3 ms·

I did spend a few mins in the history on both pages trying to find a reference to what I had in mind. Perhaps it was copyright or a see-also to something more n

I did spend a few mins in the history on both pages trying to find a reference to what I had in mind. Perhaps it was copyright or a see-also to something more notable - I doubt I'd have a positive memory of defamation. It's long enough ago I can't remember the exact route through that rabbit hole. Nonetheless the other point stands that much has been trimmed that seems like should easily meet the bar of adequate notability.

svat 9y ago
My experience of Wikipedia is that very little is deleted if it has citations to a reliable source (like a book by a reputed publisher, say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...). Notability can be the reason for deletion of an article, especially about people or companies or bands (because typically the people involved create the article), but usually, having citations in reliable sources generally implies notability as well. (At least, that's my impression. You can gain your own impression by looking at history, e.g. for article-deletion, here's the discussion/debate log from a day in the middle of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2017_July_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... ) Unfortunately, stuff that someone wrote on Wikipedia by themselves (without reference to some other source) does tend to get deleted, even if the person who wrote happened to be an expert… but that's the goal of Wikipedia: to summarized published material, rather than to contain original material. (See the “No original research” policy page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research ) This policy does mean there's less useful information on Wikipedia than there could potentially be, but there do exist people who make up stuff, so having uncited material is problematic.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Notability is problematic in a lot of ways. In principle, just about anything is notable if you get local enough with respect to either geography or subject matter. You also have the irony of an online encyclopedia that's more inclined to value more traditional types of references (books, printed articles) even if they're hard to track down. And, as you say, no original research pretty much guarantees that if something hasn't been documented somewhere credible, at least online, it tends to get excluded. That said, the system works reasonably a fair bit of the time. I'm not even sure that the biggest issues are the result of Wikipedia policies. It's more that no system of this type works well when there's controversy and that even articles that were originally written well tend to accumulate random additions, factoids, and changes that degrade them over time. People have tried alternatives to address perceived Wikipedia shortcomings. Google Knol was one such example that didn't work out. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

svat 9y ago

My experience of Wikipedia is that very little is deleted if it has citations to a reliable source (like a book by a reputed publisher, say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...). Notability can be the reason for deletion of an article, especially about people or companies or bands (because typically the people involved create the article), but usually, having citations in reliable sources generally implies notability as well. (At least, that's my impression. You can gain your own impression by looking at history, e.g. for article-deletion, here's the discussion/debate log from a day in the middle of last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2017_July_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... ) Unfortunately, stuff that someone wrote on Wikipedia by themselves (without reference to some other source) does tend to get deleted, even if the person who wrote happened to be an expert… but that's the goal of Wikipedia: to summarized published material, rather than to contain original material. (See the “No original research” policy page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research ) This policy does mean there's less useful information on Wikipedia than there could potentially be, but there do exist people who make up stuff, so having uncited material is problematic.

ghaff 9y ago
Notability is problematic in a lot of ways. In principle, just about anything is notable if you get local enough with respect to either geography or subject matter. You also have the irony of an online encyclopedia that's more inclined to value more traditional types of references (books, printed articles) even if they're hard to track down. And, as you say, no original research pretty much guarantees that if something hasn't been documented somewhere credible, at least online, it tends to get excluded. That said, the system works reasonably a fair bit of the time. I'm not even sure that the biggest issues are the result of Wikipedia policies. It's more that no system of this type works well when there's controversy and that even articles that were originally written well tend to accumulate random additions, factoids, and changes that degrade them over time. People have tried alternatives to address perceived Wikipedia shortcomings. Google Knol was one such example that didn't work out. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol