10 ms·

Wikipedia's Notability Requirements And The Slash

mquander 16y ago
Let's put aside the insanely weird idea that one person has the ability to derail the creation of information unilaterally, without a vote, and without any oversight to focus on the real problem... Jesus, does Zed Shaw live on another planet? I've never edited a Wikipedia article in my life and even I know that when an article is nominated for deletion, there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted. Also: It's sort of impossible to say that the Esoteric programming languages page should not have a description of every "notnotable" programming language. I do not think "impossible" means what you think it means.
- thristian 16y ago
  Zed Shaw's personal hell: being given a laptop with an internet connection, a browser pointed at Wikipedia, and being asked to complete the article List of things which do not exist.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    He could call it "List of things registered in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    Uh, that makes no sense.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Well, they would have to be very notable things that do not exist. (My next line wants very much to be a joke about God but I'll just leave that up to your individual imaginations.)
  - othermaciej 16y ago
    How about "List of articles which do not mention themselves"?
    - nickzoic 16y ago
      List of Articles not listed in a List of Articles.
  - mcantor 16y ago
    Would the list contain itself? Ohhh. Damn you, Bert Russell! (I kill me.)
- wnoise 16y ago
  > there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted. And it's still often actually deleted, even if consensus isn't reached.
  - mquander 16y ago
    That's true, so maybe it shouldn't really be said that people are "voting" after all. But at least an administrator has to actually agree and delete it; I guess that's what passes for oversight.
- Elepsis 16y ago
  Perhaps more experienced Wikipedians can correct me, but my understanding is that the vote for deletion isn't actually a vote. At the end of the day, a Wikipedia admin decides based on the arguments presented, not the number of opinions in either direction.
  - Osmose 16y ago
    This is true, but there's deletion review for you think the admin made the wrong choice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review Alternatively, if you wish to remake the page and improve it, there's nothing stopping you from re-creating it with new sources and information added[1]. The "Be Bold" guideline exists to encourage people to do things like that if you think you can improve it. [1] Not entirely true, controversial pages that get recreated and deleted back and forth can be blocked from being recreated. At least in the case of Nemerle, it appears that that has yet to happen.
    - erikpukinskis 16y ago
      One of the challenges with remaking the page is that you have to start over from scratch. If the page is deleted, it's gone. There's no way for you to see the edit history or anything. So you have to go back to basic research. Get to the library. Sit on Google for an afternoon.
      - Ras_ 16y ago
        Bureaucrats can bring it back. They (and among others, arbitration committee) can access deleted articles, deletion logs etc. as they please. Undelete has its own process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Undeletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Undeletion (for articles which were deleted without contest) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review (for contested deletes) In fi.wikipedia (I am an arbcom member there) both delete and undelete are decided by a 2/3 majority vote.
  - Ras_ 16y ago
- zedshaw 16y ago
  No, I live on the planet where some random dude can "elect" to have a page deleted and poof page gone. I don't care about the bizarre bureaucratic process involved, all I care about is that there's no review process or delay to it. Also, I do mean "sort of impossible". If you're going to use bad grammar to correct my writing, then at least use quotes properly.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    Zed, seriously, calm down. I know this persona gets you a lot of views, but it's seriously grating. The "bizarre bureaucratic process" is this: 1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here. 2) We talk about it for a week. 3) If, after a week, the consensus is that no, we shouldn't have the article, then it gets deleted. If not, it stays. That's not bizarre, and it's not particularly bureaucratic. Is it flawed? Absolutely. Do we need to fix it? Sure. Are you helping things with your rants? No.
    - bane 16y ago
      Except that's not what happened in this case, and probably many others. De Facto, the process was 1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here." 2) We talk about it for a week. 3) Despite there being no votes to delete and clear notability, poof! it's gone.
erikpukinskis 16y ago
You can literally read these requirements as "some big mega corp my grandma might encounter has mentioned it." This is spot on. I had to engage in a battle on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things. What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count". The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem. There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one. I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikipedia-contributors-women/ http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped... ) they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons. I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P † upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    > If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.... ) When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.
JanezStupar 16y ago
This year I donated 50€ for the worthy cause of Wikipedia. One of my arguing points was that there is a lot of obscure information I am sometimes looking for that there is no reference of - except for Wikipedia. Jimbo put your dog on a leash, or next year, when your bambi eyed face gazes into me from my monitor, I will send a turd in a bag instead of a donation. Does anyone know what address I could/should send my complaint to for maximum impact?
baddox 16y ago
I think the key here is that Wikipedia's notability requirements really only apply to people, publications, and events. For some things, for example the article on esoteric programming languages, it doesn't really make sense to talk about notability.
owyn 16y ago
You could always create an esoteric languages wiki of your own if you were all fired up about it (I work at wikia, and that's the service we provide, we have 170,000 wikis on various subjects, using the same software! Founded by the same guy!) But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.
- angus77 16y ago
  It's rare that I can't find some article about the "rest of the world" on Wikipedia that I'm looking for. What part of the world have I been overlooking?
  - carussell 16y ago
    I realize your question was mostly flippant and not directed at me, but to answer the question seriously: The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.
    - owyn 16y ago
      Yep, nail+head. Sounds like this is going to be a big institutional focus for the next couple of years as well... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wikipedia-seeks-women-writers.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wiki... Somethingawful even made a game out of it, the results of which were quoted in that article: For example, the article on "Women's suffrage" is around the same length as the "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", and Shakespeare's Henry VIII is given as much attention as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
carussell 16y ago
Plan B ¶Put out a yearly publication on Lulu.com … This publication is then a legit secondary source by a real publisher… Uh... nope. Hey, I have an idea! Let's publish suggestions like this to a blog and purport for it to be sound, so then it can be picked up by quacks who have an agenda to push in a bunch of completely unrelated situations. (Think vaccine scare pushers or those looking for self-promotion, who already exist in abundance on Wikipedia). Yeah! Let's all eschew with stuff like a "nuanced understanding". Whether you are for or against this instance of deletionism, Shaw's plan B here wouldn't successfully legitimize anything of any subject matter, and that's a good thing.
- carussell 16y ago
  I've seen this get voted down by a non-trivial amount, then upvotes bring it back up, and now it's voted back down. Anyone care to, you know, comment about whatever you're finding in my words to be an assault on your faculties of reason?
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    It's hard for Wikipedia to say that other publishers are not legitimate because they're online, when Wikipedia itself had to fight for legitimacy because of it's online nature. Doing that means they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers and not even close to their original purpose. Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites. Another thing to note: People say that Lulu doesn't have an editorial process but they do. Once you publish a book they review it and if it meets their standards they put it into Amazon and other sellers for you. Considering that editorial standards at all publishing houses is damn near zero except for copy-editing and slapping a cover on, I think it's fair to say Lulu is just fine as a source.
    - carussell 16y ago
      Wikipedia itself had to fight for legitimacy Sorry, what? If someone told you Wikipedia succeeded in a "fight for legitimacy", you were lied to. they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers You don't have to be published by giant corporate publishers to be cited on Wikipedia. You don't have be published by corporate publishers, giant or not. There are an immense number of citations on Wikipedia that fail to meet those criteria, and they can even be the best sources to cite (and not just because of a lack of sources). Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites. No, no; no need to argue here. You already had me sold. Down with nuanced understanding, I say.
starpilot 16y ago
Wikipedia has not [sic] problem paying for storage What do the near-constant donation drives cover then?
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Bandwidth, servers and staff. Storage is most certainly not their problem; the English language Wikipedia is only about 5TBs of text. That's cheap.
  - natep 16y ago
    Actually, it seems like a roughly even split between salaries+wages, internet hosting, in-kind expenses, operating, travel, and deprecation (in 2007, at least, because it was easiest to find)[1]. Wikimedia may not be a publicly traded company, but they do release their financials. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikimedia_2007_fs.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikime...
ugh 16y ago
The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets. I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  But the argument from maintainability is stupid too. Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not. Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification. They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.
  - bdonlan 16y ago
    The point isn't to delete bad content. The point is to delete content that is known by so few people that it is unlikely to get the attention needed to become a good article. To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.
    - 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
bambax 16y ago
It seems the notability requirements really serve Wikipedia's own notability. It can't say "we'll take our list of topics from Encyclopedia Britannica" but it's what it would like to do. In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat. But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.
mukyu 16y ago
Plan A doesn't work. It is actually easier to delete things from pages than deleting pages themselves. If you edit war over it you will lose. Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is. Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work? Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki. This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it. On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  You've given a very Lawful Neutral response (and are correct on those grounds). However, that still doesn't make deletionism a good or sensible or internally consistent idea.
  - mukyu 16y ago
    My actual thoughts on the issues related to inclusion and deletion are not what I was trying to address. I contributed to Wikipedia for a time and saw and was part of deletion sprees on both of the sides. Something like this happens every three months I would guess. Mostly, my thoughts on it at the moment are 'not this shit /again/'.
    - knowtheory 16y ago
      If something keeps cropping up again and again, that says to me that there is an expectation that is not being met. Either wikipedians can try to change the expectations of the entirety of the rest of the internet, or they should deal with their internal problem. As far as i have ever been able to determine, the only people who support deletionism are a subset of wikipedians.
nazgulnarsil 16y ago
puts on conspiracy cap wikipedia was a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.
neilk 16y ago
Thanks, Zed. A typically balanced, well-researched and well-thought-out solution to a complex problem. I especially liked the part where you blamed all of Wikipedia for the actions of a single user. I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable. Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent. I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable. But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out. Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  Thanks Neil, a completely inaccurate reading of what I wrote. For the record, deletionists have been a problem for many people who are members of sub-cultures and Wikipedia has ignored the problem. Writing more arbitrary rules is not the solution. The solution is to fix the software so people can create a richer organization of information. I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times despite me having been mentioned in about 10 trade and mass publications and having a book published (now two) as well as my own articles in the press. It was baffling that a single person can get a page deleted without any warning, flagging, or attempts to do some research. But really it comes down to trust. I don't trust any organization that begs me for money then deletes the content that matters to me most and tries to hide behind some bogus "well it's not us really (tee-hee)". Either Wikimedia is in charge or they silently allow this kind of crap. Finally, the issue of deletionism is purely the result of bad usability and structure. All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.
donaldc 16y ago
Notability requirements for an article to exist at all is the wrong approach. Instead, wikipedia should allow most any article to be added, but have one or more groups that "certify" articles as notable. People who want to avoid all the non-notable clutter can then elect a view of wikipedia that only includes articles certified by the group (or groups) they choose, while non-notable articles can still be viewed by those who choose to view them, and can have the breathing room to in some cases evolve into notable articles.
redthrowaway 16y ago
That's just... wrong. Come on, Zed, at least do your homework. Chris isn't deleting the pages, nor is he acting as some sort of sole determinant of noteworthiness. He's simply proposing them for deletion through the Articles for Deletion process. Also, Wikipedia handles sub-pages just fine. Most active editors have a number of sub-pages on their userpage, and many articles have sub-pages as well where people will store drafts while working on a revision. Your information is wrong, and your tone is insulting. Cut it out, man.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  I don't care what the bureaucratic process is, all I know is one guy went on a rampage electing pages for deletion and they're gone. This "plausible deniability" of page deletion so nobody is to blame really is odd.
  - redthrowaway 16y ago
    There's a discussion at each AfD where anyone can come in and say why a page should or should not be kept. In the end, it is the adminstrator's decision as to whether or not there is a consensus to delete (default is to keep), and there are processes in place for getting the decision overturned. Chris nominated 8 pages for deletion over a period of 3 days. While it's a spree that's likely hasty, it's by no means a rampage. I believe he was wrong to do as he did, but only a couple pages were deleted, and there's a discussion to have Nemerle restored. He's hardly a one-man wiki-wrecking crew.
    - bane 16y ago
      it is the adminstrator's decision as to whether or not there is a consensus to delete (default is to keep) The de facto process is to default to delete. As this embarrassing debacle has shown, there were no votes to delete, and yet poof! the articles were deleted and a day later, with significant backlash and discussion, almost all in favor to reinstate or at least open the pages back up to be reconstituted, are not back up. Wikipedia's editing "process" is a shameful joke.
- 16y ago
Tichy 16y ago
The donations thing just made me wonder if it could work to have donations per page. That is, you could kind of adopt an article (and get a banner on that article announcing you are the sponsor, perhaps). Immediate problem would of course be advertising, which would not be desired. It's just that if I donate now, I feel as if I am supportive of their deletionist policies, which I am not.
idonthack 16y ago
Wikipedia deletionism has nothing to do with the lack of paths. Organization is handled by mediawiki's category feature. Name collisions are avoided and similar names collected on disambiguation pages. "Plan A" is not a new idea, it's exactly what happens to other categories with lots of items that don't deserve their own page. "Plan B" won't work because part of deletionist policy is to ignore sources published by self-publishing outfits, because "anybody can publish there". "Plan C" won't solve a goddamn thing. Good luck with "Plan D". Quit asking for features that already exist.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  Oh, an name of idonthack with no comments and no karma really. Well, since you don't meet the requirements of notability in my world I'm just going to down vote you. Thanks for playing anonymous troll.
f10 16y ago
Strange that e.g. several content farms are deemed notable by the Wikipedia editors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia Notability requirements are fine, but not if they are applied selectively.
- bane 16y ago
  You should probably flag them AfD.
blickly 16y ago
In case anyone is still curious how this got resolved, Monsanto gave up. From his wikipedia user page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto): > Dear internet, > You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion. > I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone. > Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(
gojomo 16y ago
Zed writes: "I have registered notnotable.com... Just put up the same software, get some free hosting from some of the companies out there that I know, and start filling it in with anything that's not on Wikipedia." There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund. The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity. With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model. The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.

Let's put aside the insanely weird idea that one person has the ability to derail the creation of information unilaterally, without a vote, and without any oversight to focus on the real problem... Jesus, does Zed Shaw live on another planet? I've never edited a Wikipedia article in my life and even I know that when an article is nominated for deletion, there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted. Also: It's sort of impossible to say that the Esoteric programming languages page should not have a description of every "notnotable" programming language. I do not think "impossible" means what you think it means.

thristian 16y ago
Zed Shaw's personal hell: being given a laptop with an internet connection, a browser pointed at Wikipedia, and being asked to complete the article List of things which do not exist.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  He could call it "List of things registered in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
- zedshaw 16y ago
  Uh, that makes no sense.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Well, they would have to be very notable things that do not exist. (My next line wants very much to be a joke about God but I'll just leave that up to your individual imaginations.)
- othermaciej 16y ago
  How about "List of articles which do not mention themselves"?
  - nickzoic 16y ago
    List of Articles not listed in a List of Articles.
- mcantor 16y ago
  Would the list contain itself? Ohhh. Damn you, Bert Russell! (I kill me.)
wnoise 16y ago
> there's a big hullabaloo where everyone votes and argues about it before it's actually deleted. And it's still often actually deleted, even if consensus isn't reached.
- mquander 16y ago
  That's true, so maybe it shouldn't really be said that people are "voting" after all. But at least an administrator has to actually agree and delete it; I guess that's what passes for oversight.
Elepsis 16y ago
Perhaps more experienced Wikipedians can correct me, but my understanding is that the vote for deletion isn't actually a vote. At the end of the day, a Wikipedia admin decides based on the arguments presented, not the number of opinions in either direction.
- Osmose 16y ago
  This is true, but there's deletion review for you think the admin made the wrong choice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review Alternatively, if you wish to remake the page and improve it, there's nothing stopping you from re-creating it with new sources and information added[1]. The "Be Bold" guideline exists to encourage people to do things like that if you think you can improve it. [1] Not entirely true, controversial pages that get recreated and deleted back and forth can be blocked from being recreated. At least in the case of Nemerle, it appears that that has yet to happen.
  - erikpukinskis 16y ago
    One of the challenges with remaking the page is that you have to start over from scratch. If the page is deleted, it's gone. There's no way for you to see the edit history or anything. So you have to go back to basic research. Get to the library. Sit on Google for an afternoon.
    - Ras_ 16y ago
      Bureaucrats can bring it back. They (and among others, arbitration committee) can access deleted articles, deletion logs etc. as they please. Undelete has its own process. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Undeletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Undeletion (for articles which were deleted without contest) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review (for contested deletes) In fi.wikipedia (I am an arbcom member there) both delete and undelete are decided by a 2/3 majority vote.
- Ras_ 16y ago
zedshaw 16y ago
No, I live on the planet where some random dude can "elect" to have a page deleted and poof page gone. I don't care about the bizarre bureaucratic process involved, all I care about is that there's no review process or delay to it. Also, I do mean "sort of impossible". If you're going to use bad grammar to correct my writing, then at least use quotes properly.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  Zed, seriously, calm down. I know this persona gets you a lot of views, but it's seriously grating. The "bizarre bureaucratic process" is this: 1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here. 2) We talk about it for a week. 3) If, after a week, the consensus is that no, we shouldn't have the article, then it gets deleted. If not, it stays. That's not bizarre, and it's not particularly bureaucratic. Is it flawed? Absolutely. Do we need to fix it? Sure. Are you helping things with your rants? No.
  - bane 16y ago
    Except that's not what happened in this case, and probably many others. De Facto, the process was 1) Somebody says "I don't think this article should be here." 2) We talk about it for a week. 3) Despite there being no votes to delete and clear notability, poof! it's gone.

erikpukinskis 16y ago

You can literally read these requirements as "some big mega corp my grandma might encounter has mentioned it." This is spot on. I had to engage in a battle on Wikipedia to keep the page up for dream hampton. Not everyone knows who she is, but she was the editor for The Source at one time, and ghost wrote Jay-Z's autobiography, among other things. What I ran into is that Wikipedia basically demands that you get published in these megacorp publications that are basically all run by rich white people, and mostly men. So being written about in black publications, which tend to be more magazines and online publications, and less Library of Congress kind of stuff, doesn't cut it according to Wikipedia's notability "guidelines". If the white editors don't recognize the publication names, they don't "count". The fact is, if she had been editor of Rolling Stone, I don't think there would've been a problem. There were other factors too... being an editor and ghostwriter means she's more behind the scenes, and less likely to get outright exposure in the press. But that, too, is a requirement that I think turns Wikipedia into an amplifier of power, rather than a distributor of one. I'm not sure if there was some outright racism going on too. I mean, she was mentioned in the New York Times and people were still calling for her page removal. At that point things start to get a little murky for me. But the situation was fishy for sure.

knowtheory 16y ago
If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikipedia-contributors-women/ http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped... ) they're working on improving the gender balance, but i suspect that the format will still retain this skew simply due to societal/demographic reasons. I don't know that that means that there was any overt or covert racism, but there is definitely a contributor bias :P † upon further investigation i have not been able to find references to racial demographics for wikipedia. Consider this hearsay.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  > If you look at wikipedia's contributor stats it's like 70% white†, college aged males. (Actually wikipedians are like 87% male. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.. http://feministing.com/2011/02/02/why-are-only-13-of-wikiped.... ) When an all/mostly black country invents something like the Internet, and then creates a website like Wikipedia, and then most of the nerds it attracts to administrate it happen to be black male nerds, then, yes, you'll see a different demographic mix. But until that happens, you'll see demographic trends that are likely (and reasonably) going to be heavily influenced by their starting conditions.

JanezStupar 16y ago

This year I donated 50€ for the worthy cause of Wikipedia. One of my arguing points was that there is a lot of obscure information I am sometimes looking for that there is no reference of - except for Wikipedia. Jimbo put your dog on a leash, or next year, when your bambi eyed face gazes into me from my monitor, I will send a turd in a bag instead of a donation. Does anyone know what address I could/should send my complaint to for maximum impact?

baddox 16y ago

I think the key here is that Wikipedia's notability requirements really only apply to people, publications, and events. For some things, for example the article on esoteric programming languages, it doesn't really make sense to talk about notability.

owyn 16y ago

You could always create an esoteric languages wiki of your own if you were all fired up about it (I work at wikia, and that's the service we provide, we have 170,000 wikis on various subjects, using the same software! Founded by the same guy!) But that's not really the point here. It's just because it's wikipedia that everyone gets all weird about it. The information is out there, I don't see why it's so important that every esoteric project have a wikipedia.org page. It's not supposed to be a compendium of ALL human knowledge, it's an encyclopedia of generally useful knowledge. There has to be SOME criteria for excluding stuff. There's already a problem with wikipedia containing way too many pages about nerd topics and not enough information about the rest of the world.

angus77 16y ago
It's rare that I can't find some article about the "rest of the world" on Wikipedia that I'm looking for. What part of the world have I been overlooking?
- carussell 16y ago
  I realize your question was mostly flippant and not directed at me, but to answer the question seriously: The English Wikipedia is amazing, but it's incredibly ethnocentric in its coverage. There're a lot of red links here, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_television_articles_by_.... Unfortunately, when you are looking for information that's not something the average native English-speaking editor has knowledge of, and you are able to find some information, sometimes those writing it have a vested interest in the topic at hand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_supremacy is a minor example.
  - owyn 16y ago
    Yep, nail+head. Sounds like this is going to be a big institutional focus for the next couple of years as well... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wikipedia-seeks-women-writers.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/8292978/Wiki... Somethingawful even made a game out of it, the results of which were quoted in that article: For example, the article on "Women's suffrage" is around the same length as the "List of fictional gynoids and female cyborgs", and Shakespeare's Henry VIII is given as much attention as Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

carussell 16y ago

Plan B ¶Put out a yearly publication on Lulu.com … This publication is then a legit secondary source by a real publisher… Uh... nope. Hey, I have an idea! Let's publish suggestions like this to a blog and purport for it to be sound, so then it can be picked up by quacks who have an agenda to push in a bunch of completely unrelated situations. (Think vaccine scare pushers or those looking for self-promotion, who already exist in abundance on Wikipedia). Yeah! Let's all eschew with stuff like a "nuanced understanding". Whether you are for or against this instance of deletionism, Shaw's plan B here wouldn't successfully legitimize anything of any subject matter, and that's a good thing.

carussell 16y ago
I've seen this get voted down by a non-trivial amount, then upvotes bring it back up, and now it's voted back down. Anyone care to, you know, comment about whatever you're finding in my words to be an assault on your faculties of reason?
- zedshaw 16y ago
  It's hard for Wikipedia to say that other publishers are not legitimate because they're online, when Wikipedia itself had to fight for legitimacy because of it's online nature. Doing that means they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers and not even close to their original purpose. Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites. Another thing to note: People say that Lulu doesn't have an editorial process but they do. Once you publish a book they review it and if it meets their standards they put it into Amazon and other sellers for you. Considering that editorial standards at all publishing houses is damn near zero except for copy-editing and slapping a cover on, I think it's fair to say Lulu is just fine as a source.
  - carussell 16y ago
    Wikipedia itself had to fight for legitimacy Sorry, what? If someone told you Wikipedia succeeded in a "fight for legitimacy", you were lied to. they're just tools of the giant corporate publishers You don't have to be published by giant corporate publishers to be cited on Wikipedia. You don't have be published by corporate publishers, giant or not. There are an immense number of citations on Wikipedia that fail to meet those criteria, and they can even be the best sources to cite (and not just because of a lack of sources). Instead, they would need to recognize Lulu (like Amazon and the Library of Congress do) and accept books from there or be shown as complete hypocrites. No, no; no need to argue here. You already had me sold. Down with nuanced understanding, I say.

starpilot 16y ago

Wikipedia has not [sic] problem paying for storage What do the near-constant donation drives cover then?

Lewisham 16y ago
Bandwidth, servers and staff. Storage is most certainly not their problem; the English language Wikipedia is only about 5TBs of text. That's cheap.
- natep 16y ago
  Actually, it seems like a roughly even split between salaries+wages, internet hosting, in-kind expenses, operating, travel, and deprecation (in 2007, at least, because it was easiest to find)[1]. Wikimedia may not be a publicly traded company, but they do release their financials. [1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikimedia_2007_fs.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/4/49/Wikime...

ugh 16y ago

The notability requirements do not exist for a technical reason. That’s entirely wrong. Maintainability is the reason. The space is not limited but the time of people working on those articles. The goal is for Wikipedia to only have articles of a high quality, the more articles there are the harder that gets. I’m not trying to defend the notability rules (I think that they are quite often pretty stupid), I’m only saying that it is completely and utterly wrong to claim that Wikipedia’s notability rules exist for a technical reason.

knowtheory 16y ago
But the argument from maintainability is stupid too. Wikipedia already stuffers from variable quality, and all its content comes with a big huge caveat emptor. Furthermore, the existence of poor quality doesn't have any bearing on whether the well trafficked content is good or not. Deletionists really don't have any leg to stand on, and i find it mystifying and infuriating that they are allowed to continue deleting content put up by other people (mostly in good faith), essentially without cause or justification. They can't delete their way to good content, because no content on wikipedia starts out as good content. You can't claim that leaving up poor content is a problem, or they should just lock the whole fucking thing, and only accept well curated patches.
- bdonlan 16y ago
  The point isn't to delete bad content. The point is to delete content that is known by so few people that it is unlikely to get the attention needed to become a good article. To put it another way, even if someone writes a really, really good article about their neighbor's dog Spike - complete with genealogy down to Rover the fifth, the harrowing near-death encounter when that gallstone removal surgery went wrong, and even a detailed account of that incident last Wednesday when Spike wet the carpet, there are so few people who know anything about that dog that it's impossible to fact-check the article. For all anyone knows it's all made up. So the line has to be drawn somewhere, and there need to be clear policies for it, as otherwise, well, things like this happen.
  - 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

bambax 16y ago

It seems the notability requirements really serve Wikipedia's own notability. It can't say "we'll take our list of topics from Encyclopedia Britannica" but it's what it would like to do. In the beginnings it actually made sense, too, since it would never have took off if every page was about Joe Schmo's cat. But now that Wikipedia is probably more famous and more well known than any other "real world" encyclopedia, such "respectability hacks" are unneeded and should be repelled.

mukyu 16y ago

Plan A doesn't work. It is actually easier to delete things from pages than deleting pages themselves. If you edit war over it you will lose. Plan B does not work. Wikipedia guidelines do not consider self-published sources as 'reliable' and things published by Lulu are considered self-published. Wikipedia does not consider itself a reliable source either. It is also not going to disappear in a puff of logic like God in hhgttg, no matter how witty you think it is. Plan C has not worked in the years of people deleting things that appeal to far broader audiences than esoteric programming languages. They are still around. How well do you think this will work? Plan D is something many people have done. In a way, Wikia is a giant example of it. In other cases they go to wikinfo or create their own wiki. This post is exactly like 100s of others that someone writes whenever Wikipedia deletes (or even tries to delete) something that they care about. The ground is well-tread and it brings nothing new or interesting to the table. The internet does not need another blog post where someone spends an hour in isolation writing about it. On an irrelevant note, mediawiki does support subpages (the slashes), but articles cannot have them as article titles may contain slashes. This has absolutely nothing to do with Wikipedia's notation of notability and the reasons people try to get rid of non-notable content.

knowtheory 16y ago
You've given a very Lawful Neutral response (and are correct on those grounds). However, that still doesn't make deletionism a good or sensible or internally consistent idea.
- mukyu 16y ago
  My actual thoughts on the issues related to inclusion and deletion are not what I was trying to address. I contributed to Wikipedia for a time and saw and was part of deletion sprees on both of the sides. Something like this happens every three months I would guess. Mostly, my thoughts on it at the moment are 'not this shit /again/'.
  - knowtheory 16y ago
    If something keeps cropping up again and again, that says to me that there is an expectation that is not being met. Either wikipedians can try to change the expectations of the entirety of the rest of the internet, or they should deal with their internal problem. As far as i have ever been able to determine, the only people who support deletionism are a subset of wikipedians.

nazgulnarsil 16y ago

puts on conspiracy cap wikipedia was a huge threat to traditional information sources, but now something has to come from one of those traditional sources to be considered legitimate info. problem solved.

neilk 16y ago

Thanks, Zed. A typically balanced, well-researched and well-thought-out solution to a complex problem. I especially liked the part where you blamed all of Wikipedia for the actions of a single user. I wish you had considered the route of getting involved instead. There are just some basic, fundamental things that would help fix this. A modification to the notability rules would require a lot less effort than your other proposals. The notability rules work pretty well for kicking out useless chaff like pages about high school garage bands that have never played a show. But they do privilege old-school publishing and broadcasting, so particularly ephemeral creations like new programming languages may fare very poorly against the notability criteria. But this strikes me as fixable. Programmers can help too. We don't even have the capability, for instance, for people to be emailed when their favorite page is up for deletion. We don't have a lot of means for casual involvement; everything depends on logging into Wikipedia regularly. This is part of why battles in Wikipedia tend to be won by the most, shall we say, persistent. I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a programmer. In general our resources are stretched pretty thin, and there's really only been two years so far of a budget that's even remotely in line with the size and impact of the site (thanks to your contributions). In a lot of ways we're still playing catchup with an explosive period of growth that happened around 2006-2007, using technology that's getting a bit venerable. But the issue of deletionism and the general community demeanor is a problem that is occupying more and more of our attention. If it matters to you then contact me. I can definitely tell you there are lots and LOTS of ways to help out. Actually you could even get PAID to fix this problem. Want a job working here? We have lots of open technical positions. http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs http://bit.ly/WikimediaJobs The one thing I can't guarantee is that it will satisfy your need to rage. The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith. What they need are a) your input as a knowledgeable person about how policies need to change, and b) your technical and design skills, to create systems that avoid these communication breakdowns, and guide volunteers to be more effective.

zedshaw 16y ago
Thanks Neil, a completely inaccurate reading of what I wrote. For the record, deletionists have been a problem for many people who are members of sub-cultures and Wikipedia has ignored the problem. Writing more arbitrary rules is not the solution. The solution is to fix the software so people can create a richer organization of information. I personally have had some idiot with a vendetta get a page about me deleted numerous times despite me having been mentioned in about 10 trade and mass publications and having a book published (now two) as well as my own articles in the press. It was baffling that a single person can get a page deleted without any warning, flagging, or attempts to do some research. But really it comes down to trust. I don't trust any organization that begs me for money then deletes the content that matters to me most and tries to hide behind some bogus "well it's not us really (tee-hee)". Either Wikimedia is in charge or they silently allow this kind of crap. Finally, the issue of deletionism is purely the result of bad usability and structure. All you need to do is make a place to put these pages rather than delete them and you'll solve tons of problems.

donaldc 16y ago

Notability requirements for an article to exist at all is the wrong approach. Instead, wikipedia should allow most any article to be added, but have one or more groups that "certify" articles as notable. People who want to avoid all the non-notable clutter can then elect a view of wikipedia that only includes articles certified by the group (or groups) they choose, while non-notable articles can still be viewed by those who choose to view them, and can have the breathing room to in some cases evolve into notable articles.

redthrowaway 16y ago

That's just... wrong. Come on, Zed, at least do your homework. Chris isn't deleting the pages, nor is he acting as some sort of sole determinant of noteworthiness. He's simply proposing them for deletion through the Articles for Deletion process. Also, Wikipedia handles sub-pages just fine. Most active editors have a number of sub-pages on their userpage, and many articles have sub-pages as well where people will store drafts while working on a revision. Your information is wrong, and your tone is insulting. Cut it out, man.

zedshaw 16y ago
I don't care what the bureaucratic process is, all I know is one guy went on a rampage electing pages for deletion and they're gone. This "plausible deniability" of page deletion so nobody is to blame really is odd.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  There's a discussion at each AfD where anyone can come in and say why a page should or should not be kept. In the end, it is the adminstrator's decision as to whether or not there is a consensus to delete (default is to keep), and there are processes in place for getting the decision overturned. Chris nominated 8 pages for deletion over a period of 3 days. While it's a spree that's likely hasty, it's by no means a rampage. I believe he was wrong to do as he did, but only a couple pages were deleted, and there's a discussion to have Nemerle restored. He's hardly a one-man wiki-wrecking crew.
  - bane 16y ago
    it is the adminstrator's decision as to whether or not there is a consensus to delete (default is to keep) The de facto process is to default to delete. As this embarrassing debacle has shown, there were no votes to delete, and yet poof! the articles were deleted and a day later, with significant backlash and discussion, almost all in favor to reinstate or at least open the pages back up to be reconstituted, are not back up. Wikipedia's editing "process" is a shameful joke.
16y ago

Tichy 16y ago

The donations thing just made me wonder if it could work to have donations per page. That is, you could kind of adopt an article (and get a banner on that article announcing you are the sponsor, perhaps). Immediate problem would of course be advertising, which would not be desired. It's just that if I donate now, I feel as if I am supportive of their deletionist policies, which I am not.

idonthack 16y ago

Wikipedia deletionism has nothing to do with the lack of paths. Organization is handled by mediawiki's category feature. Name collisions are avoided and similar names collected on disambiguation pages. "Plan A" is not a new idea, it's exactly what happens to other categories with lots of items that don't deserve their own page. "Plan B" won't work because part of deletionist policy is to ignore sources published by self-publishing outfits, because "anybody can publish there". "Plan C" won't solve a goddamn thing. Good luck with "Plan D". Quit asking for features that already exist.

zedshaw 16y ago
Oh, an name of idonthack with no comments and no karma really. Well, since you don't meet the requirements of notability in my world I'm just going to down vote you. Thanks for playing anonymous troll.

f10 16y ago

Strange that e.g. several content farms are deemed notable by the Wikipedia editors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahalo.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softpedia Notability requirements are fine, but not if they are applied selectively.

bane 16y ago
You should probably flag them AfD.

blickly 16y ago

In case anyone is still curious how this got resolved, Monsanto gave up. From his wikipedia user page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto): > Dear internet, > You guys win. I will stop nominating pages for deletion. > I wasn't doing this to troll or to slam any language community. I was just trying to help -- I read the WP guidelines for inclusion, and whenever I came across a language that didn't seem to meet said criteria, I nominated it for AfD. I think, with respect to Wikipedia's established notability guidelines, my arguments for deletion were airtight, which is probably why the articles were eventually deleted. I'm not sure my actions warranted the kind of internet-hatred I received as a result. If anyone thought what I was doing was wrong, they could have just sent me a friendly message and I would have politely discussed the issue. Few took this route, and I am sorry that due to time constraints and an overwhelming amount of invective I could not reply sensibly to everyone. > Since the internet seems to care more about keeping these articles than I care about deleting them, I'll stop. I personally think a lot of the articles should have been deleted. I think that ALL articles I nominated for deletion fail to meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Here's a challenge, then, for the internet: instead of spamming my Wikipedia talk page (which I don't really care about), why don't you work on fixing WP's notability guideline for programming languages? Otherwise, some other naive editor will eventually try to delete them. Perhaps they won't have as much experience dealing with trolls and flamebait as I have had, and will become very hurt and confused. Nobody wants that :(

gojomo 16y ago

Zed writes: "I have registered notnotable.com... Just put up the same software, get some free hosting from some of the companies out there that I know, and start filling it in with anything that's not on Wikipedia." There've been a few abortive attempts to create a repository for deleted Wikipedia content, or a more inclusionist Wikipedia with the same software... and they've all proved moribund. The trick is not just the name or concept, but the entire community and mission. Reusing the same software – while attractive for a quick start – could present problems. Part of the reason Wikipedia has resorted to deletionism, in my mind, has been weaknesses in MediaWiki, and having the same general appearance and workflow is likely to just walk a new project down the same paths. And defining an alternative solely as "what Wikipedia isn't" puts a rather hard and low cap on its growth as an independent identity. With these problems in mind, I've started working on a reference knowledge-base to complement Wikipedia that will loosen the 'notability' requirement in favor of 'true and useful'. Otherwise, it will share the same licensing and a wiki-centric edit model. The project codename is 'Infinithree' ('∞³'), and I'm discussing it pre-launch at http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org and (Twitter/Identica) @infinithree.