16 ms·

Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism

283 points by DerekBickerton 4y ago

jl6 4y ago
What are some examples of really great deleted articles that we now have the opportunity to read thanks to this site?
kvetching 4y ago
Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.
- Jerry2 4y ago
  >I don't get why they would do this to so many topics. It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.
  - andrewljohnson 4y ago
    It's mostly a form of spam-control.
    - practice9 4y ago
      well, isn't most of free speech just de-facto spam?
      - macintux 4y ago
        Sure, which is why no one is legally obligated to host it.
    - Jerry2 4y ago
      >spam-control Can you explain what was so spammy about this one? https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-hunter-biden-firm-rosemont-seneca-partners/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-hu...
      - striking 4y ago
        First off, it's now a redirect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca_Partners&redirect=no https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca... Second, the article links to the archived comments about the deletion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Rosemont_Seneca_Partners https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...), wherein an editor explains > This organization is only mentioned in connection with its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, from whom it cannot inherit notability per WP:NORG. Every single source is a trivial mention in an article about the founders; that means it fails WP:GNG as well. Keeping it around additionally risks WP:BLPVIO, as this is a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden. Seems pretty clear cut to me. Write the parts that deserve to be in the Hunter Biden page in the Hunter Biden page. Don't make a stub article just so you can mention an otherwise unnotable company.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    It’s crazy how people feel entitled to have somebody else host their “thoughts” on the Internet. As the project at hand shows, if Wikipedia doesn’t want to host your page, you can simply publish elsewhere.
    - xigoi 4y ago
      Nobody is posting their “thoughts” on Wikipedia, it's for encyclopedic articles. By controlling the content of those, you control what many people consider the truth.
      - pavlov 4y ago
        An encyclopedia is by definition curated and controlled. The brilliance of the Internet and open content licensing is that you can fork Wikipedia if you don’t like their editorial choices. This wasn’t possible with a thirty-volume print edition of Britannica. Of course if you want to make people look to your version instead of the one at wikipedia.org, you probably need to invest in marketing. In theory nothing stops you from becoming the new source of authority — after all Wikipedia has only held this role for less than twenty years, and nobody remembers what was the #1 result site for these search queries then.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Sure, in the sense that literally any text is thought control.
- warning26 4y ago
  Eh, I think that paring down excess content is important for just about any organizational effort. I'm not convinced that most of this content was worth including on Wikipedia, but hey, if these people want to host it they should go for it.
  - gumby 4y ago
    Why? It’s not like a printed encyclopedia; there really aren’t space limitations in any meaningful way.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Too much noise often makes it hard to find the signal. It's also difficult to sustain any quality/accuracy, especially if the topics are too obscure.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      This is like a discussion the other day on streaming service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder to find (and trust) the good content.
    - zamadatix 4y ago
      Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the articles on the topic even though the overall article count is higher.
    - pvg 4y ago
      Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia rather than an archive of everything (which is a different and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in various forms).
    - notahacker 4y ago
      There really are limitations to the amount of time the core editors and administration have to devote to it though. Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and self promotion and nutty theories and articles created purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.
- macintux 4y ago
  Quite a few were not actually deleted; not sure how to tally those that were.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
- V__ 4y ago
  Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc. [1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    Yep, exactly. For the curious, and without casting aspersions on the individual (be nice!), here is an example of a non-notable page created for self-promotion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka&oldid=1086688615 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka... It's currently up for speedy deletion, and will probably be removed soon.
    - saghm 4y ago
      Just tried looking at it, and it's already deleted
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "I don't get why they would do this to so many topics." Self-promotion and non-notable content. Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard. Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc. Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format. but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted. The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think it could or should be something else doesn't change that. Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a dictionary. There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would rather do than explain the project's definition of a word like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres. RTFM, friend. If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be something more, you are welcome to fork it.
      - 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbrave 4y ago
  The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
- zozbot234 4y ago
  It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.
andrewljohnson 4y ago
These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!
- dorfsmay 4y ago
  No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later. It is very discouraging.
  - mindcrime 4y ago
    It is very discouraging. Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
    - VLM 4y ago
      If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content. Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X. Always follow the money.
      - throwanem 4y ago
        Okay, so, who by you is paying Wikipedia to peddle which agenda?
      - IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
        The pretzel logic people tie themselves into to make the world fit their narratives is simply astonishing.
programmarchy 4y ago
Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.
soheil 4y ago
Are all deleted articles weighed equally? If a bio page is deleted because it's self-promoting does it still appear regardless?
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Would be weird if they didn't include those pages on a "radical inclusionist" wiki.
ghaff 4y ago
>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia. That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another. While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.
- freedomben 4y ago
  Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.
flenserboy 4y ago
Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's political bias. Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?
  - flenserboy 4y ago
    Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Malcolm_Kendrick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-keep-disappearing-from-wikipedia-whats-going-on/3010664.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073
    - cmeacham98 4y ago
      Can you elaborate on how those examples prove your claim? None of those examples seem to show a political bias.
      - flenserboy 4y ago
        Ok...Kendrick — attacked specifically for questioning the role the cholesterol in heart disease and the efficacy of statins. Read through the discussion and it becomes clear that there are fundamentalists who don't want anyone who, rightly or wrongly, questions a current medical orthodoxy to even be noted. Keeping them off WP in this way is an attempt to write such dissident voices off as loons and not even worth investigating, to make it such that when someone does not appear on WP, it will be a sign that they're not even at the edge of the conversation.
mindcrime 4y ago
I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia. The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.
- KarlKemp 4y ago
  This has existed since 2013[0]. If you haven't noticed it in nine years, how much did the world really need this? [0]: https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset=20131225185241&action=history https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...
  - yucky 4y ago
    I'm always amazed at how quickly we became a pro-censorship society. I always assumed it would take several generations.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      Most people are pro-censorship. What people generally disagree on is what should be censored. Some find nudity offensive, for others it’s ideas. This is always been the case. Eg TV networks have guidelines on what they can and cannot air. If anything, the internet brought about an unprecedented lack of censorship. But that was only when it was a smaller community of individuals. The moment it snowballed, moderation was needed (whether that was on IRC, BBS or wherever).
      - BirAdam 4y ago
        Umm… Yeah. I initially wanted to disagree, but then I think about obscenity laws in the USA, and it makes sense. This is similar to people not truly believing in Democracy. They only believe in it when they’re winning.
car_analogy 4y ago
I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.
- justincormack 4y ago
  The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia admins.
  - andrew_ 4y ago
    Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.
  - Snowworm 4y ago
    Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view? I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
    - Snowworm 4y ago
      Btw. I was asking this in case deletionpedia hadn't managed to copy all of the articles.
      - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
        See some of the other comments here, there's actually a procedure to request deleted pages (that are otherwise not problematic).
    - lelandfe 4y ago
      The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really ought to stay dead – things like copyright infringement, doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net too wide when resurfacing those removed pages. That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_requests https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_reque...
KarlKemp 4y ago
Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff. As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example). Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars. Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid=1085055802 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid... This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both. And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted. The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.
- nullc 4y ago
  > that an article's subject or the subject's enemies... There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.
IdEntities 4y ago
The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."
- robonerd 4y ago
  Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was memory holed.
IronWolve 4y ago
I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam. He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page. Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc. I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think. My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history. Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported. Those who control the history books they say.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- freemint 4y ago
  Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language). Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
- babbagecabbage 4y ago
  > I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. I would be genuinely fascinated to learn some examples of this. This is something I've been suspecting for a long time, but I can rarely put my finger on anything specific. But I'm sure we're all being collectively gaslit. Lots of things feel disconcerting these days, like reality is being erased and shifted.
- 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mherdeg 4y ago
Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.
gregsher88 4y ago
My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.
- striking 4y ago
  What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Background https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.
- theobeers 4y ago
  This is a famous case. I can almost understand why they got rid of the extended synopsis. For anyone who wants to read it, here's a copy on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_explanation_of_warren_gs_regulate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_ex...
  - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
    This is hilarious, haha. There are people who wanted to keep this?
WalterBright 4y ago
Hence why it's nice to have your own copies of things. They won't get altered or disappeared.
theamk 4y ago
Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate. Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.
robonerd 4y ago
Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.
calibas 4y ago
Here's some examples: https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer. https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac
- tptacek 4y ago
  Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't. As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary. Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
  - calibas 4y ago
    ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should be covered by Wikipedia. And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do know something about the policies. That's why I chose these two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post before his death, albeit very briefly.
    - 4y ago
fareesh 4y ago
Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden. The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a notable company. This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election. It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship. At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives. One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski. Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no verdict thus far. Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on the basis of no evidence. This is the type of thing we see happening in third world countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the future of democratic rule.
noodles_nomore 4y ago
Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages, "Quote notation") can't be found there.
londgine 4y ago
Recently it was Israel's Independence Day. I was looking for something about Israel's War of Independence and I saw these Wikipedia articles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_Wa... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_... . Imagine if the article on the American Revolutionary War was renames to the First British American War. I've come to simply expect that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything somewhat political.
- Gare 4y ago
  English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name that is most common in those countries.
- morpheuskafka 4y ago
  A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to be a relatively neutral way to refer to it: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-... https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-history/ https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-hi... While the term British-American War is not in active use, I don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting against the British.
- assttoasstmgr 4y ago
  My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did not exist during the topic/time period which the article references.
- noobermin 4y ago
  No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.
teddyh 4y ago
Any relation to this other Deletionpedia? http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
MikeTaylor 4y ago
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses. What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother. Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
- tptacek 4y ago
  People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote. Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
- davidgerard 4y ago
  > only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. Could you provide three examples?
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Huh, do you think the parent comment was lying? Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
    - davidgerard 4y ago
throwaway81523 4y ago
Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.
recursivedoubts 4y ago
I'd like something similar for flagged articles and comments here on HN.
Ivoirians 4y ago
I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted. https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship
eecc 4y ago
Personally I don’t understand this “notability” deletion process. It’s text, even the most unremarkable article weighs less than ephemeral logs. Additive metadata is more than as effective for filtering and boosting what’s relevant. It’s a really asinine policy, I’m glad this project exists
pvaldes 4y ago
There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement. The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.
highspeedbus 4y ago
It's nice to have once again a authoritative link to this page [1]. A shame that wikipedia think this is irrelevant information. https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_with_alternative_display_modes https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...
aaron695 4y ago
Multicomp 4y ago
Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki. DOKUWIKI! Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page. The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/DokuWiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...
bighoss97 4y ago
Hell yeah man!
cosmojg 4y ago
For more on Wikipedia's slow transformation from a culture of inclusionism to one of deletionism, see Gwern's fantastic "In Defense of Inclusionism" here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
pyuser583 4y ago
The worst part of Wikipedia is the arcane rules and procedures. Wikipedia tries to keep things consistent, but this has created a whole body of “case law” that only experts know. I once described a law that had been proposed, but not passed, and had my contribution removed because it was “legal advice.” I couldn’t even wrap my head around that one.
leonry 4y ago
An analogue project for the German Wikipedia is Marjorie Wiki (https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI). Do similar projects exist for other languages?
foobarbecue 4y ago
As a teenager ~18 years ago, I joined ADW (Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) and I was very proud of myself. We took down a lot of personal vanity pages, per the Wikipedia is An Encyclopedia policy (at odds with the Wikipedia is Not Paper policy). I also led the push to get a lot of pokemon pages deleted as not notable. I'm not sure how I feel about all that now. Deleting the vanity pages that people put up about themselves probably improved the platform, but the pokemon were harmless.
creatonez 4y ago
Seems like this site is dead as of Sept 2020. Or maybe the auto-publishing bot is under a different name now?
LoveMortuus 4y ago
More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation. It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences... It's just sad...

jl6 4y ago

What are some examples of really great deleted articles that we now have the opportunity to read thanks to this site?

kvetching 4y ago

Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get why they would do this to so many topics.

Jerry2 4y ago
>I don't get why they would do this to so many topics. It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.
- andrewljohnson 4y ago
  It's mostly a form of spam-control.
  - practice9 4y ago
    well, isn't most of free speech just de-facto spam?
    - macintux 4y ago
      Sure, which is why no one is legally obligated to host it.
  - Jerry2 4y ago
    >spam-control Can you explain what was so spammy about this one? https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-hunter-biden-firm-rosemont-seneca-partners/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-hu...
    - striking 4y ago
      First off, it's now a redirect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca_Partners&redirect=no https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca... Second, the article links to the archived comments about the deletion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Rosemont_Seneca_Partners https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...), wherein an editor explains > This organization is only mentioned in connection with its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz, from whom it cannot inherit notability per WP:NORG. Every single source is a trivial mention in an article about the founders; that means it fails WP:GNG as well. Keeping it around additionally risks WP:BLPVIO, as this is a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden. Seems pretty clear cut to me. Write the parts that deserve to be in the Hunter Biden page in the Hunter Biden page. Don't make a stub article just so you can mention an otherwise unnotable company.
- pavlov 4y ago
  It’s crazy how people feel entitled to have somebody else host their “thoughts” on the Internet. As the project at hand shows, if Wikipedia doesn’t want to host your page, you can simply publish elsewhere.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    Nobody is posting their “thoughts” on Wikipedia, it's for encyclopedic articles. By controlling the content of those, you control what many people consider the truth.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      An encyclopedia is by definition curated and controlled. The brilliance of the Internet and open content licensing is that you can fork Wikipedia if you don’t like their editorial choices. This wasn’t possible with a thirty-volume print edition of Britannica. Of course if you want to make people look to your version instead of the one at wikipedia.org, you probably need to invest in marketing. In theory nothing stops you from becoming the new source of authority — after all Wikipedia has only held this role for less than twenty years, and nobody remembers what was the #1 result site for these search queries then.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  Sure, in the sense that literally any text is thought control.
warning26 4y ago
Eh, I think that paring down excess content is important for just about any organizational effort. I'm not convinced that most of this content was worth including on Wikipedia, but hey, if these people want to host it they should go for it.
- gumby 4y ago
  Why? It’s not like a printed encyclopedia; there really aren’t space limitations in any meaningful way.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Too much noise often makes it hard to find the signal. It's also difficult to sustain any quality/accuracy, especially if the topics are too obscure.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    This is like a discussion the other day on streaming service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder to find (and trust) the good content.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the articles on the topic even though the overall article count is higher.
  - pvg 4y ago
    Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia rather than an archive of everything (which is a different and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in various forms).
  - notahacker 4y ago
    There really are limitations to the amount of time the core editors and administration have to devote to it though. Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and self promotion and nutty theories and articles created purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.
macintux 4y ago
Quite a few were not actually deleted; not sure how to tally those that were.
greenthrow 4y ago
Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
V__ 4y ago
Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc. [1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages
- lelandfe 4y ago
  Yep, exactly. For the curious, and without casting aspersions on the individual (be nice!), here is an example of a non-notable page created for self-promotion: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka&oldid=1086688615 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka... It's currently up for speedy deletion, and will probably be removed soon.
  - saghm 4y ago
    Just tried looking at it, and it's already deleted
pmoriarty 4y ago
"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics." Self-promotion and non-notable content. Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard. Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc. Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. Wikipedia isn't an encyclopedia though, not in any traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media format. but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted. The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be "non notable". There isn't.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think it could or should be something else doesn't change that. Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a dictionary. There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would rather do than explain the project's definition of a word like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres. RTFM, friend. If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be something more, you are welcome to fork it.
    - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
michaelbrave 4y ago
The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
zozbot234 4y ago
It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.

andrewljohnson 4y ago

These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!

dorfsmay 4y ago
No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes 5 or 6 years later. It is very discouraging.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  It is very discouraging. Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to which their entire position is based on negativity, and how that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience like that?
  - VLM 4y ago
    If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat more influential paid content. Just because site X is not paying for user generated content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate content on site X. Always follow the money.
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Okay, so, who by you is paying Wikipedia to peddle which agenda?
    - IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
      The pretzel logic people tie themselves into to make the world fit their narratives is simply astonishing.

programmarchy 4y ago

Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.

soheil 4y ago

Are all deleted articles weighed equally? If a bio page is deleted because it's self-promoting does it still appear regardless?

Hamuko 4y ago
Would be weird if they didn't include those pages on a "radical inclusionist" wiki.

ghaff 4y ago

>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia. That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another. While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.

freedomben 4y ago
Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.

flenserboy 4y ago

Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.

cmeacham98 4y ago
I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's political bias. Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?
- flenserboy 4y ago
  Sure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Malcolm_Kendrick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-keep-disappearing-from-wikipedia-whats-going-on/3010664.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-pages-... https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073 https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on how those examples prove your claim? None of those examples seem to show a political bias.
    - flenserboy 4y ago
      Ok...Kendrick — attacked specifically for questioning the role the cholesterol in heart disease and the efficacy of statins. Read through the discussion and it becomes clear that there are fundamentalists who don't want anyone who, rightly or wrongly, questions a current medical orthodoxy to even be noted. Keeping them off WP in this way is an attempt to write such dissident voices off as loons and not even worth investigating, to make it such that when someone does not appear on WP, it will be a sign that they're not even at the edge of the conversation.

mindcrime 4y ago

I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia. The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.

KarlKemp 4y ago
This has existed since 2013[0]. If you haven't noticed it in nine years, how much did the world really need this? [0]: https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset=20131225185241&action=history https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...
- yucky 4y ago
  I'm always amazed at how quickly we became a pro-censorship society. I always assumed it would take several generations.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    Most people are pro-censorship. What people generally disagree on is what should be censored. Some find nudity offensive, for others it’s ideas. This is always been the case. Eg TV networks have guidelines on what they can and cannot air. If anything, the internet brought about an unprecedented lack of censorship. But that was only when it was a smaller community of individuals. The moment it snowballed, moderation was needed (whether that was on IRC, BBS or wherever).
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      Umm… Yeah. I initially wanted to disagree, but then I think about obscenity laws in the USA, and it makes sense. This is similar to people not truly believing in Democracy. They only believe in it when they’re winning.

car_analogy 4y ago

I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.

justincormack 4y ago
The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia admins.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.
- Snowworm 4y ago
  Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to view? I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would be really great for getting rid of censorship.
  - Snowworm 4y ago
    Btw. I was asking this in case deletionpedia hadn't managed to copy all of the articles.
    - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
      See some of the other comments here, there's actually a procedure to request deleted pages (that are otherwise not problematic).
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really ought to stay dead – things like copyright infringement, doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net too wide when resurfacing those removed pages. That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_requests https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia.org:Removal_reque...

KarlKemp 4y ago

Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff. As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example). Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars. Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid=1085055802 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid... This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both. And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted. The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.

nullc 4y ago
> that an article's subject or the subject's enemies... There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.

IdEntities 4y ago

The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."

robonerd 4y ago
Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.
barry-cotter 4y ago
> credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was memory holed.

IronWolve 4y ago

I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam. He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page. Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc. I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think. My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history. Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported. Those who control the history books they say.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
freemint 4y ago
Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language). Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
babbagecabbage 4y ago
> I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. I would be genuinely fascinated to learn some examples of this. This is something I've been suspecting for a long time, but I can rarely put my finger on anything specific. But I'm sure we're all being collectively gaslit. Lots of things feel disconcerting these days, like reality is being erased and shifted.
4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mherdeg 4y ago

Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.

gregsher88 4y ago

My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.

striking 4y ago
What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Background https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)#Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.
theobeers 4y ago
This is a famous case. I can almost understand why they got rid of the extended synopsis. For anyone who wants to read it, here's a copy on Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_explanation_of_warren_gs_regulate/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_ex...
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  This is hilarious, haha. There are people who wanted to keep this?

WalterBright 4y ago

Hence why it's nice to have your own copies of things. They won't get altered or disappeared.

theamk 4y ago

Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate. Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.

robonerd 4y ago

Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.

calibas 4y ago

Here's some examples: https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer. https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac

tptacek 4y ago
Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't. As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary. Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
- calibas 4y ago
  ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should be covered by Wikipedia. And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do know something about the policies. That's why I chose these two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post before his death, albeit very briefly.
  - 4y ago

fareesh 4y ago

Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden. The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a notable company. This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election. It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship. At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of Representatives. One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski. Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no verdict thus far. Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on the basis of no evidence. This is the type of thing we see happening in third world countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the future of democratic rule.

noodles_nomore 4y ago

Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages, "Quote notation") can't be found there.

londgine 4y ago

Recently it was Israel's Independence Day. I was looking for something about Israel's War of Independence and I saw these Wikipedia articles https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_Wa... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_... . Imagine if the article on the American Revolutionary War was renames to the First British American War. I've come to simply expect that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything somewhat political.

Gare 4y ago
English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name that is most common in those countries.
morpheuskafka 4y ago
A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to be a relatively neutral way to refer to it: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-... https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-history/ https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-hi... While the term British-American War is not in active use, I don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting against the British.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did not exist during the topic/time period which the article references.
noobermin 4y ago
No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.

teddyh 4y ago

Any relation to this other Deletionpedia? http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/

MikeTaylor 4y ago

I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses. What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother. Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.

tptacek 4y ago
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote. Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
davidgerard 4y ago
> only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. Could you provide three examples?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Huh, do you think the parent comment was lying? Wikipedia is like, well, a lot of social knowledge tools where there's special roles (e.g., Stack Overflow, GitHub projects) - some people build prestige by contributing content, some people seek to build prestige by gatekeeping the contributions of others.
  - davidgerard 4y ago

throwaway81523 4y ago

Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing info from articles, without the articles themselves getting deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time on this some day.

recursivedoubts 4y ago

I'd like something similar for flagged articles and comments here on HN.

Ivoirians 4y ago

I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of data was deleted. https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship

eecc 4y ago

Personally I don’t understand this “notability” deletion process. It’s text, even the most unremarkable article weighs less than ephemeral logs. Additive metadata is more than as effective for filtering and boosting what’s relevant. It’s a really asinine policy, I’m glad this project exists

pvaldes 4y ago

There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement. The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.

highspeedbus 4y ago

It's nice to have once again a authoritative link to this page [1]. A shame that wikipedia think this is irrelevant information. https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_with_alternative_display_modes https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...

aaron695 4y ago

Multicomp 4y ago

Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki. DOKUWIKI! Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page. The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/DokuWiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...

bighoss97 4y ago

Hell yeah man!

cosmojg 4y ago

For more on Wikipedia's slow transformation from a culture of inclusionism to one of deletionism, see Gwern's fantastic "In Defense of Inclusionism" here: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

pyuser583 4y ago

The worst part of Wikipedia is the arcane rules and procedures. Wikipedia tries to keep things consistent, but this has created a whole body of “case law” that only experts know. I once described a law that had been proposed, but not passed, and had my contribution removed because it was “legal advice.” I couldn’t even wrap my head around that one.

leonry 4y ago

An analogue project for the German Wikipedia is Marjorie Wiki (https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI https://marjorie-wiki.de/wiki/MARJORIE-WIKI). Do similar projects exist for other languages?

foobarbecue 4y ago

As a teenager ~18 years ago, I joined ADW (Association of Deletionist Wikipedians) and I was very proud of myself. We took down a lot of personal vanity pages, per the Wikipedia is An Encyclopedia policy (at odds with the Wikipedia is Not Paper policy). I also led the push to get a lot of pokemon pages deleted as not notable. I'm not sure how I feel about all that now. Deleting the vanity pages that people put up about themselves probably improved the platform, but the pokemon were harmless.

creatonez 4y ago

Seems like this site is dead as of Sept 2020. Or maybe the auto-publishing bot is under a different name now?

LoveMortuus 4y ago

More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation. It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences... It's just sad...