3 ms·

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

by kvetching 4y ago

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.

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.