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As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree. You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life

As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree. You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life. Even if you have tons of credits on IMDV. You don’t “deserve” wikipedia article. It’s not a collection of everything that exists ever. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are actually quite clear and documented. It’s not a badge for a job well done… And if you disagree with that - fine, it’s creative commons, you can easily get all the articles with all their histories (wikipedia helpfully dumps all that periodically every day as giant XML), and the software is open source; you can fork it and create article on every living human being that ever existed.

onli 4y ago
Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedia is actually the good one in this category, the german is already completely broken because of this clientele. You are right, it could be forked, but in practice it's unlikely humanity has the capacity to run two such projects. Thus Wikipedia - if it does not course correct - will sink slowly into irrelevance, be flanked with better wikis for specific topics (sadly often proprietary platforms/commercial projects) and then, hopefully, what you describe will really happen and a new Wikipedia will be forked, learning from the mistakes that are completely obvious to everyone outside of that current in-group of contributors.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year. The rules are here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines. But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good. I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.

onli 4y ago

Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedia is actually the good one in this category, the german is already completely broken because of this clientele. You are right, it could be forked, but in practice it's unlikely humanity has the capacity to run two such projects. Thus Wikipedia - if it does not course correct - will sink slowly into irrelevance, be flanked with better wikis for specific topics (sadly often proprietary platforms/commercial projects) and then, hopefully, what you describe will really happen and a new Wikipedia will be forked, learning from the mistakes that are completely obvious to everyone outside of that current in-group of contributors.

shp0ngle 4y ago
Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year. The rules are here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines. But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good. I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.