7 ms·

40% of Wikipedia is under threat from deletionists

64 points by panic 10y ago

jgalt212 10y ago
I'm fine with this. As an example, practically every movie ever released has its own wiki page. Is that necessary? At one point does wiki stop warehousing useful/important information and become just a cabinet of curiosities (and not so curiosities)?
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > Is that necessary? No, but why delete?
- passivepinetree 10y ago
  You're presenting a false binary: there's no reason why Wikipedia can't both warehouse useful/important information and also be a cabinet for curiosities. There's no real cost to keeping Wikipedia articles around.
  - x1798DE 10y ago
    There's low storage overhead, but there's definitely a quality control cost. You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. As such, you can accumulate subtle vandalism, pranks and biased editing. There's also a search, navigation and organization cost associated with these sorts of things. They need to be linked together, organized into categories, and if you include a bunch of non-notable garbage it's much harder for people to find the high-quality articles about notable things out there. "Deletionists" aren't running around deleting things out of spite or something, there are good reasons for the notability guidelines.
    - apetresc 10y ago
      > You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. But Wikipedia editors are completely non-fungible. The guy who wrote the page on some obscure 80's movie isn't going to start maintaining the Civil War page with all that extra time if you delete his movie. He's just going to stop editing. So the 'quality control' reasoning doesn't hold water with me. The navigation point still stands, but that's a technology problem that can be solved.
- scarmig 10y ago
  But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else. FF6? Irrelevant video game, how many wars did it win, why should it be there? Pfizer? Why should we allow companies to have individual pages, it's just free marketing? At some point, you cut Wikipedia's breadth down to something that could reasonably be handled by a team of a couple dozen editors. And then you might as well just go with a traditional encyclopedia.
  - kstrauser 10y ago
    > But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else. Well, some scientific topics. An earlier Boing Boing article (http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extinct...) references the WP page for hemovanadin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin . Two editors worked together to "speedy delete" it.
    - empthought 10y ago
      Same author with the same bias then as now; she tried for quite some time to use Wikipedia as a platform for cosmetic services advertising and personal vendettas. edit: til she was banned from Wikipedia for it, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sexology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
- Operyl 10y ago
  The irony in the end is that most of the deletions aren't actually deleted, just a bit marked to hide it.
- kstrauser 10y ago
  Conversely, if a cultural touchpoint shared with millions of neighbors isn't worth writing about, what is? Wikipedia isn't a newspaper so most current events probably aren't worthy of long-term documentation. There are more bands and songs than actors and movies. WP doesn't aim to be a summarized mirror of scientific journals. And yet it contains a little bit of each of those because someone thought they were worth writing about. I'm asking seriously: 1) What's the problem with every movie (or actor or song) having its own page? They're not all linked from the front page, so they don't pollute WP any more than the existence of some rando's blog dilutes the Internet experience of people who don't visit it. 2) If movies (or actors or songs) aren't worthy of documentation, what do you feel is?
- bbctol 10y ago
  Why is Wikipedia worse with pages for every movie ever made, though? Why would it be better without them?
acqq 10y ago
> Look up a random female porn star and a random female scientist from those categories, and you'll see what deletionists prioritize. The Pokemon Bulbasaur gets 1800 words, hemovanadin gets speedily deleted. It seems the editors who win at the moment in Wikipedia keep porn stars, delete the female scientists, keep Pokemon characters, delete scientific terms. Another effect I've observed is misrepresenting the religiosity of the scientists and the famous people, especially those who specifically weren't religious.
passivepinetree 10y ago
This seems like something worth protesting about/trying to stop, but I'm not finding any sources for the "40% of Wikipedia is under threat" claim made by the headline. The article mostly discusses a stub that was marked for deletion by one of many users who seem to pride themselves on deleting articles.
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  The 40% figure comes from ~2 million stub articles out of ~5.3 million total on English-language Wikipedia.
  - passivepinetree 10y ago
    Interesting, thanks. So they're just claiming all stubs (and no "full" articles) are in danger of deletion from these deletionists?
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  Unfortunately, Boing Boing loves sensationalistic headlines that turn out to be unsupported by data.
M_Grey 10y ago
I was expecting something pretty dramatic when I clicked on the linked "extinction event," but it's just the same thing. I can't get a sense if this is one very frustrated person, or if this is really a worrying trend. My gut, which is notably not where I do my best thinking, is sending up various warning flares, but I lack the background knowledge to address this. Does anyone here have some background on "deletionists" and what this blogger is generally alleging, rather than this specific and rather trivial example?
- empthought 10y ago
  This blogger is spreading FUD about Wikipedia because she was banned from it several years ago.
kstrauser 10y ago
That's what led to me no longer contributing (edits or money) to Wikipedia: the deletion of articles I'd helped craft. There's always some argument about "limited resources", and conceptually I get that, but it rings hollow when you see that the deleter has edited 3,000 anime character biographies. In other words, their stuff is notable and important, but your and my articles are not. Deletionists are a cancer and should be, well, deleted.
- krick 10y ago
  Sure these people are harmful, but Wikipedia rules and significance guidelines pretty much encourage this behavior. I remember musician's (it was Asura, a quite notable ambient music composer, if I remember correctly) biography being deleted. For me, the fact that I was actually searching for his biography when I found it's being deleted already shows it wasn't useless. The argument was that there's nothing that shows his significance, and relying on Wikipedia's definition of significance it was kinda hard to argue. I mean, yeah, I don't think he's got any Grammy or MTV awards or if his albums were sold in millions of copies, or some other shit relevant mostly for pop-music. It's not like he is Madonna, obviously. But within the genre he's very much well known, and if he is not notable — well, indeed I doubt even 50% of articles on Wikipedia are. I tried to argue, and checked it later — the article was removed. Instead, "Asura" redirects to (along with the original meaning, of course) to a dozen of movies, games and, you've guessed it — anime characters.
frik 10y ago
Sadly it's true. Please allow stub articles and trivia sections. Or was the ban of trivia section a push for Wikia of the Wikipedia founder!? So many great articles eg about fictional characters of movies, etc got deleted. I mean it's fine to remove marketing spam from companies, but it's not like insightful articles cost that much storage space, so why delete articles? The English language version is still good to okayish. But the German language version is completely infested by deletionits. So many good articles vanished, so many photos and pictures got deleted - it's very strange that German version has such a different guidelines/standard. de.Wikipedia sincerely needs a review from international bodies. The German Wikipedia org also maintains the toolsserver which is used for mapping and things like that for all language versions. The WikiData project also is from German branch.
- TillE 10y ago
  Please no trivia sections. There's something incredibly embarrassing about having a short article on some fairly important subject, followed by a huge list of every time that subject was mentioned on any obscure TV show. Culturally significant references, yes. Trivia? Don't crap up the main article with that sort of thing. An article about Person A should be about Person A; nobody cares about a song they were mentioned in 100 years after they died.
  - kstrauser 10y ago
    The Oxford English Dictionary (sample: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663) weeps. There's a lot of value to some in listing references to a topic.
    - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
      There's a difference between listing three to five examples of a given usage, to demonstrate that it occurs in the wild, and exhaustively cataloging every single time a thing has been mentioned by anyone.
      - 10y ago
helthanatos 10y ago
The past 3 wikis of people I've read have been false; either recently vandalized or wrong for a long time. The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want... But why? It's the admins who have been doing the vandalizing and citing unreputable sources. I don't understand why; have they been hacked?
- palunon 10y ago
  First, Wikipedia admins are not chosen by the Foundation, nor employees, but are simply elected users. Once elected you stay an admin "forever". Wikipedia en has 1268 of them. >The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want... They don't. You can of course discuss their edits, especially if you have good arguments against them. You may ultimately call for a vote on that. If they have gone rogue, you may signal them, and they may be removed from the role.
jhasse 10y ago
I would start donating if they would do something against this.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Basically a variant on "I would buy your $1.99 freemium app, if you only added this feature". :) No you wouldn't.
  - jhasse 10y ago
    How do you know?
  - basch 10y ago
    "I would donate my time to improve Wikipedia, if not for deletionists"
microcolonel 10y ago
>1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability. >2. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or because someone deleted one of their articles. Well that was a wild extrapolation. Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Since Andrea is almost certainly just guessing, I'm going to guess that the stats (if stats were to be gathered) would show little or no correlation between protected status and failing to complete articles. As for the topic of spurious deletion of stubs, I don't see the value in it, it would be nice to hear the rationale for the policy. I think that contextualizing stub deletion as an identity ("The Deletionists") is utterly ridiculous and reads as a personal attack rather than a genuine interest in improving the quality of Wikipedia. It is clear that editors are applying the deletion policy in some fashion, so if there is a problem, it is in the policy. Maybe Wikipedia should send email nags to authors of new stubs. Maybe the policy should guard against deleting articles which are too new to survive. Calling somebody a "deletionist" is hostile and dismissive. What happens when you're applying the policy legitimately and deleting a six year old stub with one sentence and a single unrelated/incorrect citation, and somebody comes by and accuses you of being a "deletionist". Labeling people is a good way to put them on the defense and ruin a conversation.
- deong 10y ago
  It's not like the article is attempting to coin a term to characterize people as "deletionists". That term has been in common use describing wikipedia editors who favor more exclusionary policies for at least ten years. Here's a Jeff Atwood piece from 2006, to cite one example. https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-deletionists/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-del...
- kstrauser 10y ago
  > Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Why is that a problem? Suppose you write a stub and walk away. Some day I want to look up the same subject and maybe write about it. There are two paths: 1) Your stub still exists. I see your references and use that as a starting point to flesh it out. 2) Your stub was deleted. I see none of your work and start over from scratch. On a practical level, what would the existence of your stub cost? It's a few KB of text and not directly linked from anywhere; it's not like we all find WP articles by loading a master index and starting from the top.
Finnucane 10y ago
Why is there no alternative to Wikipedia? There exists many wiki sites devoted to various special-interest topics, but nothing that tries to provide the kind of wide-ranging general-interest coverage that Wikipedia does. (at least that I am aware of.) It would seem that enough people are unhappy with the way Wikipedia is managed that someone would figure out a way to get something started.
- sudojudo 10y ago
  Forgive me if I don't link it, but there is an alternative to the "liberal facts" presented on Wikipedia. If you want the alt-truth about things like evolution and the Obama administration, I'm sure you can find the site with a few choice keywords. Did you know that abortion causes breast cancer? Oops, I just vomited a little, sorry about that.
- colospoin 10y ago
  https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
  - Finnucane 10y ago
    I think a site that feeds me an ad for Nazi Twitter on the first page counts as 'special interest'.
aanm1988 10y ago
> 1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability. Proof? No? So is this true or is it just lazy writing that attempts to frame this as yet another attack on women and minorities so as to try and garner easy support?
- gozur88 10y ago
  Yeah, that was lazy on the author's part and probably wrong.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Should call it the "SJW effect", when it backfires, akin to the Streisand effect.
payne92 10y ago
Articles should be presumed useful until otherwise debated and shown not useful. The burden should be on the deleter.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Writer Andrea James asserts that victims of deletion are often a woman or "minority group" member. She blames the deletion problem on "primarily older white male deletionists". If you look up the author you will discover she is "an American trans woman and controversial LGBT rights activist" according to her Wikipedia entry[1]. When an article deviates into social justice topics, red flags go up. First of all, how is it possible to ascertain the identity of the admins; do they have mugshots somewhere on the site? Or is she just guessing based on cultural biases displayed by the deleters? A debate and discussion about Wikipedia is in order, but this particular article is polluted by the author's personal biases, in my judgement. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_James
idop 10y ago
I quit editing Wikipedia back in 2010 because I was fed up with deletions, after another one of my articles - which I had worked hours and hours on (and which received contributions from other editors too) - got deleted suddenly simply because some guy thought it wasn't interesting. There was no process, no prior warnings, no input from other administrators, nothing. Just one guy who though it wasn't interesting. I quit editing and quit donating money. I'm actually surprised to see this is still a problem.

64 points by panic 10y ago

I'm fine with this. As an example, practically every movie ever released has its own wiki page. Is that necessary? At one point does wiki stop warehousing useful/important information and become just a cabinet of curiosities (and not so curiosities)?

Chris2048 10y ago
> Is that necessary? No, but why delete?
passivepinetree 10y ago
You're presenting a false binary: there's no reason why Wikipedia can't both warehouse useful/important information and also be a cabinet for curiosities. There's no real cost to keeping Wikipedia articles around.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  There's low storage overhead, but there's definitely a quality control cost. You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. As such, you can accumulate subtle vandalism, pranks and biased editing. There's also a search, navigation and organization cost associated with these sorts of things. They need to be linked together, organized into categories, and if you include a bunch of non-notable garbage it's much harder for people to find the high-quality articles about notable things out there. "Deletionists" aren't running around deleting things out of spite or something, there are good reasons for the notability guidelines.
  - apetresc 10y ago
    > You have to have editors maintaining these pages which (if they are being deleted, generally) are not notable enough to have significant reputable sources devoted to them. But Wikipedia editors are completely non-fungible. The guy who wrote the page on some obscure 80's movie isn't going to start maintaining the Civil War page with all that extra time if you delete his movie. He's just going to stop editing. So the 'quality control' reasoning doesn't hold water with me. The navigation point still stands, but that's a technology problem that can be solved.
scarmig 10y ago
But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else. FF6? Irrelevant video game, how many wars did it win, why should it be there? Pfizer? Why should we allow companies to have individual pages, it's just free marketing? At some point, you cut Wikipedia's breadth down to something that could reasonably be handled by a team of a couple dozen editors. And then you might as well just go with a traditional encyclopedia.
- kstrauser 10y ago
  > But that introduces a huge bias toward political and scientific topics and away from anything else. Well, some scientific topics. An earlier Boing Boing article (http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extinct...) references the WP page for hemovanadin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemovanadin . Two editors worked together to "speedy delete" it.
  - empthought 10y ago
    Same author with the same bias then as now; she tried for quite some time to use Wikipedia as a platform for cosmetic services advertising and personal vendettas. edit: til she was banned from Wikipedia for it, of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sexology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
Operyl 10y ago
The irony in the end is that most of the deletions aren't actually deleted, just a bit marked to hide it.
kstrauser 10y ago
Conversely, if a cultural touchpoint shared with millions of neighbors isn't worth writing about, what is? Wikipedia isn't a newspaper so most current events probably aren't worthy of long-term documentation. There are more bands and songs than actors and movies. WP doesn't aim to be a summarized mirror of scientific journals. And yet it contains a little bit of each of those because someone thought they were worth writing about. I'm asking seriously: 1) What's the problem with every movie (or actor or song) having its own page? They're not all linked from the front page, so they don't pollute WP any more than the existence of some rando's blog dilutes the Internet experience of people who don't visit it. 2) If movies (or actors or songs) aren't worthy of documentation, what do you feel is?
bbctol 10y ago
Why is Wikipedia worse with pages for every movie ever made, though? Why would it be better without them?

acqq 10y ago

> Look up a random female porn star and a random female scientist from those categories, and you'll see what deletionists prioritize. The Pokemon Bulbasaur gets 1800 words, hemovanadin gets speedily deleted. It seems the editors who win at the moment in Wikipedia keep porn stars, delete the female scientists, keep Pokemon characters, delete scientific terms. Another effect I've observed is misrepresenting the religiosity of the scientists and the famous people, especially those who specifically weren't religious.

passivepinetree 10y ago

This seems like something worth protesting about/trying to stop, but I'm not finding any sources for the "40% of Wikipedia is under threat" claim made by the headline. The article mostly discusses a stub that was marked for deletion by one of many users who seem to pride themselves on deleting articles.

mikeyouse 10y ago
The 40% figure comes from ~2 million stub articles out of ~5.3 million total on English-language Wikipedia.
- passivepinetree 10y ago
  Interesting, thanks. So they're just claiming all stubs (and no "full" articles) are in danger of deletion from these deletionists?
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Unfortunately, Boing Boing loves sensationalistic headlines that turn out to be unsupported by data.

M_Grey 10y ago

I was expecting something pretty dramatic when I clicked on the linked "extinction event," but it's just the same thing. I can't get a sense if this is one very frustrated person, or if this is really a worrying trend. My gut, which is notably not where I do my best thinking, is sending up various warning flares, but I lack the background knowledge to address this. Does anyone here have some background on "deletionists" and what this blogger is generally alleging, rather than this specific and rather trivial example?

empthought 10y ago
This blogger is spreading FUD about Wikipedia because she was banned from it several years ago.

kstrauser 10y ago

That's what led to me no longer contributing (edits or money) to Wikipedia: the deletion of articles I'd helped craft. There's always some argument about "limited resources", and conceptually I get that, but it rings hollow when you see that the deleter has edited 3,000 anime character biographies. In other words, their stuff is notable and important, but your and my articles are not. Deletionists are a cancer and should be, well, deleted.

krick 10y ago
Sure these people are harmful, but Wikipedia rules and significance guidelines pretty much encourage this behavior. I remember musician's (it was Asura, a quite notable ambient music composer, if I remember correctly) biography being deleted. For me, the fact that I was actually searching for his biography when I found it's being deleted already shows it wasn't useless. The argument was that there's nothing that shows his significance, and relying on Wikipedia's definition of significance it was kinda hard to argue. I mean, yeah, I don't think he's got any Grammy or MTV awards or if his albums were sold in millions of copies, or some other shit relevant mostly for pop-music. It's not like he is Madonna, obviously. But within the genre he's very much well known, and if he is not notable — well, indeed I doubt even 50% of articles on Wikipedia are. I tried to argue, and checked it later — the article was removed. Instead, "Asura" redirects to (along with the original meaning, of course) to a dozen of movies, games and, you've guessed it — anime characters.

frik 10y ago

Sadly it's true. Please allow stub articles and trivia sections. Or was the ban of trivia section a push for Wikia of the Wikipedia founder!? So many great articles eg about fictional characters of movies, etc got deleted. I mean it's fine to remove marketing spam from companies, but it's not like insightful articles cost that much storage space, so why delete articles? The English language version is still good to okayish. But the German language version is completely infested by deletionits. So many good articles vanished, so many photos and pictures got deleted - it's very strange that German version has such a different guidelines/standard. de.Wikipedia sincerely needs a review from international bodies. The German Wikipedia org also maintains the toolsserver which is used for mapping and things like that for all language versions. The WikiData project also is from German branch.

TillE 10y ago
Please no trivia sections. There's something incredibly embarrassing about having a short article on some fairly important subject, followed by a huge list of every time that subject was mentioned on any obscure TV show. Culturally significant references, yes. Trivia? Don't crap up the main article with that sort of thing. An article about Person A should be about Person A; nobody cares about a song they were mentioned in 100 years after they died.
- kstrauser 10y ago
  The Oxford English Dictionary (sample: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80663) weeps. There's a lot of value to some in listing references to a topic.
  - PhasmaFelis 10y ago
    There's a difference between listing three to five examples of a given usage, to demonstrate that it occurs in the wild, and exhaustively cataloging every single time a thing has been mentioned by anyone.
    - 10y ago

helthanatos 10y ago

The past 3 wikis of people I've read have been false; either recently vandalized or wrong for a long time. The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want... But why? It's the admins who have been doing the vandalizing and citing unreputable sources. I don't understand why; have they been hacked?

palunon 10y ago
First, Wikipedia admins are not chosen by the Foundation, nor employees, but are simply elected users. Once elected you stay an admin "forever". Wikipedia en has 1268 of them. >The Wikipedia admins have free reign to vandalize any article they want... They don't. You can of course discuss their edits, especially if you have good arguments against them. You may ultimately call for a vote on that. If they have gone rogue, you may signal them, and they may be removed from the role.

jhasse 10y ago

I would start donating if they would do something against this.

kazinator 10y ago
Basically a variant on "I would buy your $1.99 freemium app, if you only added this feature". :) No you wouldn't.
- jhasse 10y ago
  How do you know?
- basch 10y ago
  "I would donate my time to improve Wikipedia, if not for deletionists"

microcolonel 10y ago

>1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability. >2. That editor leaves the project, typically because of harassment or because someone deleted one of their articles. Well that was a wild extrapolation. Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Since Andrea is almost certainly just guessing, I'm going to guess that the stats (if stats were to be gathered) would show little or no correlation between protected status and failing to complete articles. As for the topic of spurious deletion of stubs, I don't see the value in it, it would be nice to hear the rationale for the policy. I think that contextualizing stub deletion as an identity ("The Deletionists") is utterly ridiculous and reads as a personal attack rather than a genuine interest in improving the quality of Wikipedia. It is clear that editors are applying the deletion policy in some fashion, so if there is a problem, it is in the policy. Maybe Wikipedia should send email nags to authors of new stubs. Maybe the policy should guard against deleting articles which are too new to survive. Calling somebody a "deletionist" is hostile and dismissive. What happens when you're applying the policy legitimately and deleting a six year old stub with one sentence and a single unrelated/incorrect citation, and somebody comes by and accuses you of being a "deletionist". Labeling people is a good way to put them on the defense and ruin a conversation.

deong 10y ago
It's not like the article is attempting to coin a term to characterize people as "deletionists". That term has been in common use describing wikipedia editors who favor more exclusionary policies for at least ten years. Here's a Jeff Atwood piece from 2006, to cite one example. https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-deletionists/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/wikipedia-inclusionists-vs-del...
kstrauser 10y ago
> Plenty of people add a stub, don't bother to finish it, and never edit again out of basic disinterest. Why is that a problem? Suppose you write a stub and walk away. Some day I want to look up the same subject and maybe write about it. There are two paths: 1) Your stub still exists. I see your references and use that as a starting point to flesh it out. 2) Your stub was deleted. I see none of your work and start over from scratch. On a practical level, what would the existence of your stub cost? It's a few KB of text and not directly linked from anywhere; it's not like we all find WP articles by loading a master index and starting from the top.

Finnucane 10y ago

Why is there no alternative to Wikipedia? There exists many wiki sites devoted to various special-interest topics, but nothing that tries to provide the kind of wide-ranging general-interest coverage that Wikipedia does. (at least that I am aware of.) It would seem that enough people are unhappy with the way Wikipedia is managed that someone would figure out a way to get something started.

sudojudo 10y ago
Forgive me if I don't link it, but there is an alternative to the "liberal facts" presented on Wikipedia. If you want the alt-truth about things like evolution and the Obama administration, I'm sure you can find the site with a few choice keywords. Did you know that abortion causes breast cancer? Oops, I just vomited a little, sorry about that.
colospoin 10y ago
https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page
- Finnucane 10y ago
  I think a site that feeds me an ad for Nazi Twitter on the first page counts as 'special interest'.

aanm1988 10y ago

> 1. An editor, usually a woman or a minority group member, writes a stub for a requested article, including references and assertion of notability. Proof? No? So is this true or is it just lazy writing that attempts to frame this as yet another attack on women and minorities so as to try and garner easy support?

gozur88 10y ago
Yeah, that was lazy on the author's part and probably wrong.
antisthenes 10y ago
Should call it the "SJW effect", when it backfires, akin to the Streisand effect.

payne92 10y ago

Articles should be presumed useful until otherwise debated and shown not useful. The burden should be on the deleter.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Writer Andrea James asserts that victims of deletion are often a woman or "minority group" member. She blames the deletion problem on "primarily older white male deletionists". If you look up the author you will discover she is "an American trans woman and controversial LGBT rights activist" according to her Wikipedia entry[1]. When an article deviates into social justice topics, red flags go up. First of all, how is it possible to ascertain the identity of the admins; do they have mugshots somewhere on the site? Or is she just guessing based on cultural biases displayed by the deleters? A debate and discussion about Wikipedia is in order, but this particular article is polluted by the author's personal biases, in my judgement. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_James

idop 10y ago

I quit editing Wikipedia back in 2010 because I was fed up with deletions, after another one of my articles - which I had worked hours and hours on (and which received contributions from other editors too) - got deleted suddenly simply because some guy thought it wasn't interesting. There was no process, no prior warnings, no input from other administrators, nothing. Just one guy who though it wasn't interesting. I quit editing and quit donating money. I'm actually surprised to see this is still a problem.