5 ms·

Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

by latch 16y ago

afterburner 16y ago
Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.
- _delirium 16y ago
  In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc. When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like! And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
  - afterburner 16y ago
    I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Yeah, there's definitely a difference in scale and possible harm done. Unlike some minor cruft in other parts of science, they don't seem to attract much kookery either, so "fringe PLs" versus "fringe physics" is at worst clutter, not full of actively misleading nonsense. I'd have to try to look at archives to be sure, but I think fringe-physics is actually one of the reasons some of the science-related policies are written as they are. The answer to, "how do we keep this crap off Wikipedia?" was to have some sort of policy about the existence of peer-reviewed sources. (The peer-reviewed part is necessary, because a lot of fringe physics has papers up on arXiv.)
  - iwwr 16y ago
    If there is a band out there with an active online community numbering in the hundreds (which means their offline following is a few orders of magnitude greater), I don't see why they shouldn't have a wikipedia page.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      If there are good sources to write an article from, sure. But if there aren't any sources besides the band's website, their MySpace, and a few fans' blog posts, what goes in the article? The usual result is that fans just write a bunch of stuff about the band they like, which doesn't make for the best article. I don't personally care that much, but I don't think the world is greatly harmed by not having those articles, either; for that kind of stuff, there are always fansites and fan wikis, so they don't have to go on Wikipedia.
      - shin_lao 16y ago
        Just basic information, which is better than nothing. If you enquire about the bank in wikipedia you'll get something like "Awesome Band is a neo-dark-fusion-hip-hop jazz Slovenian band formed in 2002. They have produced one album called and are currently active." Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia, isn't it?
        pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        >Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia, isn't it? No, it's not. Wikipedia is a knowledge repository not _the_ knowledge repository. It's not there to hold every little bit of trivia, if you want to find "what is Awesome Band" then use a search engine. Wikipedia is there to house notable instances and information that has wider application than mere trivia. Unless Awesome Band started a new genre, influenced well known bands, is a well known band (eg number 1 tracks, headlining particularly large events, etc.) or is known for something else then it's probably enough to mention them as a footnote as a band that played at Event X or possibly as a notable example of a genre or whatever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_content_criteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_conte...

Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

by latch 16y ago

Not unexpected, but whenever something like this happens, to me the real tragedy is the level of animosity and vitriol shown by the "victims".

afterburner 16y ago

Power imbalances tend to produce that emotional response. Popular revolt follows, especial when food prices go up. Wait, scratch that last bit.

_delirium 16y ago
In this case I think it's more down to the fact that a "fan community" exists. The exact same response happens when a band gets proposed for deletion and someone posts about it on the band's mailing list. You get 100 posts about how this is in fact The Most Important Band In Genre In The Past Ten Years and Wikipedia's administrators must be knuckle-dragging cultureless slobs if they don't recognize that. Then semi-organized mobs try to find who proposed the article for deletion and harass him, etc. When I saw a bunch of these posts at the top of HN, I was actually expecting a better discussion, but it seems PLs fans are pretty similar to music fans when it comes to someone touching the stuff they like! And in the other direction, you get much better discussions when there isn't a fandom involved. Most deletion debates of science and math articles end up pretty civil, with a reasonable debate about whether to merge the information somewhere, whether better sources can be found to improve the article instead of deleting it, etc. At worst, you get the one guy who wrote a vanity article about his research lab posting under multiple accounts to try to save it, but usually no mobs.
- afterburner 16y ago
  I can see how the two are similar. However, the scale of the band page problem is, I'm guessing, at least 2 orders of magnitude worse, if not more, than the programming language clutter.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Yeah, there's definitely a difference in scale and possible harm done. Unlike some minor cruft in other parts of science, they don't seem to attract much kookery either, so "fringe PLs" versus "fringe physics" is at worst clutter, not full of actively misleading nonsense. I'd have to try to look at archives to be sure, but I think fringe-physics is actually one of the reasons some of the science-related policies are written as they are. The answer to, "how do we keep this crap off Wikipedia?" was to have some sort of policy about the existence of peer-reviewed sources. (The peer-reviewed part is necessary, because a lot of fringe physics has papers up on arXiv.)
- iwwr 16y ago
  If there is a band out there with an active online community numbering in the hundreds (which means their offline following is a few orders of magnitude greater), I don't see why they shouldn't have a wikipedia page.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    If there are good sources to write an article from, sure. But if there aren't any sources besides the band's website, their MySpace, and a few fans' blog posts, what goes in the article? The usual result is that fans just write a bunch of stuff about the band they like, which doesn't make for the best article. I don't personally care that much, but I don't think the world is greatly harmed by not having those articles, either; for that kind of stuff, there are always fansites and fan wikis, so they don't have to go on Wikipedia.
    - shin_lao 16y ago
      Just basic information, which is better than nothing. If you enquire about the bank in wikipedia you'll get something like "Awesome Band is a neo-dark-fusion-hip-hop jazz Slovenian band formed in 2002. They have produced one album called and are currently active." Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia, isn't it?
      - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        >Answers the question "what is Awesome Band?" which is the role of wikipedia, isn't it? No, it's not. Wikipedia is a knowledge repository not _the_ knowledge repository. It's not there to hold every little bit of trivia, if you want to find "what is Awesome Band" then use a search engine. Wikipedia is there to house notable instances and information that has wider application than mere trivia. Unless Awesome Band started a new genre, influenced well known bands, is a well known band (eg number 1 tracks, headlining particularly large events, etc.) or is known for something else then it's probably enough to mention them as a footnote as a band that played at Event X or possibly as a notable example of a genre or whatever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_an_indiscriminate_collection_of_information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_content_criteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Wikipedia_conte...