6 ms·

The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected w

The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap. While what you suggest would be interesting I don't see it having much value, unless you manually selected which pages to include. Even then, they'd be 99.9% stubs, with nobody editing or expanding them. We just need to deal with deletionism.

boyter 16y ago
I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive. Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patterson http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patt... I was even expanding on the page, and it even had a few other contributions from other people.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  Don't get me wrong, it's a big problem, I'm just not sure the proposed solution is workable.
  - carussell 16y ago
    Since you got voted down, I see where you're coming from, and past discussions about Wikipedia on HN has revealed that a non-trivial number of HN members have only a surprisingly superficial understanding or experience with Wikipedia, I'll attempt to further explain. The Anna Patterson one is absolutely a case of where the proposed solution achieves the desired effect (in my opinion). redthrowaway hasn't mentioned whether he or she agrees about the Patterson situation, but that's fine, because it's neither here nor there. What happens on Wikipedia is that people drive by and will literally create an aritcle like "Shitfuck" and will literally write something like "a shitfuck is a guy named jason form cedar springs". seconds later the page content is changed by them again to something like: "a shitfuck is a guy named jason from cedar springs he really likes to shit but he never gets to fuck". The proposed solution is to retain all deleted articles. redthrowaway points out this isn't a realistic approach in light of these types of new articles. Opposition to redthrowaway here seems to be in the case where multiple someones somewhere care do care about the information in the Anna Patterson article. Is the Anna Patterson article at all similar to the shitfuck incident? Is someone somewhere going to come along and constructively improve that one? In case you're wondering, "yeah, but how often does that kind of thing really happen?" It happens. A lot.
mike_esspe 16y ago
Probably instead of deleting, this articles should be moved to sublayers. In this case "programming sublayer". If you don't subscribe to it, you won't see the article and links to it.
burgerbrain 16y ago
"The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap." So fucking what? Bits are so cheap they're damn near free, and we have pretty good search technology these days. Who gives a shit if there is some crusty data that nobody cares about lying around? Who precisely is hurt by this?
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Wikipedia relies on volunteers to do updates, corrections, and repair of vandalism. Storage is cheap but their time on this thankless work (just look at this thread—and we're relatively civil!) is a limited resource, and the thinner you spread them, the more unusable (outdated, mistaken, and actively misleading) the results will be. If you want a boundless supply of crap content, the union of everything anyone ever bothered to write, we already have one: the web.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    If tyrannical admins didn't chase away all possible contributors by deleting their work, perhaps this would no longer be an issue.
    - redthrowaway 16y ago
      It's not the admins. There are relatively few of them, and they really don't nominate pages for deletion very often. When a page is nominated, it's the community that argues and the admin only deletes if there's clear consensus. The problem is that deletionists flock to AfDs like it's Mecca, and inclusionists are too busy writing content.
- tommorris 16y ago
  There's a big difference between CSD ("Criterion for Speedy Deletion") and AfD ("Articles for Deletion") here. Something like Nemerle is obviously an interesting article and a failure of the AfD process. I've never done a DRV (Deletion Review) before, so I might look through Christopher Monsanto's deletions. But there ARE good reasons to delete content. I new page patrol on English Wikipedia and see thousands of articles created which are nothing more than: "asdfasdfasdf tim in year 6 of somesuch high school is teh GAY!!1" and they should rightly be deleted. Usually they are CSDed within minutes and usually deleted very quickly thereafter. The CSD process works for this kind of thing. And occasionally things slip past the CSD process and need PROD/PROD BLP/AfD. But I do think the Nemerle deletion was definitely an example of the fallacy of deletionism.

boyter 16y ago

I found that some things deleted were just petty though. For example, before Cuil came about I added a page about Anna Patterson co-founder of Cuil and was previously known as creating the biggest index using internet archive. Cuil becomes big news and then she was removed with the note that she wasn't really of note. Then the details about her were removed from Cuil's page. Quite odd. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patterson http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Anna_Patt... I was even expanding on the page, and it even had a few other contributions from other people.

redthrowaway 16y ago
Don't get me wrong, it's a big problem, I'm just not sure the proposed solution is workable.
- carussell 16y ago
  Since you got voted down, I see where you're coming from, and past discussions about Wikipedia on HN has revealed that a non-trivial number of HN members have only a surprisingly superficial understanding or experience with Wikipedia, I'll attempt to further explain. The Anna Patterson one is absolutely a case of where the proposed solution achieves the desired effect (in my opinion). redthrowaway hasn't mentioned whether he or she agrees about the Patterson situation, but that's fine, because it's neither here nor there. What happens on Wikipedia is that people drive by and will literally create an aritcle like "Shitfuck" and will literally write something like "a shitfuck is a guy named jason form cedar springs". seconds later the page content is changed by them again to something like: "a shitfuck is a guy named jason from cedar springs he really likes to shit but he never gets to fuck". The proposed solution is to retain all deleted articles. redthrowaway points out this isn't a realistic approach in light of these types of new articles. Opposition to redthrowaway here seems to be in the case where multiple someones somewhere care do care about the information in the Anna Patterson article. Is the Anna Patterson article at all similar to the shitfuck incident? Is someone somewhere going to come along and constructively improve that one? In case you're wondering, "yeah, but how often does that kind of thing really happen?" It happens. A lot.

mike_esspe 16y ago

Probably instead of deleting, this articles should be moved to sublayers. In this case "programming sublayer". If you don't subscribe to it, you won't see the article and links to it.

burgerbrain 16y ago

"The vast majority of deleted pages are utter crap." So fucking what? Bits are so cheap they're damn near free, and we have pretty good search technology these days. Who gives a shit if there is some crusty data that nobody cares about lying around? Who precisely is hurt by this?

prodigal_erik 16y ago
Wikipedia relies on volunteers to do updates, corrections, and repair of vandalism. Storage is cheap but their time on this thankless work (just look at this thread—and we're relatively civil!) is a limited resource, and the thinner you spread them, the more unusable (outdated, mistaken, and actively misleading) the results will be. If you want a boundless supply of crap content, the union of everything anyone ever bothered to write, we already have one: the web.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  If tyrannical admins didn't chase away all possible contributors by deleting their work, perhaps this would no longer be an issue.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    It's not the admins. There are relatively few of them, and they really don't nominate pages for deletion very often. When a page is nominated, it's the community that argues and the admin only deletes if there's clear consensus. The problem is that deletionists flock to AfDs like it's Mecca, and inclusionists are too busy writing content.
tommorris 16y ago
There's a big difference between CSD ("Criterion for Speedy Deletion") and AfD ("Articles for Deletion") here. Something like Nemerle is obviously an interesting article and a failure of the AfD process. I've never done a DRV (Deletion Review) before, so I might look through Christopher Monsanto's deletions. But there ARE good reasons to delete content. I new page patrol on English Wikipedia and see thousands of articles created which are nothing more than: "asdfasdfasdf tim in year 6 of somesuch high school is teh GAY!!1" and they should rightly be deleted. Usually they are CSDed within minutes and usually deleted very quickly thereafter. The CSD process works for this kind of thing. And occasionally things slip past the CSD process and need PROD/PROD BLP/AfD. But I do think the Nemerle deletion was definitely an example of the fallacy of deletionism.