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> deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think t

> deleting her stubs — short, unfinished articles that are culled when they sit dormant for too long Can someone please explain why they do this? You'd think that with $100M/yr in donations, hosting stubs wouldn't be a problem.

nullc 7y ago
Not to get into an extensive debate, but this is a complex issue where intelligent and well informed people can disagree. As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor. The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations. The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere. There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.
- xref 7y ago
  > The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
  - nullc 7y ago
    I'm sure someone could do a whole graduate thesis on that question, or any of a million other questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is evolved, not intelligently designed. It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea. If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt
- markdown 7y ago
  Thanks for the great response. > The concern is that articles that no one cares about I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. A page about a notable person on Pitcairn Island might be accessed once a day by every single one of its inhabitants but that would only show as 1500 page views by 50 users per month.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    I blieve it's not about visitors "not caring", but editors. A stub may be "Firstname Lastname is a person on Pitcairn Island" and nothing else. The article just sits there, doesn't provide value to anyone looking for info on that person and nobody appears to care enough to grow it into an informational article.
  - nullc 7y ago
    > I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. Like everything on Wikipedia the answer is some messy mixture of formal and informal processes, automation, and 8.2 kilotons of thinking meat ... which often gets it wrong but gets it right often enough to produce something truly great. I haven't been involved in wikipedia gnoming for quite a while but I think: I think in practice what happens is that various editors who care about such things go around proposing stubs for deletion based on whatever criteria they think makes sense, and then other people sometimes oppose those proposed deletions (or moves to draftspace) with arguments and improving edits. So the criteria essentially is a measure of literal care put in by editors to preserve the article.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
xref 7y ago
It’s a pretty awful practice, even worse is moving stubs to “draft space” purgatory where they can’t be found until you, as a single editor, create the entire article yourself without community support.
JdeBP 7y ago
That is not what actually happens to stubs. It has never been the site's deletion policy to delete stubs. What actually happens to stubs is that they sit around for years. Some grow; a lot do not. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldid=5712873#stub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldi... Nor was it what Fram did. Fram proposed deletion, of newly created articles (that had not sat dormant, moreover), and put the articles up for community discussion. The people who actually did the deletion were other people. Here's one such stub deleted by David Gerard, for example. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral_palsy_football_team?action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  Page history No such page Cannot look at history for a page that doesn't exist. It may have been deleted or you may have followed a bad link.
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    I deliberately did not give you an en.m.wikipedia.org URL. What you are seeing is a known problem with MobileFrontEnd, which erroneously masks some things. Use the URL that I actually gave you.

nullc 7y ago

Not to get into an extensive debate, but this is a complex issue where intelligent and well informed people can disagree. As you note, obviously the concern has nothing to do with hosting bandwidth or similar. The concern driving the removal of stubs and other undermaintained pages are (1) editorial, relating to the quality of Wikipedia as a resource and (2) the efficient expenditure of maintenance labor. The effort by volunteers to maintain Wikipedia utterly dwarfs monetary donations to the foundation even by the most conservative estimates. Similarly, the amount of potential harm caused to the world (or an individual, or to the public's goodwill towards wikipedia) due to an article which is grievously incorrect or malicious due to being unmaintained also dwarfs petty operating considerations. The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them, even inadequately, requires expenditure of editorial resources which could be better applied elsewhere. There are contributors at both extremes of this ideological split, though most people are somewhere in between. The political dynamic has created something of a impasse where contributors more on the extreme end of include-everything oppose the addition of tools that would allow less aggressive handling (such as making those pages accessible only to logged-in users, whom are presumably better informed about the sausage making) because of the justified concern that these measures would also be applied to more borderline cases which are currently included.

xref 7y ago
> The concern is that articles that no one cares about are potentially places where damaging content could fester and dealing with them That could describe the bulk of the millions of articles, why single out stubs for the axe specifically
- nullc 7y ago
  I'm sure someone could do a whole graduate thesis on that question, or any of a million other questions about how Wikipedia works. Wikipedia is evolved, not intelligently designed. It has a million behaviors that few can explain clearly-- some are historical baggage, others have critical subtle interactions. There are historical reasons for sure-- e.g. relatively early in WP's history there were a number of editors that mass created all sorts of quasi-random articles using automation. But are there good reasons to keep doing it? Dunno. Maybe someone more active than I has a better idea. If the meta of wikipedia is interesting to you, you might find these notes I made for a talk I wrote in circa 2008 or so which addresses why WP's behavior is often kind of inexplicable to humans and why that isn't a problem or at least why it's not avoidable: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt https://people.xiph.org/~greg/zen.wp.txt
markdown 7y ago
Thanks for the great response. > The concern is that articles that no one cares about I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. A page about a notable person on Pitcairn Island might be accessed once a day by every single one of its inhabitants but that would only show as 1500 page views by 50 users per month.
- luckylion 7y ago
  I blieve it's not about visitors "not caring", but editors. A stub may be "Firstname Lastname is a person on Pitcairn Island" and nothing else. The article just sits there, doesn't provide value to anyone looking for info on that person and nobody appears to care enough to grow it into an informational article.
- nullc 7y ago
  > I wonder how they determine which articles no one cares about. Like everything on Wikipedia the answer is some messy mixture of formal and informal processes, automation, and 8.2 kilotons of thinking meat ... which often gets it wrong but gets it right often enough to produce something truly great. I haven't been involved in wikipedia gnoming for quite a while but I think: I think in practice what happens is that various editors who care about such things go around proposing stubs for deletion based on whatever criteria they think makes sense, and then other people sometimes oppose those proposed deletions (or moves to draftspace) with arguments and improving edits. So the criteria essentially is a measure of literal care put in by editors to preserve the article.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

xref 7y ago

It’s a pretty awful practice, even worse is moving stubs to “draft space” purgatory where they can’t be found until you, as a single editor, create the entire article yourself without community support.

JdeBP 7y ago

That is not what actually happens to stubs. It has never been the site's deletion policy to delete stubs. What actually happens to stubs is that they sit around for years. Some grow; a lot do not. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldid=5712873#stub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy?oldi... Nor was it what Fram did. Fram proposed deletion, of newly created articles (that had not sat dormant, moreover), and put the articles up for community discussion. The people who actually did the deletion were other people. Here's one such stub deleted by David Gerard, for example. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral_palsy_football_team?action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_national_cerebral...

lonelappde 7y ago
Page history No such page Cannot look at history for a page that doesn't exist. It may have been deleted or you may have followed a bad link.
- JdeBP 7y ago
  I deliberately did not give you an en.m.wikipedia.org URL. What you are seeing is a known problem with MobileFrontEnd, which erroneously masks some things. Use the URL that I actually gave you.