a useful resource if you want to find back something that was deleted on Wikipedia. (The site had been set up before, but the original creator let it slip.)

tptacek 10y ago
What are some examples of articles you've written that you feel definitely shouldn't have been deleted?
- MrLeap 10y ago
  I'm not the parent, but I remember reading good articles - going back to them some time later and finding them deleted. Can't really recall the specifics but I bet they were for esoteric programming languages or something. http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Nu... that page seems like a decent example though. That seems like a really useful resource if I were looking for that information. I can't figure out why it would have been deleted.
  - MatmaRex 10y ago
    The reasoning can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
    - vonklaus 10y ago
      The reasons states were essentially: - Not Comprehensive - Not wholly accurate - Difficult to keep updated - Not all sourced/vergiable or unsourced Which is totally fair, except that would apply to a lot of articles...
      - razwall 10y ago
        The main reason given is that the article was original research. In other words, it was not just unsourced, but fundamentally unsourceable. There is nowhere an editor can go to reliably determine whether the entries in the list are correct (at least, not to the knowledge of anyone who participated in the deletion discussion). That puts it well outside the bounds of Wikipedia's mission as an encyclopedia, which is a tertiary information source that only summarizes information from other sources.
    - swayvil 10y ago
      Is it reasoning or is it mere justification? Hard to tell. This is the protective wall around the Wikipedia editor's kingdom.
      - Pyxl101 10y ago
        > This list is essentially unsourced and because of the nature of these numbers being unpublished, will always be original research. Does not seem to be a notable list. Seems like pretty good reasoning to me. The list is unsourced and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Plus it's not a notable topic, something I'd also agree with. Perhaps there ought to be a "wiki facts" website where such material could be published and editors could attempt to ascertain its validity and publish any facts that can be confirmed, even if not with typical encyclopedic quality sources.
        swayvil 10y ago
        You miss my point. You offered a rationale. But how exactly is it being used? 2 options : (A) It is being used to arrive at a conclusion (B) It is being used to justify a conclusion.
  - Steko 10y ago
    There was a ridiculous shitshow over MMA articles that dragged on for what seemed like years, a crusade entirely driven by one or two editors who knew how to abuse the AfD process.
  - mysterypie 10y ago
    It's an interesting list, but I can understand Wikipedia not wanting it. Somebody somewhere is maintaining the official list. If you start a new bank, you can just make up your own Issuer Identification Number and expect to interoperate with the rest of the financial industry. Since someone somewhere has a official list, Wikipedia should publish or link to that official list. I suppose if the official list is "secret" or unpublished, then the question is trickier. Even in that case, I think the best option would be for Wikipedia to offer an external link to someone compiling or maintaining such a list.
    - mysterypie 10y ago
      Uh, too late to edit my comment above, but I meant to say, "If you start a new bank, you CAN'T just make up your own Issuer Identification Number and expect to interoperate with the rest of the financial industry."
- Spooky23 10y ago
  A friend was a Commissioner of Public Works and prolific writer who authored or expanded stub articles about infrastructure (reservoirs, dams, etc). He attracted the ire of some wackjob when he referenced printed materials. Given his somewhat unique position, he had some stuff digitized and posted, and returned to Wikipedia a few months later to find that almost everything he did was reverted. I'm glad that people put up with the nonsense and contribute to Wikipedia... but what a shit experience.
  - jusq2 10y ago
    References are the basis of all material on Wikipedia. It's the only way to deal with bias at a global level. Your friend might be a decent person but there are lots of Commissioners of Public Works that aren't and have agendas that take a non trivial amount of effort and time to discover.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Printed references are references, and they shouldn't be rejected just because they aren't on the internet. But even when the author went to the trouble of putting those references on the internet, they were still deleted. There's just no justification for that. Even if a policy required all references to be available via the internet, the author fulfilled that requirement.
      - jusq2 10y ago
        sigh...there is justification. Which doesn't mean your friend and his content were treated shabbily. If this was allowed, and Donald Trump is putting up his documents on the internet and referencing them on his wikipedia page would you allow it? It can do a lot of damage and people and organizations do this all the time and every day. This is the kind of behavior the policy exists to prevent. Its well known that it isn't perfect Please read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
        10y ago
- joshlemer 10y ago
  Not the parent here, but I was pretty peeved to see the [Red Eclipse](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Red_Eclipse http://deletionpedia.org/en/Red_Eclipse) page get deleted for [not being a notable enough game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Red_Eclipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...) despite being one of the most active open source games around, and a history of over a decade. I just found it annoying because if you look through Wikipedia's [List of Open Source games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game...) is pretty much full of less notable abandonware, and it seems like some people just got a chip on their shoulder for this game's article.
- j_s 10y ago
  I feel very few will show up to link articles they've written; here's one that I also didn't write but had a lot of insanely useful info: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Server_Compare_Tools&oldid=465811353 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser... This is in no way encyclopedic and violates several policies and guidelines on lists and external links https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Server_Compare_Tools&diff=cur&oldid=465811353 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser... Seems reasonable but I almost wish their could be a tier 2 Wikipedia where people could share this type of a time investment. Maybe that's what the various undeletion sites will wind up doing!
- chris_wot 10y ago
  It's not so much they delete entire articles, it's more that certain people camp on articles and remove all your material.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  It's not just about deletes. It's amazing how so many people have the same problems with WP and they are never addressed. Comments here are getting tons of up votes due to frustration. My questions are: - Does WP leadership really know the extent to which people have stopped editing due to frustration? - Do they not fix it because they don't want to change, don't know a solution, or are bullied by their own editors? - Are they aware that WP tends to attract people with this trait and mitigating these effects would make a massive difference? http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I promise I'm not trying to be snarky or dismissive, but I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that a group of nerds on message boards can look at the most ambitious knowledge resource in the history of the Internet, and possibly in the history of the last 100 years, and come to the conclusion that it's urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I feel like the Wikipedia project is one of the better run communities anywhere on the Internet, and that we don't perceive them that way mostly due to the absolutely spectacular scale that they operate at. Note that I'm not saying they're the most pleasant community in the world to work with. They aren't! But that's because they're doing so much, working with so many people at so many different levels of engagement. Hacker News is a trifling community by comparison, and look how much work goes in to trying to maintain norms and civility here. I feel like the Wikipedia community has bent over backwards to understand the concerns that completionist interest groups have about logging every possible startup, every open source developer of any note, every open source project, &c. They spend more time discussing their norms and processes about subject inclusion than any other meta-concern. I do not feel like the tech community meets Wikipedia halfway. Every argument I see in HN threads about "deletionism" seems rooted in the idea that an Internet encyclopedia need not have strict standards for inclusion because the marginal cost of an additional article is zero. But that's simply a false statement; it's based on the false premise that the only cost for Wikipedia for articles is storage space. You can't read the Wikipedia project charter for 5 minutes without realizing that storage is their least important cost.
vacri 10y ago
> I spent a few hours to set up http://deletionpedia.org/ http://deletionpedia.org/ - to rescue articles from deletion. I hit random 5 times (it's slow), and got one empty article ('looks like it survived on WP') and four profiles (one company, three meatbags), all of which were only a couple of sentences and even calling them a 'stub article' would be generous. No tears lost over these poor-quality chaff articles.
gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
I started updating pages related to my research topic - thinking it would be a public service. The pages were egregiously out of date. Every attempt to edit was reverted by a resident page troll. Total waste of my time and the pages remain totally wrong. (yes i cited research and no the topic is not a controversial political one.)
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Did you get on the IRC channel? I edit wikipedia and normally the only way to figure out why something should have been reset is to ask. Personally, I've edited plenty of Wikipedia pages and I still occasionally do when I come across one I think I can help with, and I only have an issue around 20% of the time, and usually it's because I'm filling out a topic that's too obscure.
  - Nomentatus 10y ago
    Ditto on the official trolls, so I've quit too. One troll had a degree, at least, but he wasn't reading current research. Participation continues to decline. If your interest is very narrow and you are IRC-wise and persistent, I don't doubt that you can eventually intimidate the trolls in that narrow topic and not have a problem thereafter. But this isn't my case or the common case, I suspect.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
    Why should one have to work out how to use irc to help out in the public interest?
  - tunap 10y ago
    In hindsight, this is deliciously ironic advice considering the noteworthy cesspool of Dreg's creation. In 2012 I ventured into the Craigslist chatroom to determine why a posted item I had listed was 'ghosted'. I believe the answer was too many numerals in my description(RV: model year, mileage, doors, beds, etc.). After my attempt to satisfy the ambiguous criterion to no effect I returned and cited numerous examples other than mine that exceeded the reason given but were not ghosted. The result was every ad I had listed was then ghosted and every relist and new creation was ghosted by default. I ended up creating a new disposable, copy+pasted new listings verbatim without incident and sold most items. Listing a recently deceased family member's possessions was a chore, reaching out to Dregslist chat turned it into a nightmare. Why isn't Dreg using these funds to cleanup harrasment, data farmers and scammers on 'his' site? edit: on-topic, I too had edits on WP overturned in the mid-00's. I posted my defense in page notes to no avail and desisted any further attempts.
cabalamat 10y ago
> I started editing Wikipedia in 2003. It was fun. Over the years it became less fun My experience is similar to yours. If the Wikimedia Foundation really cared about harrassment they would kick out all the deletionists.

by guaka 10y ago

tptacek 10y ago

What are some examples of articles you've written that you feel definitely shouldn't have been deleted?

MrLeap 10y ago
I'm not the parent, but I remember reading good articles - going back to them some time later and finding them deleted. Can't really recall the specifics but I bet they were for esoteric programming languages or something. http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers http://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Nu... that page seems like a decent example though. That seems like a really useful resource if I were looking for that information. I can't figure out why it would have been deleted.
- MatmaRex 10y ago
  The reasoning can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_Issuer_Identification_Numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
  - vonklaus 10y ago
    The reasons states were essentially: - Not Comprehensive - Not wholly accurate - Difficult to keep updated - Not all sourced/vergiable or unsourced Which is totally fair, except that would apply to a lot of articles...
    - razwall 10y ago
      The main reason given is that the article was original research. In other words, it was not just unsourced, but fundamentally unsourceable. There is nowhere an editor can go to reliably determine whether the entries in the list are correct (at least, not to the knowledge of anyone who participated in the deletion discussion). That puts it well outside the bounds of Wikipedia's mission as an encyclopedia, which is a tertiary information source that only summarizes information from other sources.
  - swayvil 10y ago
    Is it reasoning or is it mere justification? Hard to tell. This is the protective wall around the Wikipedia editor's kingdom.
    - Pyxl101 10y ago
      > This list is essentially unsourced and because of the nature of these numbers being unpublished, will always be original research. Does not seem to be a notable list. Seems like pretty good reasoning to me. The list is unsourced and Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Plus it's not a notable topic, something I'd also agree with. Perhaps there ought to be a "wiki facts" website where such material could be published and editors could attempt to ascertain its validity and publish any facts that can be confirmed, even if not with typical encyclopedic quality sources.
      - swayvil 10y ago
        You miss my point. You offered a rationale. But how exactly is it being used? 2 options : (A) It is being used to arrive at a conclusion (B) It is being used to justify a conclusion.
- Steko 10y ago
  There was a ridiculous shitshow over MMA articles that dragged on for what seemed like years, a crusade entirely driven by one or two editors who knew how to abuse the AfD process.
- mysterypie 10y ago
  It's an interesting list, but I can understand Wikipedia not wanting it. Somebody somewhere is maintaining the official list. If you start a new bank, you can just make up your own Issuer Identification Number and expect to interoperate with the rest of the financial industry. Since someone somewhere has a official list, Wikipedia should publish or link to that official list. I suppose if the official list is "secret" or unpublished, then the question is trickier. Even in that case, I think the best option would be for Wikipedia to offer an external link to someone compiling or maintaining such a list.
  - mysterypie 10y ago
    Uh, too late to edit my comment above, but I meant to say, "If you start a new bank, you CAN'T just make up your own Issuer Identification Number and expect to interoperate with the rest of the financial industry."
Spooky23 10y ago
A friend was a Commissioner of Public Works and prolific writer who authored or expanded stub articles about infrastructure (reservoirs, dams, etc). He attracted the ire of some wackjob when he referenced printed materials. Given his somewhat unique position, he had some stuff digitized and posted, and returned to Wikipedia a few months later to find that almost everything he did was reverted. I'm glad that people put up with the nonsense and contribute to Wikipedia... but what a shit experience.
- jusq2 10y ago
  References are the basis of all material on Wikipedia. It's the only way to deal with bias at a global level. Your friend might be a decent person but there are lots of Commissioners of Public Works that aren't and have agendas that take a non trivial amount of effort and time to discover.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Printed references are references, and they shouldn't be rejected just because they aren't on the internet. But even when the author went to the trouble of putting those references on the internet, they were still deleted. There's just no justification for that. Even if a policy required all references to be available via the internet, the author fulfilled that requirement.
    - jusq2 10y ago
      sigh...there is justification. Which doesn't mean your friend and his content were treated shabbily. If this was allowed, and Donald Trump is putting up his documents on the internet and referencing them on his wikipedia page would you allow it? It can do a lot of damage and people and organizations do this all the time and every day. This is the kind of behavior the policy exists to prevent. Its well known that it isn't perfect Please read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
      - 10y ago
joshlemer 10y ago
Not the parent here, but I was pretty peeved to see the [Red Eclipse](http://deletionpedia.org/en/Red_Eclipse http://deletionpedia.org/en/Red_Eclipse) page get deleted for [not being a notable enough game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Red_Eclipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...) despite being one of the most active open source games around, and a history of over a decade. I just found it annoying because if you look through Wikipedia's [List of Open Source games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game...) is pretty much full of less notable abandonware, and it seems like some people just got a chip on their shoulder for this game's article.
j_s 10y ago
I feel very few will show up to link articles they've written; here's one that I also didn't write but had a lot of insanely useful info: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Server_Compare_Tools&oldid=465811353 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser... This is in no way encyclopedic and violates several policies and guidelines on lists and external links https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Server_Compare_Tools&diff=cur&oldid=465811353 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Microsoft_SQL_Ser... Seems reasonable but I almost wish their could be a tier 2 Wikipedia where people could share this type of a time investment. Maybe that's what the various undeletion sites will wind up doing!
chris_wot 10y ago
It's not so much they delete entire articles, it's more that certain people camp on articles and remove all your material.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
It's not just about deletes. It's amazing how so many people have the same problems with WP and they are never addressed. Comments here are getting tons of up votes due to frustration. My questions are: - Does WP leadership really know the extent to which people have stopped editing due to frustration? - Do they not fix it because they don't want to change, don't know a solution, or are bullied by their own editors? - Are they aware that WP tends to attract people with this trait and mitigating these effects would make a massive difference? http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety http://dictionary.com/browse/persnickety
- tptacek 10y ago
  I promise I'm not trying to be snarky or dismissive, but I literally have the opposite concern. I am amazed that a group of nerds on message boards can look at the most ambitious knowledge resource in the history of the Internet, and possibly in the history of the last 100 years, and come to the conclusion that it's urgently endangered by the fact that their edits about young startups and science fiction characters are rejected. I feel like the Wikipedia project is one of the better run communities anywhere on the Internet, and that we don't perceive them that way mostly due to the absolutely spectacular scale that they operate at. Note that I'm not saying they're the most pleasant community in the world to work with. They aren't! But that's because they're doing so much, working with so many people at so many different levels of engagement. Hacker News is a trifling community by comparison, and look how much work goes in to trying to maintain norms and civility here. I feel like the Wikipedia community has bent over backwards to understand the concerns that completionist interest groups have about logging every possible startup, every open source developer of any note, every open source project, &c. They spend more time discussing their norms and processes about subject inclusion than any other meta-concern. I do not feel like the tech community meets Wikipedia halfway. Every argument I see in HN threads about "deletionism" seems rooted in the idea that an Internet encyclopedia need not have strict standards for inclusion because the marginal cost of an additional article is zero. But that's simply a false statement; it's based on the false premise that the only cost for Wikipedia for articles is storage space. You can't read the Wikipedia project charter for 5 minutes without realizing that storage is their least important cost.

vacri 10y ago

> I spent a few hours to set up http://deletionpedia.org/ http://deletionpedia.org/ - to rescue articles from deletion. I hit random 5 times (it's slow), and got one empty article ('looks like it survived on WP') and four profiles (one company, three meatbags), all of which were only a couple of sentences and even calling them a 'stub article' would be generous. No tears lost over these poor-quality chaff articles.

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago

I started updating pages related to my research topic - thinking it would be a public service. The pages were egregiously out of date. Every attempt to edit was reverted by a resident page troll. Total waste of my time and the pages remain totally wrong. (yes i cited research and no the topic is not a controversial political one.)

3pt14159 10y ago
Did you get on the IRC channel? I edit wikipedia and normally the only way to figure out why something should have been reset is to ask. Personally, I've edited plenty of Wikipedia pages and I still occasionally do when I come across one I think I can help with, and I only have an issue around 20% of the time, and usually it's because I'm filling out a topic that's too obscure.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  Ditto on the official trolls, so I've quit too. One troll had a degree, at least, but he wasn't reading current research. Participation continues to decline. If your interest is very narrow and you are IRC-wise and persistent, I don't doubt that you can eventually intimidate the trolls in that narrow topic and not have a problem thereafter. But this isn't my case or the common case, I suspect.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
  Why should one have to work out how to use irc to help out in the public interest?
- tunap 10y ago
  In hindsight, this is deliciously ironic advice considering the noteworthy cesspool of Dreg's creation. In 2012 I ventured into the Craigslist chatroom to determine why a posted item I had listed was 'ghosted'. I believe the answer was too many numerals in my description(RV: model year, mileage, doors, beds, etc.). After my attempt to satisfy the ambiguous criterion to no effect I returned and cited numerous examples other than mine that exceeded the reason given but were not ghosted. The result was every ad I had listed was then ghosted and every relist and new creation was ghosted by default. I ended up creating a new disposable, copy+pasted new listings verbatim without incident and sold most items. Listing a recently deceased family member's possessions was a chore, reaching out to Dregslist chat turned it into a nightmare. Why isn't Dreg using these funds to cleanup harrasment, data farmers and scammers on 'his' site? edit: on-topic, I too had edits on WP overturned in the mid-00's. I posted my defense in page notes to no avail and desisted any further attempts.

cabalamat 10y ago

> I started editing Wikipedia in 2003. It was fun. Over the years it became less fun My experience is similar to yours. If the Wikimedia Foundation really cared about harrassment they would kick out all the deletionists.