5 ms·

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 Wikip

by 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.
- neilk 16y ago
  You might be responding to an earlier version of what I said, but I absolutely agree with you that it's got a lot to do with the software. Do you really want the Wikimedia Foundation to set themselves up as a judge of the content in Wikipedia? I mean, apart from the fact that we have no mandate or qualifications to do this, how could you get an organization that fits around a few tables in a restaurant to judge all the edit wars in Wikipedia? In over 250 languages?! If this problem is going to be solved, it's going to be solved in some distributed fashion, by the community, or by interested hackers such as yourself pitching in and giving the community new tools. There's a good chance you (by which I mean any hacker reading this) could get PAID to solve this problem. Or, it's going to be solved by someone forking Wikipedia content or starting over, but the same problems have to be solved somehow.
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    No, after this and many other things I'm not interested in working for them, at all. Especially if I find out the rumors of a "nerd purge" agenda are true. If there is a call to delete "nerdy" content I'm gonna really turn up the destruction.
    - neilk 16y ago
      A "nerd purge". At Wikipedia. You just broke my brain. What are you talking about?
      - knowtheory 16y ago
        maybe he's referring to the sentiment here? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215731 (also, lotsa wikimedia ppl on HN then? ;) )
      - zedshaw 16y ago
        I've started to notice that a lot of "nerdy" topics get deleted lately. I can't prove it, but I suspect there's some attempt to cleanse the "white male nerd" out of Wikipedia in order to attract normal people. Again, I can't prove it. If it's true that's about the worst way to crap on the people who donate the most money and do the most work keeping the project going.
ramanujan 16y ago
Deletionism has caused innumerable PhDs and casual users alike to stop contributing to Wikipedia. It has been a cancer for years. If Zed's article means someone at the Wikimedia Foundation finally understands the problem, fantastic! First thing you do, please kill all of the rules lawyers (and maybe get some machine learning in there to clean up spam and pause edit wars, rather than relying on fallible humans with obvious agendas). Till then, one can only hope that Zed's fork of Wikipedia gives it an incentive to move in an inclusionist direction. Perhaps a fork oriented around Facebook Connect, such that people edit with their real names and have property rights over their pages (Knol hasn't really properly executed on the idea, though it's been around for a while). I'm pretty sure next year when Wikipedia start asking for donations I'm going to come out strong and campaign against them. Brilliant! Wikimedia person, you guys do a lot of A/B testing of your donation pages. Why not put something in there asking how many donors actually favor deletionism? I think you'll be surprised how many people have been turned off by it. Just include it all and let search (and writer reputation) sort it out.
- neilk 16y ago
  I don't want to talk about other people's research (that hasn't yet been formally presented to the community) but believe me people are working on it. And your donations have made that research possible.
Jun8 16y ago
Well, we don't have the insider insight that you have of course, but I've been a follower of news about such deletionism (and pity editor fights) for a while now, and find that it's really hard to believe that "The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith." Even if this is true, you can do horrible deeds while thinking that you are acting in good faith, the Inquisition is a good but extreme example. What is needed to stop such nonsense is an internal balancing mechanism in Wikipedia against such wayward editors.
saurik 16y ago
The core problem here is that things are being /deleted/ (in a permanent, no-longer-accessible-for-review fashion): in today's day and age (I'm willing to believe this will change in another 10-15 years) I find it almost unfathomable that Wikimedia really has to /delete/ old content rather than simply "putting it in the attic". To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality. Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline". However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies). But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic). And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost. So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators. And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner). Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted". If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help. Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in. But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society. Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.
bane 16y ago
I'll be perfectly honest with you, until the Wikimedia foundation steps in and straightens out the embarrassing charade that the community editorial process has become, I know that not only will I personally not be wasting my time trying to contribute to wikipedia, I won't be donating either (no matter how doe eyed Jimmy gets) and I'll be trying to get as many other people as possible to follow suit. It's unrealistic to expect the foundation to edit all the individual content, but they need to manage the processes. As they are, it's virtually impossible for anybody not already part of the circle-jerk of WP editors to provide any meaningful contributions. The jargon density alone in dealing with anything other than the most basic edits make most people quit immediately. And no, starting up yet another discussion over WP:N is not going to solve the problem - that's a bigger losing battle than trying to keep a page for Alice ML alive. The foundation simply needs to step in and say "this is how it's going to be" and fix it. Here's my 3 step solution for what it's worth: 1) AfD's are initially silent -- meaning nobody knows that an article has been flagged. An article needs at least a dozen AfD flags to spark a deletion process. The deletion process needs to be similarly fair, anonymous and automatic. That means secret ballot, long periods of consideration and discussion (not hours, more like months)...in other words, it needs to be a serious deal to remove an article from the site. AfD flags should disappear after 48 hours if no action or discussion has taken place and the default should be to keep the article. 2) Wikipedia needs to eliminate the class of editors completely from the site. Editing powers are given out to outright assholes who pretend to be operating in good faith but really just operate on a power trip. Users may only edit some fixed number of "things" per month. WP is dominated right now by people with literally nothing to do in their lives except spend 16 hours a day policing wikipedia. WP should not be encouraging this type of obsessive personality by giving them power over the community. I can say definitely, 100% of the problem that people have with WP is with these kinds of editors. 3) No single admin may pull the delete trigger, if the secret ballot shows a positive deletion assertion, it needs a panel of 3 admins to confirm. The process to reverse a deletion should be simple and similarly free from the personal whims of overzealous admins/editors. WP:N needs to either be fixed, or go away. Despite being a guideline, editors treat it as a hard and fast rule that is paradoxically applied completely arbitrarily to individual pages. The guideline is so broken that it would probably only result in a wikipedia containing short snippets of common/popular knowledge if applied across the entire site -- basically what Zed calls "things my grandmother knows about". This completely defeats the purpose of a reference site. People come here to discover new information, not confirm what they already know. If anything, it should be harder to put a page up of highly notable things than long-tail things. It's not that trying to contribute to wikipedia is inconvenient, or that it's jargon is unnecessarily dense, it's that it fucking sucks to try and be a positive force to expand wikipedia. It's painful, it's no fun, there's literally no reward, and hours and hours of work can poof! go away based on somebody's whim. It used to be fun. I used to contribute things. There used to be useful and helpful discussions on every page, trying to make them as high quality as possible. But then people started to figure out that it's easier to just delete entire articles that contains a single typo, or where the writer hasn't pulled together all of the references yet or the subject hasn't risen to whatever arbitrary interpretation of WP:N that some random admin is using that day. Rather than try and improve the article, or help find the references, or help establish notability, poof gone goes the work. And that's been going on for more than 5 years without any apparent movement by the foundation to fix this broken problem. It's not a technical issue (though I agree with Zed that much of it comes from the lack of a '/') it's a policy problem that the foundation needs to address. edit I think I'll probably be checking out http://www.wikia.com/Wikia http://www.wikia.com/Wikia as a replacement for wikipedia. It looks like they have a much saner process on the surface.

by neilk 16y ago

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.

neilk 16y ago
You might be responding to an earlier version of what I said, but I absolutely agree with you that it's got a lot to do with the software. Do you really want the Wikimedia Foundation to set themselves up as a judge of the content in Wikipedia? I mean, apart from the fact that we have no mandate or qualifications to do this, how could you get an organization that fits around a few tables in a restaurant to judge all the edit wars in Wikipedia? In over 250 languages?! If this problem is going to be solved, it's going to be solved in some distributed fashion, by the community, or by interested hackers such as yourself pitching in and giving the community new tools. There's a good chance you (by which I mean any hacker reading this) could get PAID to solve this problem. Or, it's going to be solved by someone forking Wikipedia content or starting over, but the same problems have to be solved somehow.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  No, after this and many other things I'm not interested in working for them, at all. Especially if I find out the rumors of a "nerd purge" agenda are true. If there is a call to delete "nerdy" content I'm gonna really turn up the destruction.
  - neilk 16y ago
    A "nerd purge". At Wikipedia. You just broke my brain. What are you talking about?
    - knowtheory 16y ago
      maybe he's referring to the sentiment here? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215731 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215731 (also, lotsa wikimedia ppl on HN then? ;) )
    - zedshaw 16y ago
      I've started to notice that a lot of "nerdy" topics get deleted lately. I can't prove it, but I suspect there's some attempt to cleanse the "white male nerd" out of Wikipedia in order to attract normal people. Again, I can't prove it. If it's true that's about the worst way to crap on the people who donate the most money and do the most work keeping the project going.

ramanujan 16y ago

Deletionism has caused innumerable PhDs and casual users alike to stop contributing to Wikipedia. It has been a cancer for years. If Zed's article means someone at the Wikimedia Foundation finally understands the problem, fantastic! First thing you do, please kill all of the rules lawyers (and maybe get some machine learning in there to clean up spam and pause edit wars, rather than relying on fallible humans with obvious agendas). Till then, one can only hope that Zed's fork of Wikipedia gives it an incentive to move in an inclusionist direction. Perhaps a fork oriented around Facebook Connect, such that people edit with their real names and have property rights over their pages (Knol hasn't really properly executed on the idea, though it's been around for a while). I'm pretty sure next year when Wikipedia start asking for donations I'm going to come out strong and campaign against them. Brilliant! Wikimedia person, you guys do a lot of A/B testing of your donation pages. Why not put something in there asking how many donors actually favor deletionism? I think you'll be surprised how many people have been turned off by it. Just include it all and let search (and writer reputation) sort it out.

neilk 16y ago
I don't want to talk about other people's research (that hasn't yet been formally presented to the community) but believe me people are working on it. And your donations have made that research possible.

Jun8 16y ago

Well, we don't have the insider insight that you have of course, but I've been a follower of news about such deletionism (and pity editor fights) for a while now, and find that it's really hard to believe that "The truth is, almost everyone in the Wiki community is acting in good faith." Even if this is true, you can do horrible deeds while thinking that you are acting in good faith, the Inquisition is a good but extreme example. What is needed to stop such nonsense is an internal balancing mechanism in Wikipedia against such wayward editors.

saurik 16y ago

The core problem here is that things are being /deleted/ (in a permanent, no-longer-accessible-for-review fashion): in today's day and age (I'm willing to believe this will change in another 10-15 years) I find it almost unfathomable that Wikimedia really has to /delete/ old content rather than simply "putting it in the attic". To be clear: I totally understand that things that are not being maintained need to not be supported; hell, that's the name of the game in engineering management as well as encyclopedia curation. It would obviously be detrimental to everyone if Wikipedia had a bunch of rotting content that it claimed was a reasonably accurate telling of reality. Therefore, I concede that it is important that things that are not being maintained or that don't have enough source material aren't claimed to be part of the experience: this content needs to be found and flagged, and there probably should be a process for determining this, maybe even a "notability guideline". However, actually /deleting/ the content is totally counter-productive: all you've done is made the project slightly less useful to someone out there. I mean, even if the content on that page was only half accurate (and 50% outright lies), that's about as good as much of the primary source material and historical record we have anyway (and many orders of magnitude better than medical research, according to recent meta-studies). But, putting that particular argument aside for a moment, if a contributor comes by a week later and wants to know what happened and get involved in that particular discussion, maybe even is in a position to improve the article, it is too late: that data has been replaced by something that does no more than tell you when it was deleted, with a one-sentence explanation as to why (that is often something unintelligibly cryptic). And that, to me, is the crux of the problem: Wikipedia is this amazing body of knowledge where you can see what people are changing and work together to solve problems in this wonderfully egalitarian community process... until someone deletes something, at which point the data is gone, and all record of what that topic was or why it may have been important to someone is now irretrievably lost. So, if you are telling me that /that/ is something that is open to discussion, and that the only reason you haven't fixed /that/ is due to a resource constraint, whether it be developer time or server assets, then this is amazing, and more people should know this, because that is not at all the experience I've had talking with Wikipedia moderators. And, on that note, I will happily give $10,000 to WikiMedia to hire an engineer to add this one feature. I imagine it will be reasonably simple, and should not take much time: deletion should become impossible, being replaced by a "this page has been deleted and is no longer considered to be maintained or accurate" banner (that itself is implemented in the exact same manner as the "up for deletion" banner). Preferably, the list of deleted pages would then be aggregated to a page on the site (something I believe may already happen with these flags, but if not this should be easy to add) so that people who want to try to help improve the quality of this information can do so, which will also provide a good head start to anyone wanting to /start/ an article on a "newly notable" topic that used to be considered "deleted". If $10,000 isn't enough, please figure out what it would take, and we can talk. That is (unfortunately) a lot of money to me (my company operates on almost no margin, so that's a sizable percentage of my operating budget), but I consider Wikimedia to be a really important project that, despite this horrendous flaw, benefits everyone, and I want to make certain that I'm doing my part to help. Hell, if the problem ends up coming down to finding the engineer, I am willing to do the work myself, and can probably find a bunch of other people who would be willing to volunteer on this particular subproject: I bet we can even find developers who are "notable" (even by Wikimedia's current guidelines) to come out of the woodwork and pitch in. But, until this particular issue is fixed, I really have no interest in becoming the guy from Zed's campaign, who gets to walk around with a t-shirt saying "I gave Wikipedia $100 and all they did was delete my favorite programming language.": I'd rather see Wikipedia collapse due to funding constraints and be replaced by whatever comes next than contribute to something that actively deletes and purges the precious information it has been entrusted with by society. Please, I implore you: accept my humble donation offer, and let the destruction stop now.

bane 16y ago

I'll be perfectly honest with you, until the Wikimedia foundation steps in and straightens out the embarrassing charade that the community editorial process has become, I know that not only will I personally not be wasting my time trying to contribute to wikipedia, I won't be donating either (no matter how doe eyed Jimmy gets) and I'll be trying to get as many other people as possible to follow suit. It's unrealistic to expect the foundation to edit all the individual content, but they need to manage the processes. As they are, it's virtually impossible for anybody not already part of the circle-jerk of WP editors to provide any meaningful contributions. The jargon density alone in dealing with anything other than the most basic edits make most people quit immediately. And no, starting up yet another discussion over WP:N is not going to solve the problem - that's a bigger losing battle than trying to keep a page for Alice ML alive. The foundation simply needs to step in and say "this is how it's going to be" and fix it. Here's my 3 step solution for what it's worth: 1) AfD's are initially silent -- meaning nobody knows that an article has been flagged. An article needs at least a dozen AfD flags to spark a deletion process. The deletion process needs to be similarly fair, anonymous and automatic. That means secret ballot, long periods of consideration and discussion (not hours, more like months)...in other words, it needs to be a serious deal to remove an article from the site. AfD flags should disappear after 48 hours if no action or discussion has taken place and the default should be to keep the article. 2) Wikipedia needs to eliminate the class of editors completely from the site. Editing powers are given out to outright assholes who pretend to be operating in good faith but really just operate on a power trip. Users may only edit some fixed number of "things" per month. WP is dominated right now by people with literally nothing to do in their lives except spend 16 hours a day policing wikipedia. WP should not be encouraging this type of obsessive personality by giving them power over the community. I can say definitely, 100% of the problem that people have with WP is with these kinds of editors. 3) No single admin may pull the delete trigger, if the secret ballot shows a positive deletion assertion, it needs a panel of 3 admins to confirm. The process to reverse a deletion should be simple and similarly free from the personal whims of overzealous admins/editors. WP:N needs to either be fixed, or go away. Despite being a guideline, editors treat it as a hard and fast rule that is paradoxically applied completely arbitrarily to individual pages. The guideline is so broken that it would probably only result in a wikipedia containing short snippets of common/popular knowledge if applied across the entire site -- basically what Zed calls "things my grandmother knows about". This completely defeats the purpose of a reference site. People come here to discover new information, not confirm what they already know. If anything, it should be harder to put a page up of highly notable things than long-tail things. It's not that trying to contribute to wikipedia is inconvenient, or that it's jargon is unnecessarily dense, it's that it fucking sucks to try and be a positive force to expand wikipedia. It's painful, it's no fun, there's literally no reward, and hours and hours of work can poof! go away based on somebody's whim. It used to be fun. I used to contribute things. There used to be useful and helpful discussions on every page, trying to make them as high quality as possible. But then people started to figure out that it's easier to just delete entire articles that contains a single typo, or where the writer hasn't pulled together all of the references yet or the subject hasn't risen to whatever arbitrary interpretation of WP:N that some random admin is using that day. Rather than try and improve the article, or help find the references, or help establish notability, poof gone goes the work. And that's been going on for more than 5 years without any apparent movement by the foundation to fix this broken problem. It's not a technical issue (though I agree with Zed that much of it comes from the lack of a '/') it's a policy problem that the foundation needs to address. edit I think I'll probably be checking out http://www.wikia.com/Wikia http://www.wikia.com/Wikia as a replacement for wikipedia. It looks like they have a much saner process on the surface.