5 ms·

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

by 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.
  - robryan 16y ago
    You could also just take the article in good faith at face value. I don't think anyone really believes everything on wikipedia is going to be top notch quality. If people are looking up popular things a lot of work will have been done maintaining the article, if they are looking up things of narrow interest it is reasonable to assume that everything there might be from just a single perspective, but could still give value to that person.
  - knowtheory 16y ago
    But Spike is a straw-man (well, dog). These programming languages aren't non-existant, and can be verified as actually existing. It's not that there are no references to it. On top of that, i'm still unclear why it would even matter? Things with little interest will generate little traffic. The potential to misinform is pretty low. And if it were to be the case that an article that was incorrect (maliciously or not) were to suddenly see an increase in traffic, presumably that can only serve to encourage people to point out inaccuracies and correct them (treating fictionalized accounts of anything as being an inaccuracy). And wikipedia already has a mechanism for resolving synonymy and name-resolution disputes.
    - prodigal_erik 16y ago
      If Wikipedia just accumulated everything it could, we'd end up with a billion articles 90% of which are vandalized, outdated, mistaken crap. The potential to misinform would be huge. They can only successfully scale the corpus at the rate at which they gain volunteer editors (who are far rarer than people who just write one article about their favorite obscure thing, and then leave).
      - arethuza 16y ago
        If something is vandalized or mistaken then delete it, if it is outdated then there should be some kind of long term archiving policy but I fail to understand the reasoning behind deleting articles which are factually correct, even if rather obscure. What harm do they do?
      - 16y ago
zedshaw 16y ago
Well, then if there is no technical reason, then it's a usability flaw or just stupidity. If it is possible to create meta-pages that could house sub-cultures and esoteric information, then they aren't doing it and using these rules for no reason. If they can't create one more level, then it's a technical problem they should solve. Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed". Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.
- ugh 16y ago
  As I said, the official reason for the notability rules is maintainability – to keep the amount of articles low and relevant so that they can be maintained.
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    What?! To keep the amount of articles low? Ok wait, why were they begging for 10 million dollars then? So they can have no content? You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible. Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.
    - ugh 16y ago
      They don’t want to keep the amount of articles as small as possible, they want just the right type and amount of articles so that they can maintain them. Wikipedia depends on volunteers and I don’t think Wikimedia can afford to pay people to maintain articles [1]. If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning). This is a very controversial topic, the battle between Deletionists [1] and Inclusionists [2] has been raging for a long time on Wikipedia. Technical reasons really play no role in this battle. [1] Wikimedia 2010-11 budget plan (PDF): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

by ugh 16y ago

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.
- robryan 16y ago
  You could also just take the article in good faith at face value. I don't think anyone really believes everything on wikipedia is going to be top notch quality. If people are looking up popular things a lot of work will have been done maintaining the article, if they are looking up things of narrow interest it is reasonable to assume that everything there might be from just a single perspective, but could still give value to that person.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  But Spike is a straw-man (well, dog). These programming languages aren't non-existant, and can be verified as actually existing. It's not that there are no references to it. On top of that, i'm still unclear why it would even matter? Things with little interest will generate little traffic. The potential to misinform is pretty low. And if it were to be the case that an article that was incorrect (maliciously or not) were to suddenly see an increase in traffic, presumably that can only serve to encourage people to point out inaccuracies and correct them (treating fictionalized accounts of anything as being an inaccuracy). And wikipedia already has a mechanism for resolving synonymy and name-resolution disputes.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    If Wikipedia just accumulated everything it could, we'd end up with a billion articles 90% of which are vandalized, outdated, mistaken crap. The potential to misinform would be huge. They can only successfully scale the corpus at the rate at which they gain volunteer editors (who are far rarer than people who just write one article about their favorite obscure thing, and then leave).
    - arethuza 16y ago
      If something is vandalized or mistaken then delete it, if it is outdated then there should be some kind of long term archiving policy but I fail to understand the reasoning behind deleting articles which are factually correct, even if rather obscure. What harm do they do?
    - 16y ago

zedshaw 16y ago

Well, then if there is no technical reason, then it's a usability flaw or just stupidity. If it is possible to create meta-pages that could house sub-cultures and esoteric information, then they aren't doing it and using these rules for no reason. If they can't create one more level, then it's a technical problem they should solve. Another way to put this is, you can't expect a single flat namespace to contain even a reasonable amount of human knowledge. At some point, as any Librarian will tell you, you have to make a 2nd level. If they did then they'd solve the problem since you could say nothing is deleted and is just "subbed". Of course, then that'd be a new insult, but at least information wouldn't disappear for no reason other than egocentric opinion.

ugh 16y ago
As I said, the official reason for the notability rules is maintainability – to keep the amount of articles low and relevant so that they can be maintained.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  What?! To keep the amount of articles low? Ok wait, why were they begging for 10 million dollars then? So they can have no content? You understand that you just said the organization that's devoted to becoming the largest record of human knowledge is interested in keeping that large record as small as possible. Holy crap, I officially give up. The internet is nothing but a giant never ending scene from Catch-22.
  - ugh 16y ago
    They don’t want to keep the amount of articles as small as possible, they want just the right type and amount of articles so that they can maintain them. Wikipedia depends on volunteers and I don’t think Wikimedia can afford to pay people to maintain articles [1]. If you want an article about every Pokémon and not just Pikachu you should start your own Pokémon wiki. That’s Wikipedia’s official party line. Well, at least the party line of the Deletionists (who seem to be winning). This is a very controversial topic, the battle between Deletionists [1] and Inclusionists [2] has been raging for a long time on Wikipedia. Technical reasons really play no role in this battle. [1] Wikimedia 2010-11 budget plan (PDF): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism