5 ms·

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 gener

• duskwuff 6y 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 6y 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.
  • a1369209993 6y ago
    In the reductio ad absurdum, storage costs do become a problem, and deletionism discourages many useless pages from being created in the first place. OTOH, deletionism discourages many useful pages from being created in the first place, which is a much more serious problem.
  • Permit 6y ago
    > Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having them? I like the idea that the articles on Wikipedia are generally on "notable" topics or people. When I am reading an article I know that it has probably been eyed up and down by deletionists, hunting for any excuse to delete it, but they walked away unable to do so. That's a very useful signal to me! For example, right now I can look someone up and use "has a Wikipedia page" as a rough proxy for "is well known". If everyone had Wikipedia pages, I could no longer do this.
    • TigeriusKirk 6y ago
      As gp says, though, a deletionist flag and deletionist viewport would accomplish that just as well, while preserving more obscure and niche topics.
      • kerkeslager 6y ago
        Another possibility is to have it in the positive: have a notability flag.
    • jakub_g 6y ago
      In general I agree with you on "has wikipedia article ~= notable". However it's well known that WP editors are biased and for example, articles about women get deleted where a similar article about a man wouldn't be.
  • teraflop 6y ago
    Wikipedians have been arguing over these positions for many years, so if you want to see the arguments in favor of deletionism, there are plenty of places to look. For example, here are IMO the most salient points from https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism: > Some believe that the presence of uninformative articles damage the project's usefulness and credibility, particularly when casual visitors encounter them through Internet search engines or Wikipedia's "random page" or "recent changes." > Articles on obscure topics, even if they are in principle verifiable, tend to be very difficult to verify. Usually, the more obscure, the harder to verify. Actually verifying such articles, or sorting out verifiable facts from exaggeration and fiction, takes a great deal of time. Not verifying them opens the door to fiction and advertising. This also leads to a de facto collapse of the "no original research policy", which is one of the fundamental Wikipedia policies. Empirically, there have been a number of hoax articles which were difficult to prove to be hoaxes but which could have easily been deleted by a sufficiently strict notability policy. > Poorly-sourced articles can result in Citogenesis, as incorrect or unsourced information on Wiki (e.g., information that is the product of original research) is then repeated outside Wiki and eventually works its way into a publication that is normally regarded as a reliable source.
• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It's worth noting that the Bulbasaur fans won and he does have his own page.
  • Permit 6y ago
    That's great! And I think it shows that no matter where you draw the line you're going to end up with compelling topics on either side of it. I see it as a strength of Wikipedia that these things are fluid and there is an ongoing tension between inclusionists and deletionists. I'm very happy where they've ended up at the moment.
• musicale 6y ago
  > I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his own page Bulbasaur is a pop culture icon; he may very well be the second most recognizable Pokémon after Pikachu (though as noted Charmander and Squirtle are up there too.) In any case, he definitely earned his own page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur
• nitwit005 6y ago
  I'm in essentially the same camp. When I've tried to look things up, it's always already been there. I've made edits to wikipedia, but it's always been undoing vandalism.
• gwern 6y 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. What you are missing is the 'seen and the unseen'. Wikipedia has stagnated badly, and it captures an ever more vanishingly small slice of the world. The world keeps getting bigger, things keep happening, and even the core topics were never actually covered in the detail they could and should be covered. You simply cannot keep up with everything with a core of, what is it now, less than 30k regular editors? That's basically enough to fight off vandals, do basic maintenance, and cover the occasional hot topic like coronavirus or Donald Trump to a reasonably adequate degree. It's not enough to cover even the Anglosphere, much less seriously improve the back catalogue, or realize a fraction of WP's original aims. Whenever I look at WP articles on any topic I know, like deep learning/deep reinforcement learning/behavioral genetics/decision theory/darknet markets etc, I find that they tend to be hilariously out of date, short, incomplete, or not covered at all. They're usually not outright wrong, but what is not there is much more important than what is usually there. (Let's take a moment to consider how WP's AlphaGo article, which is one of its best articles on DL/DRL because AG is globally famous, does not even mention MuZero or the term 'expert iteration'...) Typically, most of that would be 'notable', assuming an editor tenacious enough to fight for it - but such editors are precisely what have been lost. And yet, WP is more important than ever! Isn't it ironic that when WP was at its healthiest, when it was most keeping up with Notable topics, it was hardly used, and now that it's been severely ailing for a decade, search engines and social media networks depend abjectly on it for their knowledge graphs and factcheckers and disinformation fighting efforts? (Well, not ironic. Just bad. For everyone.)
  • bscphil 6y ago
    > Whenever I look at WP articles on any topic I know, like deep learning/deep reinforcement learning/behavioral genetics/decision theory/darknet markets etc, I find that they tend to be hilariously out of date, short, incomplete, or not covered at all. The same is true for the stuff I know anything about, too. But I wonder if there's an alternative interpretation of this. The article argues: > And it’s casual users who matter. We lost the credentialed experts years ago, if we ever had them. I can see the truth in this. But at the same time, couldn't you say that to the same extent, the more "casuals" you have editing, the worse the articles that really need an expert's oversight (like machine learning articles) are going to be? I recently made some huge improvements to an article that was basically unreadable. Then I started looking through the history, and found that the article had been basically okay (though not great) about 8 months prior. Tracing the edits, I found that a professor at a community college had made it a semester long assignment for each student to pick a Wikipedia article to work on, in order to learn ... something. In any case, the student assigned to work on the article in question couldn't even write coherent English, let alone make high quality edits to this article. They had systematically ruined the article with a new account over about 4-5 months, with no oversight, and none of their commits were reverted by any editor. So I find it rather hard to say for certain that what we need are "more" editors, if those editors are largely going to be casual editors. As an expert (in a small number of fields), I don't (usually) edit Wikipedia for two reasons: 1. The starting quality of most of the articles I would work is so abysmally bad that I'd honestly rather tell the students I work with to just totally ignore Wikipedia as a way of learning about stuff in my field. Making two or three articles passable would not resolve that fundamental problem. (The problem is that the quality of an article not overseen by a very good editor is at best going to approach an average quality essay by a college student - in other words, about a 2 out of 5.) 2. I don't mind strict editing rules (see above), in fact I think they may often be necessary. What I've encountered when trying to edit Wikipedia, however, is that long-time editors know how to use and distort the rules to their own advantage. This doesn't mean the rules are misguided, necessarily, it just means that Wikipedia's culture is too insular and the top editors tend to have their own way with things.
• kerkeslager 6y ago
  > 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. Well, there are a few criteria that are inherent: 1. Something is at least a little notable if someone is willing to write about it. In a literal sense, it's notable because someone noted it. 2. There's also the citation factor: even if someone cites their own work, they've at least gone to the effort to note it twice. > Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an article and what is does not. Citation needed. Why must there be such a line?