6 ms·

I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Most of the time it's not a problem, since not finding the article there

I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Most of the time it's not a problem, since not finding the article there trains you to go to the English version first, but if you look up specific German topics that never had an article on the English Wikipedia in the first place, finding the German article deleted is infuriating.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
What is the reason they are deleted? Because controversial? Or something else?
- RedNifre 5y ago
  The ones I would like to read are usually deleted because they are "not relevant".
hh3k0 5y ago
Yeah, I've been preferring the English Wikipedia for years. I usually check en.wikipedia.org first unless it's about something German or something particularly relevant for Germans and Germany. I don't have numbers at hand but it all too often feels as if the German article is just a few months outdated translation of its English equivalent. But perhaps the situation has already changed?
bombcar 5y ago
In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Especially when you find that the English one is about ten lines and the foreign language one was hundreds - but now gone. Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
  - bell-cot 5y ago
    That concept (knowledge debt) makes far more sense for code which is actually run (or could be run) than for a Wikipedia page. Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. Disk space is cheap, and the "backwater" page's information might become more important with time. (If only as a snippet of "what did people back then think about..." data.)
    - The_Colonel 5y ago
      Can people stop with this "disk space is cheap" strawman? This discussion was never about disk space. Having unmaintained articles means a huge amount of content not checked by anybody ever so what you get is a mix of self-promo, jokes, intentionally misleading articles, "1054654789764 is a number" articles, political agenda etc.
      - bell-cot 5y ago
        Rightly or wrongly, quite a few people seem to have gotten a bad "Wikipedia is zealous about deleting stuff to [vague emotional speculation] save disk space" vibe. Putting a more-accurate label on the situation would not help their displeasure. Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between: - "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc." and - "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current". I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
        The_Colonel 5y ago
        It's easy enough to detect blatant vandalism (even then some are not caught). But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light. Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article. Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do? > but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all. Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.
- asveikau 5y ago
  I would say that the notability or non-notability of a subject is independent of storage costs. Not every topic deserves an article. People can disagree about what needs an article.
mschuster91 5y ago
> I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Back when I was an active German Wikipedia editor, decisions were done by community vote. Personally, I agree with you that the German inclusion policies are way too strict and there have been scandals about it (e.g. about an anti-feminine bias), but the Foundation "overruling" a community vote? That's a line that should not be crossed, for good reasons.
Villodre 5y ago
The Spanish Wikipedia is a dumpster fire. Mad respect for those who stick editing it, but it's been years since I decided to stop my modest contributions and run away from all the toxicity there.
Bud 5y ago
What sort of topics? Are we talking about the old tired debate over rightful moderation and editing of offensively-fawning articles about Nazis? Which articles have been deleted? Any examples?
Yizahi 5y ago
Regional Wikis are sometimes so bad that it is better to avoid them altogether if possible. For example Russian Wiki is completely under Kremlin control and every historical or political page is written to reflect alternative reality they are living in.
WikiTossaway 5y ago
Normal deletionists strip Wikipedia of joy. Malicious deletionists are a whole different world. I propose the following example of the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/La_Voce_di_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Free Flights to Italy was a minor political party in the 2018 Italian elections. The party was created by Giuseppe Macario. Rolling Stone Italy published an article on Macario showing that many of his claims about himself were actually fabricated. This was picked up by other media outlets. La Voce di New York published several not-so-positive articles on the guy at the time. The Points Guy published an article as well. The account (Modulato) which proposed the deletion is Giuseppe Macario himself. He did the same thing on Italian Wikipedia. It is a strategic attempt to suppress negative stories about his past. You can see this behavior repeated in the history of rogeting article on English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=h... Several years ago, Macario ran an academic cheating service called CheatTurnitin. One of the techniques used to circumvent anti-plagiarism services, like Turnitin, is rogeting. Macario published an article on LinkedIn. He integrated the article as a source for the rogeting article (IP 5.170.* edits). A short while later, he added his service's website to the article as well. This service attracted a lot of negative reviews on sites like Ripoff Reports. Toward the end of 2017, he attempted to clean up his additions (Adrin10) to the rogeting article. These were reverted by other editors. Last year, he tried to propose the rogeting article for quick deletion. This was reverted by another editor. And that's when the Modulato account came in and removed the material without being contested. While this content shouldn't have been there to start with, it just shows an example of not all deletionists being equal. Some are far worse than others.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

What is the reason they are deleted? Because controversial? Or something else?

RedNifre 5y ago
The ones I would like to read are usually deleted because they are "not relevant".

hh3k0 5y ago

Yeah, I've been preferring the English Wikipedia for years. I usually check en.wikipedia.org first unless it's about something German or something particularly relevant for Germans and Germany. I don't have numbers at hand but it all too often feels as if the German article is just a few months outdated translation of its English equivalent. But perhaps the situation has already changed?

bombcar 5y ago

In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Especially when you find that the English one is about ten lines and the foreign language one was hundreds - but now gone. Mark it “bleh” or something, but don’t delete. Nobody prints out Wikipedia anyway.

mschuster91 5y ago
> In an era of infinitely cheap storage it’s even more infuriating. Call it "knowledge debt", similar to the concept of "code debt". Every piece of knowledge also has to be maintained (e.g. in the case of a natural person, if they are still alive), and that maintenance costs effort.
- bell-cot 5y ago
  That concept (knowledge debt) makes far more sense for code which is actually run (or could be run) than for a Wikipedia page. Vs. just labeling the page as old, low-traffic, and little-maintained. Disk space is cheap, and the "backwater" page's information might become more important with time. (If only as a snippet of "what did people back then think about..." data.)
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    Can people stop with this "disk space is cheap" strawman? This discussion was never about disk space. Having unmaintained articles means a huge amount of content not checked by anybody ever so what you get is a mix of self-promo, jokes, intentionally misleading articles, "1054654789764 is a number" articles, political agenda etc.
    - bell-cot 5y ago
      Rightly or wrongly, quite a few people seem to have gotten a bad "Wikipedia is zealous about deleting stuff to [vague emotional speculation] save disk space" vibe. Putting a more-accurate label on the situation would not help their displeasure. Editorial-resource-wise, there is a huge difference between: - "a decent general editor can glance over this article long enough to label it as [1] plausibly legit, [2] obvious drunken rambling, [3] some kid's knock-knock joke collection, [4] ax-grinding extremism, [5] etc." and - "a subject-matter-expert editor can determine whether this Korean-language article about Roman legal practices in (the Roman province of) Hispania Baetica under Emperor Caracalla (198-217) is passably correct and current". I am not a studious follower of things Wiki, but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all.
      - The_Colonel 5y ago
        It's easy enough to detect blatant vandalism (even then some are not caught). But it's very easy to write an article which superficially looks great - nice structure, polished language, links to other wikipedia articles etc, but at the same time can be completely false and talking about something which doesn't actually exist, or does exist and paints it in a completely incorrect light. Again, not all such articles get caught today, but in general it's a manageable problem with the "Notability" and "Reliable sources" tools. Either there are supporting sources and you can easily verify the information, or there aren't, and you delete the article. Now imagine that you relax these requirements and somebody writes that beautiful article full of details but with no supporting sources. It can be completely false, an elaborate hoax, self promo or part of a smear campaign. What do you do? > but quite a few people seem to feel that Wikipedia is really not handling the situation well at all. Yeah, they mostly have only very cursory information about what are wikipedia's goals and how it works internally.
asveikau 5y ago
I would say that the notability or non-notability of a subject is independent of storage costs. Not every topic deserves an article. People can disagree about what needs an article.

mschuster91 5y ago

> I won't donate until the deletionists get kicked out of the German language Wikipedia. Back when I was an active German Wikipedia editor, decisions were done by community vote. Personally, I agree with you that the German inclusion policies are way too strict and there have been scandals about it (e.g. about an anti-feminine bias), but the Foundation "overruling" a community vote? That's a line that should not be crossed, for good reasons.

Villodre 5y ago

The Spanish Wikipedia is a dumpster fire. Mad respect for those who stick editing it, but it's been years since I decided to stop my modest contributions and run away from all the toxicity there.

Bud 5y ago

What sort of topics? Are we talking about the old tired debate over rightful moderation and editing of offensively-fawning articles about Nazis? Which articles have been deleted? Any examples?

Yizahi 5y ago

Regional Wikis are sometimes so bad that it is better to avoid them altogether if possible. For example Russian Wiki is completely under Kremlin control and every historical or political page is written to reflect alternative reality they are living in.

WikiTossaway 5y ago

Normal deletionists strip Wikipedia of joy. Malicious deletionists are a whole different world. I propose the following example of the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/La_Voce_di_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... Free Flights to Italy was a minor political party in the 2018 Italian elections. The party was created by Giuseppe Macario. Rolling Stone Italy published an article on Macario showing that many of his claims about himself were actually fabricated. This was picked up by other media outlets. La Voce di New York published several not-so-positive articles on the guy at the time. The Points Guy published an article as well. The account (Modulato) which proposed the deletion is Giuseppe Macario himself. He did the same thing on Italian Wikipedia. It is a strategic attempt to suppress negative stories about his past. You can see this behavior repeated in the history of rogeting article on English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rogeting&action=h... Several years ago, Macario ran an academic cheating service called CheatTurnitin. One of the techniques used to circumvent anti-plagiarism services, like Turnitin, is rogeting. Macario published an article on LinkedIn. He integrated the article as a source for the rogeting article (IP 5.170.* edits). A short while later, he added his service's website to the article as well. This service attracted a lot of negative reviews on sites like Ripoff Reports. Toward the end of 2017, he attempted to clean up his additions (Adrin10) to the rogeting article. These were reverted by other editors. Last year, he tried to propose the rogeting article for quick deletion. This was reverted by another editor. And that's when the Modulato account came in and removed the material without being contested. While this content shouldn't have been there to start with, it just shows an example of not all deletionists being equal. Some are far worse than others.