5 ms·

> 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.

> 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Another possibility is to have it in the positive: have a notability flag.
- jakub_g 7y 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 7y 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.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  These are arguments for a verifiability guideline, not a notability guideline.
- EamonnMR 6y ago
  When you hit random page, most of the time you get one of the following: Uninformative article about a locality Uninformative article about the football team of the above.
scott_s 7y ago
> But what is the cost of having them? The time and effort of the Wikipedia editors; the reputation of Wikipedia in general.
Barrin92 7y ago
> I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl. The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd be borderline impossible to find general information that is relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't go to the public library and put random writings of me on a shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be noise. The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump. Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can independently verify personal content or topics so niche that only one person knows what's going on. I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal content. That stuff is more suited for a self-hosted wiki.
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  > The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd be borderline impossible to find general information that is relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't go to the public library and put random writings of me on a shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be noise. If this were true, there would be the same problem with the internet, since we don't have notability limitations for who can build a webpage. But the fact is, search is a pretty well-developed field. A very simple metric is simply: how many places is this linked from. These can come up higher in search results, be prioritized higher in disambiguation pages, etc. Start with that, and refine from there. Notability is a sorting problem, not a filtering problem. > The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump. You're wrong in your own examples. Sorry buddy, but if someone searches for "Bulbasaur", is there some more notable thing you think they are looking for besides the Pokemon? > Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can independently verify personal content or topics so niche that only one person knows what's going on. Which is a great case for a verifiability guideline, not a notability guideline. > I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal content. "Must be nonfiction", "must be verifiable", etc. are all different requirements from "must be notable".
yorwba 7y ago
> 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. That flag exists. It's set by deleting the article. As you note: > in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever So if someone wanted to present an inclusionist view of Wikipedia to those who find that content valuable, they could do so.
- dooglius 7y ago
  No, you can't edit pages that have been deleted, so that's more than a flag.
fnl 7y ago
Isn't what you are describing exactly the Internet plus a search engine you trust will pick up the article type you are interested in? In fact, you'd still need to trust that open WPv2 thing just like that search engine.
ardy42 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. > But what is the cost of having them? 0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite. Without standards, the volume of articles could become so large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit them all. 1. Malicious, unscrupulous, or misguided actors co-opting Wikipedia's reputation for their own purposes (e.g. Jack's snake oil has been scientifically proven to cure all disease by all these articles in fake medical journals). 2. Useless garbage in search results that you'd have to wade through. Literally thousands of high school students every year would put up pages about their bands, cartoons, and art which are of no value to anyone but themselves. Why host all that if you're just going to have to build your search to exclude it?
- andrewla 6y ago
  (Late reply, so you'll probably never see this, but oh well) > 0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite. Without standards, the volume of articles could become so large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit them all. The importance of fact-checking and verification are in my opinion proportional to notability, and editors will naturally flock to verify articles that they have an interest in or are generally notable. So what if the Bulbasaur article has some inaccuracies? And frankly, the problem is unsolved -- read the wikipedia article on "hypnosis" and cringe at what appears to be the script for a poorly made thriller. At least we could splinter that article into multiple articles talking about the treatment in fiction, which has notability in itself compared to the semi-mystical ravings on the main page. The other complaints are related to notability as well. I'm not saying that we should treat all articles as definitive -- we don't even do that now. The correctness of the article is a function of the dedication of contributors which is a function of the notability of the subject; this reinforcement happens organically. Frankly, I'd welcome more skepticism approaching wikipedia content because that skepticism forms the basis for people becoming editors rather than seeing editing being something reserved for an elite class of self-diagnosed "experts".
_jal 7y ago
> I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl. Several billion cat-water bowl pages are probably just an annoyance for someone. But what would you think of a page explaining, say, all the healthy virtues of drinking diluted bleach for fighting C19 being hosted on wikipedia.org? How do you think that's going to work out, in the first instance, when panicking people read it, and in the second, when people start treating wikipedia.org as trustworthy as their spam folder?
- CDSlice 7y ago
  Wouldn’t that be blocked by Wikipedia’s source requirements? Presumably no trustworthy source will say that drinking diluted bleach is good for you so there won’t be any sources to make a Wikipedia article out of.
  - mauvehaus 7y ago
    I realize that you and the parent are referring to recent news, but bleach can be used to disinfect water for drinking in an emergency[0]. I'm not going to argue with anybody who feels like this is pedantry (yes, technically the resulting water is highly diluted bleach, but that's not the point), but it is worth filing away for the future. You know, the one where we can buy bleach again. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergency-disinfection-drinking-water https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergenc...

a1369209993 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Another possibility is to have it in the positive: have a notability flag.
jakub_g 7y 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 7y 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.

kerkeslager 7y ago
These are arguments for a verifiability guideline, not a notability guideline.
EamonnMR 6y ago
When you hit random page, most of the time you get one of the following: Uninformative article about a locality Uninformative article about the football team of the above.

scott_s 7y ago

> But what is the cost of having them? The time and effort of the Wikipedia editors; the reputation of Wikipedia in general.

Barrin92 7y ago

> I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl. The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd be borderline impossible to find general information that is relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't go to the public library and put random writings of me on a shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be noise. The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump. Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can independently verify personal content or topics so niche that only one person knows what's going on. I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal content. That stuff is more suited for a self-hosted wiki.

kerkeslager 7y ago
> The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd be borderline impossible to find general information that is relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't go to the public library and put random writings of me on a shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be noise. If this were true, there would be the same problem with the internet, since we don't have notability limitations for who can build a webpage. But the fact is, search is a pretty well-developed field. A very simple metric is simply: how many places is this linked from. These can come up higher in search results, be prioritized higher in disambiguation pages, etc. Start with that, and refine from there. Notability is a sorting problem, not a filtering problem. > The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump. You're wrong in your own examples. Sorry buddy, but if someone searches for "Bulbasaur", is there some more notable thing you think they are looking for besides the Pokemon? > Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can independently verify personal content or topics so niche that only one person knows what's going on. Which is a great case for a verifiability guideline, not a notability guideline. > I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal content. "Must be nonfiction", "must be verifiable", etc. are all different requirements from "must be notable".

yorwba 7y ago

> 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. That flag exists. It's set by deleting the article. As you note: > in the current deletionist world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved in history forever So if someone wanted to present an inclusionist view of Wikipedia to those who find that content valuable, they could do so.

dooglius 7y ago
No, you can't edit pages that have been deleted, so that's more than a flag.

fnl 7y ago

Isn't what you are describing exactly the Internet plus a search engine you trust will pick up the article type you are interested in? In fact, you'd still need to trust that open WPv2 thing just like that search engine.

ardy42 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. > But what is the cost of having them? 0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite. Without standards, the volume of articles could become so large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit them all. 1. Malicious, unscrupulous, or misguided actors co-opting Wikipedia's reputation for their own purposes (e.g. Jack's snake oil has been scientifically proven to cure all disease by all these articles in fake medical journals). 2. Useless garbage in search results that you'd have to wade through. Literally thousands of high school students every year would put up pages about their bands, cartoons, and art which are of no value to anyone but themselves. Why host all that if you're just going to have to build your search to exclude it?

andrewla 6y ago
(Late reply, so you'll probably never see this, but oh well) > 0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite. Without standards, the volume of articles could become so large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit them all. The importance of fact-checking and verification are in my opinion proportional to notability, and editors will naturally flock to verify articles that they have an interest in or are generally notable. So what if the Bulbasaur article has some inaccuracies? And frankly, the problem is unsolved -- read the wikipedia article on "hypnosis" and cringe at what appears to be the script for a poorly made thriller. At least we could splinter that article into multiple articles talking about the treatment in fiction, which has notability in itself compared to the semi-mystical ravings on the main page. The other complaints are related to notability as well. I'm not saying that we should treat all articles as definitive -- we don't even do that now. The correctness of the article is a function of the dedication of contributors which is a function of the notability of the subject; this reinforcement happens organically. Frankly, I'd welcome more skepticism approaching wikipedia content because that skepticism forms the basis for people becoming editors rather than seeing editing being something reserved for an elite class of self-diagnosed "experts".

_jal 7y ago

> I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about your cat's water bowl. Several billion cat-water bowl pages are probably just an annoyance for someone. But what would you think of a page explaining, say, all the healthy virtues of drinking diluted bleach for fighting C19 being hosted on wikipedia.org? How do you think that's going to work out, in the first instance, when panicking people read it, and in the second, when people start treating wikipedia.org as trustworthy as their spam folder?

CDSlice 7y ago
Wouldn’t that be blocked by Wikipedia’s source requirements? Presumably no trustworthy source will say that drinking diluted bleach is good for you so there won’t be any sources to make a Wikipedia article out of.
- mauvehaus 7y ago
  I realize that you and the parent are referring to recent news, but bleach can be used to disinfect water for drinking in an emergency[0]. I'm not going to argue with anybody who feels like this is pedantry (yes, technically the resulting water is highly diluted bleach, but that's not the point), but it is worth filing away for the future. You know, the one where we can buy bleach again. [0] https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergency-disinfection-drinking-water https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergenc...