10 ms·

In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)

100 points by luu 7y ago

narag 7y ago
No comments yet? I guess others are still reading TFA... There are a number of issues that seem to be eternal. Even if there's an obvious right answer, I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these? I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale.
- CarVac 7y ago
  I would attribute it to an inadequate equilibrium, a local minimum that's simply too hard to escape at this point.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  As a former Wikipedian, what's there to say? The evidence is still there, and was there for years and years. Deletionism was, and remains, a wrong-headed attitude that does not understand what makes WP qualitatively different from standard encyclopedic offerings. There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and indeed that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary and Wikidata to their own TLDs. The main problem with WP is that it is far easier to be wrong than to be right, and the effort required to be right is linear in the number of words written. In short, the number of editors per page required for acceptable quality does not roll off with large numbers of pages, but stays relatively high, at around 1-2 editors/page. Worse, the number of moderators per editor does not roll off either. The number of bureaucrats required therefore keeps growing, logarithmically but steadily, and the demands on arbitration committees keep growing. The committees themselves have long ago failed basic principles of legal legibility, leading to sprawling bureaucracy. One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we store. Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we could use Wikidata to automatically generate articles. We already have factboxes which could be largely automatically populated, and many people only care about the factboxes. Prose would be limited to commentary and explication, but would not be the main bodies of articles. This is not just a pipe dream; LMFDB [0] exists and is worth examining as an example of how code and data can automatically generate the bulk of an encyclopedia. But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when Esperanza [1] was dissolved. We are now somewhere between Bureaucracy and The Aftermath. [0] https://www.lmfdb.org/ https://www.lmfdb.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza
  - narag 7y ago
    Wow, the death of hope...
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we store. Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we could use Wikidata to automatically generate articles. This is in fact being proposed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia_and_a_new_Wikipedia_project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_tow... by a prominent Wikidatan. (Edit: follow up at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda .) However generating sensible articles would require expanding the current Wikidata model, and this is something that should happen gradually and be managed by the WD community itself, not at a separate project. The whole pretty-printing-in-natural-language part is the most speculative by far, and incubating it separately makes more sense. It's worth noting that Wikidata itself is not "deletionist" other than as implied by verifiability- and sourcing-requirements. Its model is far more general and far more "inclusionist" than even the most permissive visions for Wikipedia.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    > There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and indeed that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary and Wikidata to their own TLDs. This feels like a gross misreading of the facts. Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia because its work product is fundamentally different -- it's a dictionary, not an encylopedia. Wikipedia has a lot of articles about things that aren't words, and Wiktionary has a lot of pages for words that wouldn't make sense to write an encyclopedia article about. Wikidata, meanwhile, is only about raw data. Which is a part of an encyclopedia, but far from all of it. (How would you write an article about the history of Rome using only data?) > But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when Esperanza [1] was dissolved. This, too, is a gross misstatement of the facts. Esperanza was dissolved because it was becoming a cabal. It started as a social group, but rapidly grew into its own organization, with its own decision-making processes and elected officials separate from those of Wikipedia. There was widespread agreement, even from Esperanza's founder, that the organization was no longer fulfilling its purpose, and an effort to reform it before it was shut down. There's a decent summary at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-01-02/Experanza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- pdonis 7y ago
  > I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale. I think the general unspeakable reason is pretty simple: once you give people power, some of them will misuse it. And since it takes more effort to correct a misuse of power than to commit the misuse in the first place, any institution that gives people power becomes more and more corrupt over time as misuses of power outweigh valid uses of power.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    While I'm mostly in Camp Inclusion, I appreciate the issues that tend to come up as you loosen criteria for articles more and more--you probably inevitably get articles that are "notable" to a narrower and narrower set of people and a lot of verification depends on shakier and harder to access sources. That said, it's pretty clear that there are more than a few Wikipedia admins who seem to have embraced deletionism for topics that aren't near and dear to them personally and/or which poke at whatever their particular political hot buttons are.
  - kragen 7y ago
    The nice thing about Wikis in general is that it's usually easier to correct a misuse of the power to edit a page than it is to commit the misuse in the first place. That's why Wikis work at all.
    - narag 7y ago
      That works for the power to edit, not for the power to delete. So it makes sense, yes.
  - ooobit2 7y ago
    Not just some people, nearly all will abuse it. But we've seen this more-so in people who are less familiar with these institutions. Baltimore, MD, for example, has had now two black, female mayors convicted of corruption and removed from office. We've seen the current mayor of Chicago attempt authoritarianism to enforce the stay-at-home order. Michigan's mayor has reached far beyond CDC and NHS recommendations, and now faces possible corruption charges over abuse of power. Maine's governor is also in the spotlight for circumventing checks and balances by the legislature on the executive office. People love AOC, and I too believe she means well, but even she has warped into an anarcho-syndicalist, going so far as to make absurd statements that "incremental change isn't working", when everyone knows governance is a complex, incremental series of processes, necessary to maintain a free republic and limit opportunities for tyranny. Omar has had a sexual affair with a senior member of her staff. Tlaib has been censured for collaborating with anti-semitic organizations on official business. Biden, himself, has now managed over a year of avoiding investigations into how his son secured a chair on a Ukrainian energy board and was on that board during negotiations between the Obama-Biden administration and Ukraine related to that company's finances. It's cute that people like John Oliver continue to say that the rise of fascism isn't obvious, that it happens slow, subtle. But abuses of power and position are everywhere right now, especially among anti-Trump activists in the media and Congress. You might agree that Trump is a racist, but taking that very position is complicit with the anarcho-syndicalism among a growing number of leftist politicians now. Keep an air of skepticism about you for your own safety. Just because 75% of us think a hate speech law is a reasonable circumvention of free speech guarantees doesn't mean we aren't also enabling scope creep. As we've seen thus far, "slippery slope" is a fallacy in everything but governance.
- som33 7y ago
  > I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these? Because human beings don't see reality accurately, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
dang 7y ago
A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255 Thread from 2014 - interesting top comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791 (Reposts are ok after about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) I've made the year in the title a gwernian range.
eitland 7y ago
Same goes for stackoverflow. Since the stackoverflow database is freely available I cannot see a single good reason why they haven't been outcompeted years ago.
- the_af 7y ago
  So I have my own beefs with stackoverflow and the stackexchange network at large, but... ...at some point you have to ask yourself, why haven't they been outcompeted? For every post complaining about stackoverflow moderation or policies, there are probably thousands of people using it every day to do their jobs, and it hasn't been outcompeted! So if we're honest, we cannot rule out the possibility they are doing something right. They set out to replace closed sites like "Expert Sex Change" -- ok, sorry for the joke, expertsexchange -- and also reduce low quality noise. They succeeded and they are now the gold standard. So why hasn't anyone simply taken their data and forked it? A great example: softwareengineering.stackexchange -- formerly programmers.stackexchange -- has a troubled history. At times it has decided everything was off-topic there (I'm not joking, there were times where every question on the home page was closed as off-topic), and some long time "inclusionist" and well-intentioned contributors declared they would fork it, and their fork would include everything even tangentially related to programmers and people wouldn't be censored for asking questions about anything. Where are those forks now?
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    First mover advantage. It's like asking why no one has created another Reddit, or another HN. When the original exists, a derivative doesn't gain traction unless something goes seriously wrong. The sole time that Reddit was in danger was when their front page was blacked out over the moderator rebellion. Luckily for them, Voat's servers completely died under the load. Then Reddit came back online, and the rest was history. I would imagine your questions have straightforward answers along those lines. No one switches because inertia, not quality. In general, a new thing has to be fundamentally different in some way. It's rare that an internet product is out-competed by someone else doing literally the same thing. Even Reddit was fundamentally different from digg. They were both link aggregators, but that's about where the similarities stopped.
qu4ku 7y ago
Gwern's website starts to be next level.
severine 7y ago
Does anyone here remember Seth Finkelstein? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia I miss his writing! edit: His blog is still up: http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.html http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.htm... but unfortunately, no new entries since 2013 :(
andrewla 7y ago
As an inclusionist who has basically given up on editing wikipedia because of deletionist forces, I read this article and see nothing but points I agree with. What I would like to see, however, is a good defense of deletionism. I have a lot of trouble even understanding the point of view. If there's some higher-level motivation about storage costs or something, then I can buy it, but I don't think anyone is making that argument. Does it hurt wikipedia to have low-quality articles? I think only insofar as the articles are about subjects that are important, so the effect seems to be self-balancing. Can wikipedia be used by people to glorify themselves with personal wikipedia pages? Sure, but who cares -- unless someone does care in a particular instance (i.e. a person named Albert Einstein tries to take over the main article -- people will fight it because they want the article to point to the right person).
- astine 7y ago
  I think that the main argument that isn't simply a matter of storage costs (which probably does kick in at some point) is simply a matter of brand-management. If the average Wikipedia article is a discussion an incomplete and poorly sourced article about Pokemon then Wikipedia gets a reputation as poor source of information. It actually had the reputation pretty strongly early on, but it's reputation for reliabity has actually improved over the years. I suppose that there is also the inverse problem where poor articles can use Wikipedia's relatively good reputation to give visibility to some pseudoscience or conspiracy theory. If it's really obscure, the only people who will be writing articles about are will be proponents who will then link to the article from their closed Facebook groups. It won't necessarily be obvious to non-experts what's going on so deleting certain kinds of articles could be a protection against that as well. (I'm not any kind of Wikipedian btw; just speculating off of the top of my head.)
  - domador 7y ago
    If that's the case, I'd prefer a two-tiered Wikipedia over a deletionist Wikipedia. In such a Wikipedia, each page could be clearly-labeled as either an encyclopedia-quality entry or as a "wannabe" encyclopedia entry. (A better term would be needed for the lower tier.) Such labeling should be very noticeable and visible when you open an entry, at least for the lower-tier entries.
Permit 7y ago
As a purely end-user of Wikipedia I just want to chip in only to say that I have not seen any observable decline in Wikipedia over the last 15 years. I am generally very happy with the results I get when I use it. > The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors. I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his own page. Presumably, though, you agree there should be SOME criteria for what is notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article? For example, in order of increasing mundanity these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc. Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. We can argue about where to draw that line but I'm actually pretty happy with how Wikipedia has done it.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. That line is simply: > If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability This instantly weeds out a lot of obviously trivial topics. There's arguments about how exactly "significant coverage", "reliable sources" and "independent of the subject" should be defined, and refinements of this policy for specific subject areas, but that's the core of Wikipedia's notability policies. I've never heard any solid arguments for including a topic which doesn't meet this criterion.
- andrewla 7y ago
  > these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc. Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having them? If they confuse an issue, like if your cat shares a name with a more notable animal, then yours can just be renamed to "Fluffers (Permit's cat)". Who does it hurt to have that page on there, even in the reductio ad absurdum? Even, hypothetically, storage costs -- in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever, so we don't save anything. If we need to provide the capability to flag pages as "deletionists don't like this" and present a deletionist view of wikipedia to those who don't wish to be exposed to that content, then go for it. I don't mean to try to throw rhetorical exclamation points everywhere; I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl.
markwkw 7y ago
Is it easy to tell what technology gwern uses for his website? I'm not web-savvy, but it looks html looks like it's not generated, but hand crafted. Is is a static website?
- juped 7y ago
  You can find this information on the site
- astine 7y ago
  As Juped said, there is actually an in depth discussion of the tool used to generate the website on the about page: https://www.gwern.net/About#tools https://www.gwern.net/About#tools It looks like static generated website is about correct.
Animats 7y ago
Most of the important topics were covered years ago. Encyclopedias are not high-maintenance; the maintenance team for Britannica wasn't all that big. I used to edit Wikipedia quite a bit, but got into other things.
miblon 7y ago
I noticed the decline. About a year ago, during a hackathon, we tried to get an article online. It took us 3 deletes and retries. Then I reached out to a national official at Wikipedia and finally the article got accepted. That's not good...
- tptacek 7y ago
  What was the article? It'll have a history, and we can see for ourselves what happened with it.
netcan 7y ago
This sort of problem (or its opposite) is inevitable with our internet circa 2020. Maybe wikipedia is too narrow. Maybe it's too broad. These things don't have singular, indisputable answers... The problem is that we have an internet of bottlenecks. Wikipedia choices about what is encyclopedic or notable is the only definition of encyclopedic that matters. Youtube's interpretation of fair use, twitter's definition of offensive or facebook's definition of obscene... they're the working definitions. The internet needs to be less centralised... Even wikipedia.
domador 7y ago
If Wikipedia is to retain a deletionist editorial cultural, I'd at least like to be able to access the history for deleted entries and read old versions of such entries. As it stands, those entries seem to be permanently removed from public access (and maybe even on the back end.) I don't like that 1984-style versioning, which gives the message that certain entries never existed in the first place. (I'd understand a small exception for copyright infringing content--that such content should remain unavailable when deleted.)
Stierlitz 7y ago
“The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and .. what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors.” .. as well as self-serving corporate and political interests. As in they sit on an article 24/7 making sure nothing controversial get in. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Except for those that contradict the inner party. Go to the Talk Page and discuss it they say. Do that and your account gets disabled for violating some obscure WP rule.
notriddle 7y ago
> If you try to write niche articles on certain topics, people will tell you to save it for Wikia. I am not excited or interested in such a parochial project which excludes so many of my interests, which does not want me to go into great depth about even the interests it deems meritorious—and a great many other people are not excited either, especially as they begin to realize that even if you navigate the culture correctly and get your material into Wikipedia, there is far from any guarantee that your contributions will be respected, not deleted, and improved. I hate to be seen as supporting deletionism, because I've never contributed enough to WP to really have an opinion (I've mostly just expanded on existing articles and fixed obvious vandalism and typos), but I don't understand why this is a bad thing. I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good thing. The Iron Law of Oligarchy will weaken the website just like it's destroyed every other website, with no good reason to believe it'll be different this time. At least if Wikipedia is limited in scope, the damage it does will be limited too.
- vkou 7y ago
  > I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good thing. No, having all of this content under Wikipedia would be an amazing thing. For all its warts, Wikipedia (When it has the information you are looking for) is the gold standard in what the the web should be. It's amazing that it exists as a website, and compared to the mountains of crud that surrounds it, it has an amazing UX. The inclusionist argument is that the web would be better if more of its content was available under the same high standards that Wikipedia set. Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale.
  - notriddle 7y ago
    > Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale. The invasion of policy-driven jerks seems like a good counterargument; it's an anti-economy of scale, since smaller websites have less of the problem. edit: Arguing about scale also kind of ignores that there's a good space between the scope of the website being "everything" and having a website dedicated to the IDW "Sniffles the Mouse" comics. IMDB is well-respected, TVTropes has been successful with a very different culture from IMDB, the Arch Linux Wiki has a reputation for being useful even if you aren't technically using Arch, and, as we've already proven, Wikia has pretty much made a business out of this.
di4na 7y ago
I have to say this is spot on. The move of things like the Culture spacecraft names into wikia was a killing blow, particularly due to the use of ... dubious... cookies and tracking on wikia. And while i understand the feeling this does not belong in wikipedia, this was not wrong either or low quality and a good open door for new editors. I could keep going, i have a long list of lost good information from wikipedia over the years. This one is just the one that made me decide to stop using it.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors. This is a result of the state/traditional media asserting more control over internet propaganda. Year by year, what is acceptable on wikipedia, forums, social media, etc have narrowed. Followed by the strong arming of these tech companies into privileging authoritarian/authoritative sources. Look at what happened to youtube. There was a time when they had great recommendations and you could go into a "deep dive" of youtube for hours. Now, the recommendations has no depth and focused on "late night shows", establishment news and pre-screened content. Google search is no better. Reddit is just advertisement/pr ( celebrity X donated 5 masks to a hospital ) garbage and propaganda. It's pretty impressive how easily and quickly a handful of "bankrupt" news companies could control trillion dollar tech companies. What you could write, say, etc and what you could watch, hear, etc has been limited in just few years. And the trend doesn't seem to be stopping. Just 10 years ago, nobody could've predicted this could happen.

100 points by luu 7y ago

No comments yet? I guess others are still reading TFA... There are a number of issues that seem to be eternal. Even if there's an obvious right answer, I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these? I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale.

CarVac 7y ago
I would attribute it to an inadequate equilibrium, a local minimum that's simply too hard to escape at this point.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
As a former Wikipedian, what's there to say? The evidence is still there, and was there for years and years. Deletionism was, and remains, a wrong-headed attitude that does not understand what makes WP qualitatively different from standard encyclopedic offerings. There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and indeed that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary and Wikidata to their own TLDs. The main problem with WP is that it is far easier to be wrong than to be right, and the effort required to be right is linear in the number of words written. In short, the number of editors per page required for acceptable quality does not roll off with large numbers of pages, but stays relatively high, at around 1-2 editors/page. Worse, the number of moderators per editor does not roll off either. The number of bureaucrats required therefore keeps growing, logarithmically but steadily, and the demands on arbitration committees keep growing. The committees themselves have long ago failed basic principles of legal legibility, leading to sprawling bureaucracy. One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we store. Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we could use Wikidata to automatically generate articles. We already have factboxes which could be largely automatically populated, and many people only care about the factboxes. Prose would be limited to commentary and explication, but would not be the main bodies of articles. This is not just a pipe dream; LMFDB [0] exists and is worth examining as an example of how code and data can automatically generate the bulk of an encyclopedia. But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when Esperanza [1] was dissolved. We are now somewhere between Bureaucracy and The Aftermath. [0] https://www.lmfdb.org/ https://www.lmfdb.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza
- narag 7y ago
  Wow, the death of hope...
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we store. Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we could use Wikidata to automatically generate articles. This is in fact being proposed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_towards_a_multilingual_Wikipedia_and_a_new_Wikipedia_project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_tow... by a prominent Wikidatan. (Edit: follow up at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda .) However generating sensible articles would require expanding the current Wikidata model, and this is something that should happen gradually and be managed by the WD community itself, not at a separate project. The whole pretty-printing-in-natural-language part is the most speculative by far, and incubating it separately makes more sense. It's worth noting that Wikidata itself is not "deletionist" other than as implied by verifiability- and sourcing-requirements. Its model is far more general and far more "inclusionist" than even the most permissive visions for Wikipedia.
- duskwuff 7y ago
  > There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and indeed that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary and Wikidata to their own TLDs. This feels like a gross misreading of the facts. Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia because its work product is fundamentally different -- it's a dictionary, not an encylopedia. Wikipedia has a lot of articles about things that aren't words, and Wiktionary has a lot of pages for words that wouldn't make sense to write an encyclopedia article about. Wikidata, meanwhile, is only about raw data. Which is a part of an encyclopedia, but far from all of it. (How would you write an article about the history of Rome using only data?) > But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when Esperanza [1] was dissolved. This, too, is a gross misstatement of the facts. Esperanza was dissolved because it was becoming a cabal. It started as a social group, but rapidly grew into its own organization, with its own decision-making processes and elected officials separate from those of Wikipedia. There was widespread agreement, even from Esperanza's founder, that the organization was no longer fulfilling its purpose, and an effort to reform it before it was shut down. There's a decent summary at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2007-01-02/Experanza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
pdonis 7y ago
> I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale. I think the general unspeakable reason is pretty simple: once you give people power, some of them will misuse it. And since it takes more effort to correct a misuse of power than to commit the misuse in the first place, any institution that gives people power becomes more and more corrupt over time as misuses of power outweigh valid uses of power.
- ghaff 7y ago
  While I'm mostly in Camp Inclusion, I appreciate the issues that tend to come up as you loosen criteria for articles more and more--you probably inevitably get articles that are "notable" to a narrower and narrower set of people and a lot of verification depends on shakier and harder to access sources. That said, it's pretty clear that there are more than a few Wikipedia admins who seem to have embraced deletionism for topics that aren't near and dear to them personally and/or which poke at whatever their particular political hot buttons are.
- kragen 7y ago
  The nice thing about Wikis in general is that it's usually easier to correct a misuse of the power to edit a page than it is to commit the misuse in the first place. That's why Wikis work at all.
  - narag 7y ago
    That works for the power to edit, not for the power to delete. So it makes sense, yes.
- ooobit2 7y ago
  Not just some people, nearly all will abuse it. But we've seen this more-so in people who are less familiar with these institutions. Baltimore, MD, for example, has had now two black, female mayors convicted of corruption and removed from office. We've seen the current mayor of Chicago attempt authoritarianism to enforce the stay-at-home order. Michigan's mayor has reached far beyond CDC and NHS recommendations, and now faces possible corruption charges over abuse of power. Maine's governor is also in the spotlight for circumventing checks and balances by the legislature on the executive office. People love AOC, and I too believe she means well, but even she has warped into an anarcho-syndicalist, going so far as to make absurd statements that "incremental change isn't working", when everyone knows governance is a complex, incremental series of processes, necessary to maintain a free republic and limit opportunities for tyranny. Omar has had a sexual affair with a senior member of her staff. Tlaib has been censured for collaborating with anti-semitic organizations on official business. Biden, himself, has now managed over a year of avoiding investigations into how his son secured a chair on a Ukrainian energy board and was on that board during negotiations between the Obama-Biden administration and Ukraine related to that company's finances. It's cute that people like John Oliver continue to say that the rise of fascism isn't obvious, that it happens slow, subtle. But abuses of power and position are everywhere right now, especially among anti-Trump activists in the media and Congress. You might agree that Trump is a racist, but taking that very position is complicit with the anarcho-syndicalism among a growing number of leftist politicians now. Keep an air of skepticism about you for your own safety. Just because 75% of us think a hate speech law is a reasonable circumvention of free speech guarantees doesn't mean we aren't also enabling scope creep. As we've seen thus far, "slippery slope" is a fallacy in everything but governance.
som33 7y ago
> I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these? Because human beings don't see reality accurately, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

dang 7y ago

A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255 Thread from 2014 - interesting top comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791 (Reposts are ok after about a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) I've made the year in the title a gwernian range.

eitland 7y ago

Same goes for stackoverflow. Since the stackoverflow database is freely available I cannot see a single good reason why they haven't been outcompeted years ago.

the_af 7y ago
So I have my own beefs with stackoverflow and the stackexchange network at large, but... ...at some point you have to ask yourself, why haven't they been outcompeted? For every post complaining about stackoverflow moderation or policies, there are probably thousands of people using it every day to do their jobs, and it hasn't been outcompeted! So if we're honest, we cannot rule out the possibility they are doing something right. They set out to replace closed sites like "Expert Sex Change" -- ok, sorry for the joke, expertsexchange -- and also reduce low quality noise. They succeeded and they are now the gold standard. So why hasn't anyone simply taken their data and forked it? A great example: softwareengineering.stackexchange -- formerly programmers.stackexchange -- has a troubled history. At times it has decided everything was off-topic there (I'm not joking, there were times where every question on the home page was closed as off-topic), and some long time "inclusionist" and well-intentioned contributors declared they would fork it, and their fork would include everything even tangentially related to programmers and people wouldn't be censored for asking questions about anything. Where are those forks now?
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  First mover advantage. It's like asking why no one has created another Reddit, or another HN. When the original exists, a derivative doesn't gain traction unless something goes seriously wrong. The sole time that Reddit was in danger was when their front page was blacked out over the moderator rebellion. Luckily for them, Voat's servers completely died under the load. Then Reddit came back online, and the rest was history. I would imagine your questions have straightforward answers along those lines. No one switches because inertia, not quality. In general, a new thing has to be fundamentally different in some way. It's rare that an internet product is out-competed by someone else doing literally the same thing. Even Reddit was fundamentally different from digg. They were both link aggregators, but that's about where the similarities stopped.

qu4ku 7y ago

Gwern's website starts to be next level.

severine 7y ago

Does anyone here remember Seth Finkelstein? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia I miss his writing! edit: His blog is still up: http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.html http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.htm... but unfortunately, no new entries since 2013 :(

andrewla 7y ago

As an inclusionist who has basically given up on editing wikipedia because of deletionist forces, I read this article and see nothing but points I agree with. What I would like to see, however, is a good defense of deletionism. I have a lot of trouble even understanding the point of view. If there's some higher-level motivation about storage costs or something, then I can buy it, but I don't think anyone is making that argument. Does it hurt wikipedia to have low-quality articles? I think only insofar as the articles are about subjects that are important, so the effect seems to be self-balancing. Can wikipedia be used by people to glorify themselves with personal wikipedia pages? Sure, but who cares -- unless someone does care in a particular instance (i.e. a person named Albert Einstein tries to take over the main article -- people will fight it because they want the article to point to the right person).

astine 7y ago
I think that the main argument that isn't simply a matter of storage costs (which probably does kick in at some point) is simply a matter of brand-management. If the average Wikipedia article is a discussion an incomplete and poorly sourced article about Pokemon then Wikipedia gets a reputation as poor source of information. It actually had the reputation pretty strongly early on, but it's reputation for reliabity has actually improved over the years. I suppose that there is also the inverse problem where poor articles can use Wikipedia's relatively good reputation to give visibility to some pseudoscience or conspiracy theory. If it's really obscure, the only people who will be writing articles about are will be proponents who will then link to the article from their closed Facebook groups. It won't necessarily be obvious to non-experts what's going on so deleting certain kinds of articles could be a protection against that as well. (I'm not any kind of Wikipedian btw; just speculating off of the top of my head.)
- domador 7y ago
  If that's the case, I'd prefer a two-tiered Wikipedia over a deletionist Wikipedia. In such a Wikipedia, each page could be clearly-labeled as either an encyclopedia-quality entry or as a "wannabe" encyclopedia entry. (A better term would be needed for the lower tier.) Such labeling should be very noticeable and visible when you open an entry, at least for the lower-tier entries.

Permit 7y ago

As a purely end-user of Wikipedia I just want to chip in only to say that I have not seen any observable decline in Wikipedia over the last 15 years. I am generally very happy with the results I get when I use it. > The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors. I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his own page. Presumably, though, you agree there should be SOME criteria for what is notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article? For example, in order of increasing mundanity these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc. Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. We can argue about where to draw that line but I'm actually pretty happy with how Wikipedia has done it.

duskwuff 7y ago
> Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. That line is simply: > If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability This instantly weeds out a lot of obviously trivial topics. There's arguments about how exactly "significant coverage", "reliable sources" and "independent of the subject" should be defined, and refinements of this policy for specific subject areas, but that's the core of Wikipedia's notability policies. I've never heard any solid arguments for including a topic which doesn't meet this criterion.
andrewla 7y ago
> these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc. Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having them? If they confuse an issue, like if your cat shares a name with a more notable animal, then yours can just be renamed to "Fluffers (Permit's cat)". Who does it hurt to have that page on there, even in the reductio ad absurdum? Even, hypothetically, storage costs -- in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever, so we don't save anything. If we need to provide the capability to flag pages as "deletionists don't like this" and present a deletionist view of wikipedia to those who don't wish to be exposed to that content, then go for it. I don't mean to try to throw rhetorical exclamation points everywhere; I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl.

markwkw 7y ago

Is it easy to tell what technology gwern uses for his website? I'm not web-savvy, but it looks html looks like it's not generated, but hand crafted. Is is a static website?

juped 7y ago
You can find this information on the site
astine 7y ago
As Juped said, there is actually an in depth discussion of the tool used to generate the website on the about page: https://www.gwern.net/About#tools https://www.gwern.net/About#tools It looks like static generated website is about correct.

Animats 7y ago

Most of the important topics were covered years ago. Encyclopedias are not high-maintenance; the maintenance team for Britannica wasn't all that big. I used to edit Wikipedia quite a bit, but got into other things.

miblon 7y ago

I noticed the decline. About a year ago, during a hackathon, we tried to get an article online. It took us 3 deletes and retries. Then I reached out to a national official at Wikipedia and finally the article got accepted. That's not good...

tptacek 7y ago
What was the article? It'll have a history, and we can see for ourselves what happened with it.

netcan 7y ago

This sort of problem (or its opposite) is inevitable with our internet circa 2020. Maybe wikipedia is too narrow. Maybe it's too broad. These things don't have singular, indisputable answers... The problem is that we have an internet of bottlenecks. Wikipedia choices about what is encyclopedic or notable is the only definition of encyclopedic that matters. Youtube's interpretation of fair use, twitter's definition of offensive or facebook's definition of obscene... they're the working definitions. The internet needs to be less centralised... Even wikipedia.

domador 7y ago

If Wikipedia is to retain a deletionist editorial cultural, I'd at least like to be able to access the history for deleted entries and read old versions of such entries. As it stands, those entries seem to be permanently removed from public access (and maybe even on the back end.) I don't like that 1984-style versioning, which gives the message that certain entries never existed in the first place. (I'd understand a small exception for copyright infringing content--that such content should remain unavailable when deleted.)

Stierlitz 7y ago

“The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and .. what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors.” .. as well as self-serving corporate and political interests. As in they sit on an article 24/7 making sure nothing controversial get in. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Except for those that contradict the inner party. Go to the Talk Page and discuss it they say. Do that and your account gets disabled for violating some obscure WP rule.

notriddle 7y ago

> If you try to write niche articles on certain topics, people will tell you to save it for Wikia. I am not excited or interested in such a parochial project which excludes so many of my interests, which does not want me to go into great depth about even the interests it deems meritorious—and a great many other people are not excited either, especially as they begin to realize that even if you navigate the culture correctly and get your material into Wikipedia, there is far from any guarantee that your contributions will be respected, not deleted, and improved. I hate to be seen as supporting deletionism, because I've never contributed enough to WP to really have an opinion (I've mostly just expanded on existing articles and fixed obvious vandalism and typos), but I don't understand why this is a bad thing. I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good thing. The Iron Law of Oligarchy will weaken the website just like it's destroyed every other website, with no good reason to believe it'll be different this time. At least if Wikipedia is limited in scope, the damage it does will be limited too.

vkou 7y ago
> I don't like that they're being driven to an ad-supported website, but the simple act of not having Wikipedia eat all of the web seems like a good thing. No, having all of this content under Wikipedia would be an amazing thing. For all its warts, Wikipedia (When it has the information you are looking for) is the gold standard in what the the web should be. It's amazing that it exists as a website, and compared to the mountains of crud that surrounds it, it has an amazing UX. The inclusionist argument is that the web would be better if more of its content was available under the same high standards that Wikipedia set. Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale.
- notriddle 7y ago
  > Competitors can't deliver that same standard because of economies of scale. The invasion of policy-driven jerks seems like a good counterargument; it's an anti-economy of scale, since smaller websites have less of the problem. edit: Arguing about scale also kind of ignores that there's a good space between the scope of the website being "everything" and having a website dedicated to the IDW "Sniffles the Mouse" comics. IMDB is well-respected, TVTropes has been successful with a very different culture from IMDB, the Arch Linux Wiki has a reputation for being useful even if you aren't technically using Arch, and, as we've already proven, Wikia has pretty much made a business out of this.

di4na 7y ago

I have to say this is spot on. The move of things like the Culture spacecraft names into wikia was a killing blow, particularly due to the use of ... dubious... cookies and tracking on wikia. And while i understand the feeling this does not belong in wikipedia, this was not wrong either or low quality and a good open door for new editors. I could keep going, i have a long list of lost good information from wikipedia over the years. This one is just the one that made me decide to stop using it.

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors. This is a result of the state/traditional media asserting more control over internet propaganda. Year by year, what is acceptable on wikipedia, forums, social media, etc have narrowed. Followed by the strong arming of these tech companies into privileging authoritarian/authoritative sources. Look at what happened to youtube. There was a time when they had great recommendations and you could go into a "deep dive" of youtube for hours. Now, the recommendations has no depth and focused on "late night shows", establishment news and pre-screened content. Google search is no better. Reddit is just advertisement/pr ( celebrity X donated 5 masks to a hospital ) garbage and propaganda. It's pretty impressive how easily and quickly a handful of "bankrupt" news companies could control trillion dollar tech companies. What you could write, say, etc and what you could watch, hear, etc has been limited in just few years. And the trend doesn't seem to be stopping. Just 10 years ago, nobody could've predicted this could happen.