20 ms·

The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

427 points by InfinityX0 15y ago

daenz 15y ago
"Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- angersock 15y ago
  Flagged for removal. Notability?
ioquatix 15y ago
Yeah, I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia. In the end I just gave up trying to contribute. Some user even has a bot that now chases me around when I make edits...
csmt 15y ago
I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was deleted for no reason. Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.
- yuhong 15y ago
  I think a lot of the problem is that measuring editors by edit count is like measuring programmers by lines of code.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
javert 15y ago
First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's too hard to find the right place to go and complain. The author even managed to complain when someone helpfully pointed out that he went to the wrong place to revise a pointless and already settled argument. Seriously, this is a Wikipedia success story. If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure. If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching on a blog, and figured out how to revive an already-settled issue, he could have successfully managed to waste people's time on this. But no. "I demand to be listened to NOW, and if I'm not, Wikipedia is Closed and Unfriendly."
- viraptor 15y ago
  He pointed out exactly why he posted in a "wrong" place and presented how frustrating it is to get to the right information. He's saying that the process is broken and you're saying he did nor follow the process... I think your response doesn't make much sense. He did quite a lot (i.e. Tried to follow instructions) but was effectively sent to /dev/null. Regardless of whether the original article should be restored or not, I think this points out some interesting facts about how wikipedia works.
- sullivandanny 15y ago
  I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work. There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons. Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much. If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus. When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia. That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute. If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork. I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly. But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.
suivix 15y ago
I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.
- gwillen 15y ago
  That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).
  - sabat 15y ago
    ... which is completely ridiculous, for two reasons. One, Wikipedia is based in America, and so naturally its English should be consistently American. Two, modern English as spoken and written in England has grammar problems -- e.g., the insistence on using plurals for singular objects, such as corporations ("Shell Oil have announced ..."). Therefore, American English is obviously preferable.
    - barkingcat 15y ago
      The English uses plural for corporations because they are referring to the mass of entities that make up the corporation (including people, brands, products). I don't think this is a grammatical problem, but a societal/philosophical viewpoint on what a corporation is. If you are American, of course it seems weird, but within the context of English society, it is internally self consistent with English grammar.
    - vacri 15y ago
      Ah, the good old "The English have poor command of English" argument. Nice work.
    - wpietri 15y ago
      The thing that really kills me about your comment is that you seem to think that your off-the-top-of-your-head points are somehow novel, as if no Wikipedian has ever mentioned them before. And that's exactly the mistake Sullivan makes, too. You're both wrong, of course: discussions on these topics go back years, with hundreds or thousands of smart participants. But at least you haven't done like Sullivan and a million others by following up your naiveté with outrage that you aren't being respected for your genius, insight, and expertise.
therandomguy 15y ago
I'm sorry about your case and the frustration that you had to face. However, they must be doing something right since Wikipedia has millions of user contributed pages? Also it might not be easy to administer a website of that size where anyone is free to go ahead and edit any of the hundreds of thousands of pages. Maybe they are settling for 99% satisfaction? That said, they do need our donations.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia. You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and other crap the core group of contributors has constructed. But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors. There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator", "bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count. You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages. Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun, eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics. There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see how the sausage is made.
true_religion 15y ago
The thrust of his arguement is that since he believes Jessica is more notable than he is, and wikipedia has an existing article about him then his opinion should count. However, an alternative conclusion could be that he isn't notable by wikipedia's standards and his article should also be deleted.
- andreyvit 15y ago
  That's not the point he's making, please re-read the article. He included the specific reasons he believes Jessica to be notable (with proper references).
nilchameleons 15y ago
It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia - obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica, but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.
- william42 15y ago
  The page on notability seems to imply that notability means having sources that don't require original research; which is a reasonable thing to do but probably should have just been put under that rule. Wikipedia avoids original research for a very good reason: to keep out physics cranks and the like, who would infest WP otherwise.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far it's a total class act and it has a lot to do with these policies. I'm sure you know that Wikipedia has to constantly police itself for large companies trying to mess with competitor's pages and how there are armies of political operatives out there trying to rewrite history through Wikipedia. This is why even experts like the OP are so scrutinized.
  - FaceKicker 15y ago
    > You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. But why? If there's an article about your company in a legitimate publication, I don't see why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia article about it. How would it make Wikipedia a less useful or lower-quality resource? Are you saying it would get in the way of finding information about more "notable" subjects? I don't understand how. Sure, my attitude would make the disambiguation page for "John Smith" much longer, but I think it would still be reasonable as long as it's well-sorted into categories (as it is now).
jaylevitt 15y ago
While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure. MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.
- jaylevitt 15y ago
  Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?
aeontech 15y ago
Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether. Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad. [1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 [2] http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
- philwelch 15y ago
  The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games. See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no? Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with the minimum number of rules necessary to make that successful, but ultimately, the rules and red tape turned into the fun part of the game, and the encyclopedia-writing is just the grinding bit. If all you wanted was a huge encyclopedia unlimited by the constraints of physical book size, you'd have a deletion policy like this: "each statement of fact has to be cited from a reliable source, every article has to be composed entirely of statements of fact, any other content should be deleted". So if there are no reliably-sourced statements of fact about a given subject, you don't get an article about them. If I started a Wikipedia article about my neighbor's cat and wrote a lot of outrageous claims, they would all be deleted and we'd be left with a blank article, which would probably be deleted as a relatively boring matter of procedure. But what fun is that, when we can have a concept like "notability"? Ah! Suddenly, instead of all that boring shit about citing facts and removing uncited content, and just keeping whatever reliable information we have about something, we can have a massive PvE game where you get to find articles about subjects you don't care about and declare "this isn't notable!", and then you can lawyer a "consensus" of other players into agreeing with you. Or if another player disagrees, suddenly you have a massive PvP battle! Fun! Well, at least for a certain type of person who enjoys lawyering and gets off on will-to-power stuff that motivates one to try and delete articles from an encyclopedia, which is exactly the type of person that gravitates towards the project. And--believe it or not--these kinds of highly-social games, and one's success in them on Wikipedia, are a major factor in getting elected "administrator", at which point your duties now entail judging these lawyering games and actually deleting the articles!
nethsix 15y ago
Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  >Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience. It's both. HN is unfriendly to new users who are used to the kind of interactions that predominate elsewhere. It is in many ways a close reddit analogue, and yet even veteran redditors will find themselves downvoted to oblivion here. I certainly did, when I first signed up. Like HN, Wikipedia requires getting used to. There is a "Wikipedia Way", which is very different from how people interact on other parts of the Internet. It can seem bureaucratic and neurotic, and it is, but it keeps things running relatively smoothly for the regulars, which is the important part. The people who take the time to learn the ropes are the ones who end up ensuring that the content is useful and informative. Yes, some people will be put off by the fact that only reliable secondary sources can be considered when determining the notability of a subject, but the restriction is there for a reason: it keeps the crap out. None of this means that Wikipedia is not open. If you waltzed into the Linux dev channel and insisted that something be done a certain way, you'd be banned. Linux is similarly complex, and there is a "Linux Way" of doing things. Take the time to learn that way and contribute, and you'll be welcomed. Insist they're wrong and write blog posts about how wrong they are, and you'll be ignored.
pessimizer 15y ago
His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened. I hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.
- zbowling 15y ago
  I don't understand why you are getting down-voted for your comment. This is exactly what happens. I've been in on more than 30 or 40 so AfD discussions. There is usually a deep debate of it. In the end it's not about votes either. We leave long explanations as our points for or against. We weigh the arguments. It prevents the "+1 me too! I agree!" responses from adding to it so consensus by vote doesn't always matter.
  - gergles 15y ago
    The actual results were 7:6. On what planet is that "consensus"? Oh wait, another WikiMagicThing is that only some votes count and some votes count more than others and what votes count is completely up to the arbitrary decision of someone who has no accountability for their decisions. Right.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - zbowling 15y ago
      Consensus cannot be found in votes alone. Don't over simplify things. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:!VOTE#Straw_poll_guidelines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:!VOTE#Straw_poll_guid... If you see the world in black and white, you're missing important grey matter. ~Jack Fyock
whazzmaster 15y ago
I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information. I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries. His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!" Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.
- tptacek 15y ago
  It's an encyclopedia. You're not supposed to cite it in anything academic.
- scarmig 15y ago
  You should, and we should. I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.
  - whazzmaster 15y ago
    That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.
- DanBC 15y ago
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Sounds like a lot of whining to me. The author's reaction to this made him lose all credibility with me. First off, you think you're an expert? Maybe you are, maybe not but even experts aren't always right and just because you think in your infinite expert wisdom that so and so should have a Wikipedia page, the majority of us obviously don't. Secondly, so sorry the appeals process was so inconvenient for you. So far Wikipedia is doing just fine and your rant doesn't seem to be hurting them much. With all the garbage that people attempt to post on Wikipedia, there's a good reason for all the walls. In the end this comes off like a know-it-all's childish hissy fit for not getting his way. The world doesn't have to accept your point of view. Your response to this whole thing probably played a large role in you not getting what you wanted. Next time try to up think about why some of these things are in place, know that you can't jump ahead of someone else in charge just because you think you're better qualified (it's first volunteer, first served on Wikipedia) and just approach the issue with a lot more tact and less childish kicking and screaming next time. Some people love to talk about ideals like freedom, democracy, fairness, and all that but as soon as it inconveniences them they take the position that somehow those rules are for everyone else and they're somehow special. This guy doesn't fall in with the ideals thing I was talking about but he somehow managed to convince himself that everyone should just see thing his way. How dare a free, worldwide, not for profit, website with a 99% democratic submission and editing process not bend to your will! The audacity! Welcome to Wikipedia on the WWW where majority rules (even if you think they're all stupid-heads). I hope Jimmy Wales sends you a personal apology. Now let's all go edit the Wikipedia pages for "Cry Baby", "Brat", and "Temper Tantrum" and cite the author as a living example.
- eykanal 15y ago
  What's with all the hate? The author has a lot of valid points. 1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of bureaucracy, making it so that, technically anyone can edit, but realistically, only those who know how to game the system can edit, than the system as a whole is a partial failure. 2) Who are you to judge whether he's an expert? Given that he at least claims to work in the field, that makes him more of an expert than almost all of the wikipedia editors combined. They just know their own bureaucratic guidelines, he actually knows something about the article in discussion. In the interest of journalistic integrity, they should at least attempt to listen to his points. 3) His points about how difficult it is to contest something is completely spot-on. There's no good reason why all the "contest this" or "discuss that" pages are simply huge text pages, other than because no one gave them a proper UI. For new users, it's confusing as heck. Given the status wikipedia has nowadays, and how widely it's used, they simply can't expect every user to know or care about their arcane systems. The system needs a proper UI for these sorts of things, making it easy to (a) file a complaint, (b) find a previously filed complaint, (c) discuss the complaint, and (d) find the resolution. His story about wading through talk pages isn't unusual, and it's kind of shameful for wikipedia that they haven't made it easier to use since their inception.
HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction > Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.
- gojomo 15y ago
  Indeed, the strict 'encyclopedic' standard that got Wikipedia this far, as a defense against lots of problems, is now itself a damaging constraint. I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place. There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org http://thunkpedia.org. More discussion is at the project blog, http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org (from the original codename).
  - tommorris 15y ago
    I've been looking forward to adding to the list of unsuccessful inclusionist Wikipedia forks.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      A fork which only flips the 'inclusionist' bit is clearly the wrong approach. Wikipedia is still very good, and a fork with the same 'encyclopedic' mission, software, and general format – but inclusionist – would inherit all the stresses that made Wikipedia become deletionist. It'd also still have to compete with Wikipedia for the critical mass of attention and contributors who like everything about Wikipedia except for the deletionism. The reference-information successes have explored territory a bit further from Wikipedia, in content (Wikia, wikiHow, tvTropes) and format (StackOverflow, Quora, IMDB)... so that's what Thunkpedia is doing too. Whether it succeeds or fails, it won't fit neatly into your list of 'inclusionist Wikipedia forks'.
- Tsagadai 15y ago
  I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the past become our keys to understanding the past and our world. I think it is unfortunate that Wikipedia tries to assess what is important in the future by a clique's definition of what is important to them now.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
  Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    >>Everyone should have a wikipedia page Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.
    - HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
      I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages, while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.
      - wpietri 15y ago
        It's an interesting notion, and Wikipedia used to be more like that, but Wikipedia has gone the other way for a lot of good reasons, including fairness to both readers and subjects. Readers are poorly served by a one-line biography for somebody obscure, and even more poorly served by the typical marginal biography, which is a couple paragraphs of poorly written cruft sans citations. Subjects are poorly served by shaky biographies because suddenly the top search result is a couple of semi-random sentences covering the few things that happen to be verifiable about them. For example, when you search for my mom's name, the top result is her obituary. I carefully wrote it in consultation with the family to give a balanced view of her life, so I'm happy to see it there. But suppose there were a Wikipedia article about her. If you went and pulled all her public records, I think you'd get a) her birthdate, b) her bankruptcy, c) her real estate broker's license, and d) the times she was the victim of a crime. I would hate it if she had an article in Wikipedia, because nothing that really matters about her life would be a part of it, and if I tried to put it in I'd (correctly) get [citation needed].
bdrocco 15y ago
I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site. But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem
- nerfhammer 15y ago
  http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  We have an entire web full of whatever unverifiable stuff anyone felt like writing. Why should Wikimedia beg for more resources to expend mirroring content that isn't reliable enough to contribute to their goals?
mmahemoff 15y ago
Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit. I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.
- gwern 15y ago
  It will not surprise you to learn that you are far from the first to complain about the flat discussion pages. They have a lot of advantages - they're just easier to work with for a lot of things like rearranging sections, creating new sections, etc. - all stuff that your random social news site (like Hacker News) simply does not let you do because it would be a UI and vandalism nightmare. There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Anybody who's a serious Wikipedia editor can happily work the discussion pages. So a standard discussion system wouldn't benefit them at all. Novices who are smart and willing to put in a little time are also fine with it for basic use. So a standard discussion system really only benefits people who aren't smart or who aren't willing to put in a little time. But in making it easier for clueless noobs to express their opinions, will that help Wikipedia? Or will it hurt it by soaking up the time of people who do know what they're doing? As an example, consider Danny Sullivan's experience. If it had been easier for him to kick off a deletion review, he would have done it. But that would have been a waste of time, as he didn't have anything to say that would have changed the outcome. And that's true because he wasn't willing to take any time to understand what was going on. Or as another example, consider YouTube comments. How does it help Wikipedia to make it easier to let those people comment?
viraptor 15y ago
I wonder if the same thing will happen to stackoverflow? They have a number of levels of access, reviewing, meta-reviewing, administrators, etc. What level do you get to before becoming a bureaucratic place where everything is designed and decided by comitee?
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Many (most? all?) of the Stackexchange sites are already overwhelmingly bureaucratic. The difference between Wikipedia and SE is that on SE, the problem isn't "deletionism" it's "closequestionitis." That and a generally unwelcoming / unfriendly attitude expressed towards n00bs. But, ya know, it's working for them (for now at least) so what can ya do?
tptacek 15y ago
You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Deletions include: * The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine * A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired * Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs * A promo for a not-yet-released book * An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song * A strategy guide for The Sims 3 * A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name) * An article about a youth football team ... and it just keeps going on like that. This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Where we learn: * This is an article about an SEO consultant. * It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book. * That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written about in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo). It took two weeks for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out how many libraries carried her book. Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. In every one of those retarded articles, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. Every time. Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works. Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms. Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching. So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA: RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier.
kondro 15y ago
Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right) that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons. I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact that should be categorized.
- rospaya 15y ago
  It already exists and is called Deletionpedia. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
pithic 15y ago
I made this site awhile back, partly to address some of Wikipedia's conceptual peccadillos (notability, navigability, less than full openness). It didn't get traction, and I found it hard to market a knowledge-sharing site, in part because almost nobody is actively searching for knowledge-sharing solutions. The core idea was a bidirectionally weighted graph where users could set the weightings using slider controls. I've since moved on to another project. Anyhoo, the site is mobwa.com. Sooner or later I'll get around to taking it down.
kstenerud 15y ago
What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates. So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.
- mikeleeorg 15y ago
  I would really, really love to see this. Even with the core MediaWiki platform too. MediaWiki is open source BTW. I would do this if I could, but alas, my UI skills are not quite there. Are there any sharp UI designers who want to do this? It would be a hell of an addition to one's resume, not to mention the world :)
- zbowling 15y ago
  There are simply way to many forms and inputs we have to deal with on Wikipedia to make it a one off for every case. We eat our dog food all over wikipedia for that reason. Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and it's easy. For it to get added as a special page, it has rise to a general enough thing to be needed by everyone using Mediawiki or something so pressing that could never or should never be on a Wikipage. Meta concepts usually only fit that (like permissions and stats and new page reviewing).
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    "We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere." And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover. For a user trying to accomplish something quickly, however, it doesn't work. Reporting an issue, contributing to discussions or even FINDING them, navigating a voting page... Basically everything PROCESS related is a place where a wall of text is the most unwelcome thing you can be presented with. It's great that you dogfood; just remember that the old unix hacks ate their own dogfood too. But rather than make things friendlier for people, it just made the unix hacks more defensive about their unfriendly system.
trotsky 15y ago
If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.
ciscoriordan 15y ago
A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_knox_wikipedia_info_scr.php http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...
- mikeleeorg 15y ago
  I didn't know about the Wikipedia issues around that tragedy, but found it interesting from a sociological standpoint. So I tried looking for similar cases of the line between fact & opinion blurring on battleground Wikipedia, and found this, in case anyone else is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia (And it's on Wikipedia itself, natch.)
polemic 15y ago
bitter blogger is bitter.
- coffeeaddicted 15y ago
  Getting stuff rejected hurts a lot. I also skipped 1-2 donation rounds after that happened to me in the past. But then again I continued using Wikipedia so in the end I got over it ;-)
zotz 15y ago
Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the place.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  > The above treatment of a dead young coder... That treatment was six people casting "delete" votes, which did not succeed. That's one hell of a small tolerance you have for disagreement. Your post is a little like saying "I won't go to New York City any more because a few people posted on Yelp that they didn't like this one restaurant I enjoyed going to."
  - zotz 15y ago
    If I got treated in NYC like I've been treated and have seen people treated on Wikipedia, I'd never go back there either.
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      I'm pretty sure there are more than six people who'd treat you like that in NYC.
- slyall 15y ago
  The article wasn't created until after he had died as is made clear by the discussion and the edit history. People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the person was otherwise noteable. If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in history even if he was special to you.
rospaya 15y ago
The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.
- zbowling 15y ago
  We go out of our way on Wikipedia to make everyone feel welcome to edit anything. If someone makes a good faith mistake, more often or not, you are sent a welcome message fairly quickly by either a vandal patroller or an admin. New users will get hit up after their 2nd or 3rd edit with a Welcome message too. I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part of what I do. No body should feel afraid to edit Wikipedia. Ever. It's a public resource.
  - iFire 15y ago
    If it fails once, why aren't we fixing it?
wpietri 15y ago
There's a lot of Wikipedia I think should be more transparent or more approachable. But deletion discussions aren't really one of them. Deciding what really fits in an encyclopedia isn't simple. Wikipedia has spent literally a decade working out a set of rules that balances utility, fairness, quality, and maintainability. Those rules will inevitably seem bureaucratic and opaque to people who haven't worked on a number of articles and then really considered the problem. Deletion discussions are perennial magnets for non-participants who believe that they or their (friend|band|ancestor|website) belong in Wikipedia. They are inevitably upset. Worse, in Pauli's phrase, they aren't even wrong: they start with the premise the article should be kept and then say whatever they think will let them win. In this case, the bloggy ranter doesn't get basic Wikipedia fundamentals. E.g. that Wikipedia isn't about what's true, it's about what's verifiable[1]. Suppose he thinks that his pal is the most important person ever. He might be right, but what matters is what can be proven from reliable sources[2]. Making deletion review more approachable to the personally outraged would certainly increase the number of reviews, but it wouldn't materially change the number of articles kept. What it would do is waste a lot of valuable editor and admin time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS
- gergles 15y ago
  You have deliberately ignored the most contentious part of the Wikipedia policy regarding articles, which is the "Notability" rule. Why an Internet-based encyclopedia with no editors, printed version, or quality control feels the need to limit articles to "notable subjects" is beyond me - it isn't like we're going to run out of electrons any time soon. In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed and that she worked in SEM. There were plenty of sources to back that up. That should be the relevant criterion for whether an article can exist in an Internet-based encyclopedia. There was no reason to delete this article other than "Ha ha, I know the rules of this bizarre system and will throw W:PDQXYZ links at you until you go away".
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
Chirael 15y ago
I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular community of bureaucracy. I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this article did. Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.
lincolnwebs 15y ago
My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.
wpietri 15y ago
For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page. The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing". Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion. So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.
- _delirium 15y ago
  That's what makes this particular discussion strange. Of all the problems Wikipedia does actually have, this isn't one of them: the system worked ok here, in a pretty straightforward way. It also lacks any evidence that the person in question was even interested in contributing to Wikipedia in the first place, except for the sole purpose of inserting a backlink to herself. Those aren't the kinds of contributions Wikipedia is most direly lacking, so when it comes to improving the community, I'd focus effort on not scaring away the people who are actually attempting to contribute things (other than self-promotion). I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person, though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Oops! I'm too late to edit, but as is probably obvious from context, I meant to write "the article was basically untouched until September 2011".
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
laurentoget 15y ago
If Wikipedia let Search Engine <strike>Abuse</strike> Marketing experts decide what is worthy to be on wikipedia, Wikipedia would end up being as relevant as ehow.com and experts-exchange.com.
njharman 15y ago
Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot. The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to is fail.
- waqf 15y ago
  I love how you spelled "idiosyncrasies" correctly but failed with "its".
SeanLuke 15y ago
Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page still has an "example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the revert button is so easy to press?
mrbill 15y ago
Can be summed up pretty easily: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt
richardw 15y ago
A few years back, the list page for "gtd software" was deleted, the data was lifted, moved to a private web page, the "gtd" page was pointed at the latter as a reference! I (strongly) suspected the private company of arranging it via a wiki-fu but couldn't prove it. Perfect example of gaming the system.
greenyoda 15y ago
"About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn’t notable enough." Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these standards.
- corin_ 15y ago
  Because a far higher number of people know about and have an interest in Buffy The Vampire Slayer than this Jessie person?
vacri 15y ago
Reading a lot of these and previous comments on HN, it seems: Steve Jobs, harsh policies, shiny product: Good! Jim Wales, harsh policies, shiny product: Bad!
spullara 15y ago
Looks like Danny's article on wikipedia has now come under scrutiny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist) "The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (November 2011)" Personally, I think the notability guidelines are pretty outrageous and wildly out of date. I mean, how long before there aren't any "legitimate publications" by their standard?
- yuvipanda 15y ago
  Quoting from the talk page: > Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them. --Jezebel'sPonyo And the tag has been removed.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
BasDirks 15y ago
"I’m a notable person on Wikipedia, as well as an expert in search marketing. So for what it’s worth, you’re seriously questioning whether Jessie should have her own page? That’s just crazy. The page should be restored, and immediately. She’s clearly notable." These lines make it clear enough what kind of clown we're dealing with.
SaltwaterC 15y ago
The Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is a heap of crap. Maybe somebody should donate Jimmy a dictionary, besides the cash he's looking for.
giddas 15y ago
First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud" Then they came for me
chalst 15y ago
The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you do not. Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth" is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the "truth" we work to here. " http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Flavius_Vanillus#Dialogue_with_FT2 http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi... If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might be more effective, which is why I have hopes for http://hypothes.is/index.html http://hypothes.is/index.html
budley 15y ago
What most amuses me about all this is that it is the most famous Jessie Stricchiola has ever been.
nomdeplume 15y ago
... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor Wikipedia
IsaacL 15y ago
From the action deletion discussion: "The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6 in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete !votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength. DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted, without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the sourcing. That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete" More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion.... Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non-experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all unfriendly deletionists.
test5625 15y ago
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 doesn't work in Opera web browser.
Aramgutang 15y ago
I'm unable to view the article; on Firefox, it never loads, and on Chrome, there are two scrollbars, but none of them actually scroll, so I can't get past the first page. Anyone care to provide a working copy?
Flibbler 15y ago
I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the uninitiated. We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules. Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want. I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing about who's in the right. How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances? Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?
nachteilig 15y ago
It seems like one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the admin class. They often adopt this "us vs them" bunker mentality like one discovers with a few bad police apples. This especially true with new and unregistered users.

427 points by InfinityX0 15y ago

daenz 15y ago

"Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters." -The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

angersock 15y ago
Flagged for removal. Notability?

ioquatix 15y ago

Yeah, I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia. In the end I just gave up trying to contribute. Some user even has a bot that now chases me around when I make edits...

csmt 15y ago

I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was deleted for no reason. Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.

yuhong 15y ago
I think a lot of the problem is that measuring editors by edit count is like measuring programmers by lines of code.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

javert 15y ago

First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's too hard to find the right place to go and complain. The author even managed to complain when someone helpfully pointed out that he went to the wrong place to revise a pointless and already settled argument. Seriously, this is a Wikipedia success story. If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure. If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching on a blog, and figured out how to revive an already-settled issue, he could have successfully managed to waste people's time on this. But no. "I demand to be listened to NOW, and if I'm not, Wikipedia is Closed and Unfriendly."

viraptor 15y ago
He pointed out exactly why he posted in a "wrong" place and presented how frustrating it is to get to the right information. He's saying that the process is broken and you're saying he did nor follow the process... I think your response doesn't make much sense. He did quite a lot (i.e. Tried to follow instructions) but was effectively sent to /dev/null. Regardless of whether the original article should be restored or not, I think this points out some interesting facts about how wikipedia works.
sullivandanny 15y ago
I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work. There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons. Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much. If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus. When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia. That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute. If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork. I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly. But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.

suivix 15y ago

I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.

gwillen 15y ago
That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).
- sabat 15y ago
  ... which is completely ridiculous, for two reasons. One, Wikipedia is based in America, and so naturally its English should be consistently American. Two, modern English as spoken and written in England has grammar problems -- e.g., the insistence on using plurals for singular objects, such as corporations ("Shell Oil have announced ..."). Therefore, American English is obviously preferable.
  - barkingcat 15y ago
    The English uses plural for corporations because they are referring to the mass of entities that make up the corporation (including people, brands, products). I don't think this is a grammatical problem, but a societal/philosophical viewpoint on what a corporation is. If you are American, of course it seems weird, but within the context of English society, it is internally self consistent with English grammar.
  - vacri 15y ago
    Ah, the good old "The English have poor command of English" argument. Nice work.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    The thing that really kills me about your comment is that you seem to think that your off-the-top-of-your-head points are somehow novel, as if no Wikipedian has ever mentioned them before. And that's exactly the mistake Sullivan makes, too. You're both wrong, of course: discussions on these topics go back years, with hundreds or thousands of smart participants. But at least you haven't done like Sullivan and a million others by following up your naiveté with outrage that you aren't being respected for your genius, insight, and expertise.

therandomguy 15y ago

I'm sorry about your case and the frustration that you had to face. However, they must be doing something right since Wikipedia has millions of user contributed pages? Also it might not be easy to administer a website of that size where anyone is free to go ahead and edit any of the hundreds of thousands of pages. Maybe they are settling for 99% satisfaction? That said, they do need our donations.

philwelch 15y ago
Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia. You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and other crap the core group of contributors has constructed. But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors. There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator", "bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count. You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages. Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun, eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics. There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see how the sausage is made.

true_religion 15y ago

The thrust of his arguement is that since he believes Jessica is more notable than he is, and wikipedia has an existing article about him then his opinion should count. However, an alternative conclusion could be that he isn't notable by wikipedia's standards and his article should also be deleted.

andreyvit 15y ago
That's not the point he's making, please re-read the article. He included the specific reasons he believes Jessica to be notable (with proper references).

nilchameleons 15y ago

It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia - obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica, but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.

william42 15y ago
The page on notability seems to imply that notability means having sources that don't require original research; which is a reasonable thing to do but probably should have just been put under that rule. Wikipedia avoids original research for a very good reason: to keep out physics cranks and the like, who would infest WP otherwise.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far it's a total class act and it has a lot to do with these policies. I'm sure you know that Wikipedia has to constantly police itself for large companies trying to mess with competitor's pages and how there are armies of political operatives out there trying to rewrite history through Wikipedia. This is why even experts like the OP are so scrutinized.
- FaceKicker 15y ago
  > You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. But why? If there's an article about your company in a legitimate publication, I don't see why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia article about it. How would it make Wikipedia a less useful or lower-quality resource? Are you saying it would get in the way of finding information about more "notable" subjects? I don't understand how. Sure, my attitude would make the disambiguation page for "John Smith" much longer, but I think it would still be reasonable as long as it's well-sorted into categories (as it is now).

jaylevitt 15y ago

While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure. MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.

jaylevitt 15y ago
Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?

aeontech 15y ago

Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether. Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad. [1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808 [2] http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...

philwelch 15y ago
The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games. See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no? Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with the minimum number of rules necessary to make that successful, but ultimately, the rules and red tape turned into the fun part of the game, and the encyclopedia-writing is just the grinding bit. If all you wanted was a huge encyclopedia unlimited by the constraints of physical book size, you'd have a deletion policy like this: "each statement of fact has to be cited from a reliable source, every article has to be composed entirely of statements of fact, any other content should be deleted". So if there are no reliably-sourced statements of fact about a given subject, you don't get an article about them. If I started a Wikipedia article about my neighbor's cat and wrote a lot of outrageous claims, they would all be deleted and we'd be left with a blank article, which would probably be deleted as a relatively boring matter of procedure. But what fun is that, when we can have a concept like "notability"? Ah! Suddenly, instead of all that boring shit about citing facts and removing uncited content, and just keeping whatever reliable information we have about something, we can have a massive PvE game where you get to find articles about subjects you don't care about and declare "this isn't notable!", and then you can lawyer a "consensus" of other players into agreeing with you. Or if another player disagrees, suddenly you have a massive PvP battle! Fun! Well, at least for a certain type of person who enjoys lawyering and gets off on will-to-power stuff that motivates one to try and delete articles from an encyclopedia, which is exactly the type of person that gravitates towards the project. And--believe it or not--these kinds of highly-social games, and one's success in them on Wikipedia, are a major factor in getting elected "administrator", at which point your duties now entail judging these lawyering games and actually deleting the articles!

nethsix 15y ago

Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.

redthrowaway 15y ago
>Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience. It's both. HN is unfriendly to new users who are used to the kind of interactions that predominate elsewhere. It is in many ways a close reddit analogue, and yet even veteran redditors will find themselves downvoted to oblivion here. I certainly did, when I first signed up. Like HN, Wikipedia requires getting used to. There is a "Wikipedia Way", which is very different from how people interact on other parts of the Internet. It can seem bureaucratic and neurotic, and it is, but it keeps things running relatively smoothly for the regulars, which is the important part. The people who take the time to learn the ropes are the ones who end up ensuring that the content is useful and informative. Yes, some people will be put off by the fact that only reliable secondary sources can be considered when determining the notability of a subject, but the restriction is there for a reason: it keeps the crap out. None of this means that Wikipedia is not open. If you waltzed into the Linux dev channel and insisted that something be done a certain way, you'd be banned. Linux is similarly complex, and there is a "Linux Way" of doing things. Take the time to learn that way and contribute, and you'll be welcomed. Insist they're wrong and write blog posts about how wrong they are, and you'll be ignored.

pessimizer 15y ago

His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened. I hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.

zbowling 15y ago
I don't understand why you are getting down-voted for your comment. This is exactly what happens. I've been in on more than 30 or 40 so AfD discussions. There is usually a deep debate of it. In the end it's not about votes either. We leave long explanations as our points for or against. We weigh the arguments. It prevents the "+1 me too! I agree!" responses from adding to it so consensus by vote doesn't always matter.
- gergles 15y ago
  The actual results were 7:6. On what planet is that "consensus"? Oh wait, another WikiMagicThing is that only some votes count and some votes count more than others and what votes count is completely up to the arbitrary decision of someone who has no accountability for their decisions. Right.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - zbowling 15y ago
    Consensus cannot be found in votes alone. Don't over simplify things. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:!VOTE#Straw_poll_guidelines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:!VOTE#Straw_poll_guid... If you see the world in black and white, you're missing important grey matter. ~Jack Fyock

whazzmaster 15y ago

I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information. I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary source and started randomly changing entries. His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!" Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with a colossal grain of salt. You should too.

tptacek 15y ago
It's an encyclopedia. You're not supposed to cite it in anything academic.
scarmig 15y ago
You should, and we should. I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.
- whazzmaster 15y ago
  That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.
DanBC 15y ago

billpatrianakos 15y ago

Sounds like a lot of whining to me. The author's reaction to this made him lose all credibility with me. First off, you think you're an expert? Maybe you are, maybe not but even experts aren't always right and just because you think in your infinite expert wisdom that so and so should have a Wikipedia page, the majority of us obviously don't. Secondly, so sorry the appeals process was so inconvenient for you. So far Wikipedia is doing just fine and your rant doesn't seem to be hurting them much. With all the garbage that people attempt to post on Wikipedia, there's a good reason for all the walls. In the end this comes off like a know-it-all's childish hissy fit for not getting his way. The world doesn't have to accept your point of view. Your response to this whole thing probably played a large role in you not getting what you wanted. Next time try to up think about why some of these things are in place, know that you can't jump ahead of someone else in charge just because you think you're better qualified (it's first volunteer, first served on Wikipedia) and just approach the issue with a lot more tact and less childish kicking and screaming next time. Some people love to talk about ideals like freedom, democracy, fairness, and all that but as soon as it inconveniences them they take the position that somehow those rules are for everyone else and they're somehow special. This guy doesn't fall in with the ideals thing I was talking about but he somehow managed to convince himself that everyone should just see thing his way. How dare a free, worldwide, not for profit, website with a 99% democratic submission and editing process not bend to your will! The audacity! Welcome to Wikipedia on the WWW where majority rules (even if you think they're all stupid-heads). I hope Jimmy Wales sends you a personal apology. Now let's all go edit the Wikipedia pages for "Cry Baby", "Brat", and "Temper Tantrum" and cite the author as a living example.

eykanal 15y ago
What's with all the hate? The author has a lot of valid points. 1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of bureaucracy, making it so that, technically anyone can edit, but realistically, only those who know how to game the system can edit, than the system as a whole is a partial failure. 2) Who are you to judge whether he's an expert? Given that he at least claims to work in the field, that makes him more of an expert than almost all of the wikipedia editors combined. They just know their own bureaucratic guidelines, he actually knows something about the article in discussion. In the interest of journalistic integrity, they should at least attempt to listen to his points. 3) His points about how difficult it is to contest something is completely spot-on. There's no good reason why all the "contest this" or "discuss that" pages are simply huge text pages, other than because no one gave them a proper UI. For new users, it's confusing as heck. Given the status wikipedia has nowadays, and how widely it's used, they simply can't expect every user to know or care about their arcane systems. The system needs a proper UI for these sorts of things, making it easy to (a) file a complaint, (b) find a previously filed complaint, (c) discuss the complaint, and (d) find the resolution. His story about wading through talk pages isn't unusual, and it's kind of shameful for wikipedia that they haven't made it easier to use since their inception.

HnNoPassMailer 15y ago

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction > Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.

gojomo 15y ago
Indeed, the strict 'encyclopedic' standard that got Wikipedia this far, as a defense against lots of problems, is now itself a damaging constraint. I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place. There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org http://thunkpedia.org. More discussion is at the project blog, http://infinithree.org http://infinithree.org (from the original codename).
- tommorris 15y ago
  I've been looking forward to adding to the list of unsuccessful inclusionist Wikipedia forks.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    A fork which only flips the 'inclusionist' bit is clearly the wrong approach. Wikipedia is still very good, and a fork with the same 'encyclopedic' mission, software, and general format – but inclusionist – would inherit all the stresses that made Wikipedia become deletionist. It'd also still have to compete with Wikipedia for the critical mass of attention and contributors who like everything about Wikipedia except for the deletionism. The reference-information successes have explored territory a bit further from Wikipedia, in content (Wikia, wikiHow, tvTropes) and format (StackOverflow, Quora, IMDB)... so that's what Thunkpedia is doing too. Whether it succeeds or fails, it won't fit neatly into your list of 'inclusionist Wikipedia forks'.
Tsagadai 15y ago
I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the past become our keys to understanding the past and our world. I think it is unfortunate that Wikipedia tries to assess what is important in the future by a clique's definition of what is important to them now.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).
- felipemnoa 15y ago
  >>Everyone should have a wikipedia page Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.
  - HnNoPassMailer 15y ago
    I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages, while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.
    - wpietri 15y ago
      It's an interesting notion, and Wikipedia used to be more like that, but Wikipedia has gone the other way for a lot of good reasons, including fairness to both readers and subjects. Readers are poorly served by a one-line biography for somebody obscure, and even more poorly served by the typical marginal biography, which is a couple paragraphs of poorly written cruft sans citations. Subjects are poorly served by shaky biographies because suddenly the top search result is a couple of semi-random sentences covering the few things that happen to be verifiable about them. For example, when you search for my mom's name, the top result is her obituary. I carefully wrote it in consultation with the family to give a balanced view of her life, so I'm happy to see it there. But suppose there were a Wikipedia article about her. If you went and pulled all her public records, I think you'd get a) her birthdate, b) her bankruptcy, c) her real estate broker's license, and d) the times she was the victim of a crime. I would hate it if she had an article in Wikipedia, because nothing that really matters about her life would be a part of it, and if I tried to put it in I'd (correctly) get [citation needed].

bdrocco 15y ago

I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site. But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem

nerfhammer 15y ago
http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/ http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
prodigal_erik 15y ago
We have an entire web full of whatever unverifiable stuff anyone felt like writing. Why should Wikimedia beg for more resources to expend mirroring content that isn't reliable enough to contribute to their goals?

mmahemoff 15y ago

Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit. I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.

gwern 15y ago
It will not surprise you to learn that you are far from the first to complain about the flat discussion pages. They have a lot of advantages - they're just easier to work with for a lot of things like rearranging sections, creating new sections, etc. - all stuff that your random social news site (like Hacker News) simply does not let you do because it would be a UI and vandalism nightmare. There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.
wpietri 15y ago
Anybody who's a serious Wikipedia editor can happily work the discussion pages. So a standard discussion system wouldn't benefit them at all. Novices who are smart and willing to put in a little time are also fine with it for basic use. So a standard discussion system really only benefits people who aren't smart or who aren't willing to put in a little time. But in making it easier for clueless noobs to express their opinions, will that help Wikipedia? Or will it hurt it by soaking up the time of people who do know what they're doing? As an example, consider Danny Sullivan's experience. If it had been easier for him to kick off a deletion review, he would have done it. But that would have been a waste of time, as he didn't have anything to say that would have changed the outcome. And that's true because he wasn't willing to take any time to understand what was going on. Or as another example, consider YouTube comments. How does it help Wikipedia to make it easier to let those people comment?

viraptor 15y ago

I wonder if the same thing will happen to stackoverflow? They have a number of levels of access, reviewing, meta-reviewing, administrators, etc. What level do you get to before becoming a bureaucratic place where everything is designed and decided by comitee?

mindcrime 15y ago
Many (most? all?) of the Stackexchange sites are already overwhelmingly bureaucratic. The difference between Wikipedia and SE is that on SE, the problem isn't "deletionism" it's "closequestionitis." That and a generally unwelcoming / unfriendly attitude expressed towards n00bs. But, ya know, it's working for them (for now at least) so what can ya do?

tptacek 15y ago

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Deletions include: * The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine * A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired * Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs * A promo for a not-yet-released book * An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song * A strategy guide for The Sims 3 * A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name) * An article about a youth football team ... and it just keeps going on like that. This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola". Let's look at her AfD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... Where we learn: * This is an article about an SEO consultant. * It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book. * That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written about in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo). It took two weeks for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out how many libraries carried her book. Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. In every one of those retarded articles, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. Every time. Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works. Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia. None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project. But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms. Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching. So, to repay you the kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE "Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA: RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL. They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree; would make everyone's life easier.

kondro 15y ago

Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right) that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons. I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact that should be categorized.

rospaya 15y ago
It already exists and is called Deletionpedia. http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

pithic 15y ago

I made this site awhile back, partly to address some of Wikipedia's conceptual peccadillos (notability, navigability, less than full openness). It didn't get traction, and I found it hard to market a knowledge-sharing site, in part because almost nobody is actively searching for knowledge-sharing solutions. The core idea was a bidirectionally weighted graph where users could set the weightings using slider controls. I've since moved on to another project. Anyhoo, the site is mobwa.com. Sooner or later I'll get around to taking it down.

kstenerud 15y ago

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates. So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.

mikeleeorg 15y ago
I would really, really love to see this. Even with the core MediaWiki platform too. MediaWiki is open source BTW. I would do this if I could, but alas, my UI skills are not quite there. Are there any sharp UI designers who want to do this? It would be a hell of an addition to one's resume, not to mention the world :)
zbowling 15y ago
There are simply way to many forms and inputs we have to deal with on Wikipedia to make it a one off for every case. We eat our dog food all over wikipedia for that reason. Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and it's easy. For it to get added as a special page, it has rise to a general enough thing to be needed by everyone using Mediawiki or something so pressing that could never or should never be on a Wikipage. Meta concepts usually only fit that (like permissions and stats and new page reviewing).
- kstenerud 15y ago
  "We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere." And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover. For a user trying to accomplish something quickly, however, it doesn't work. Reporting an issue, contributing to discussions or even FINDING them, navigating a voting page... Basically everything PROCESS related is a place where a wall of text is the most unwelcome thing you can be presented with. It's great that you dogfood; just remember that the old unix hacks ate their own dogfood too. But rather than make things friendlier for people, it just made the unix hacks more defensive about their unfriendly system.

trotsky 15y ago

If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.

ciscoriordan 15y ago

A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned. http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_knox_wikipedia_info_scr.php http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...

mikeleeorg 15y ago
I didn't know about the Wikipedia issues around that tragedy, but found it interesting from a sociological standpoint. So I tried looking for similar cases of the line between fact & opinion blurring on battleground Wikipedia, and found this, in case anyone else is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia (And it's on Wikipedia itself, natch.)

polemic 15y ago

bitter blogger is bitter.

coffeeaddicted 15y ago
Getting stuff rejected hurts a lot. I also skipped 1-2 donation rounds after that happened to me in the past. But then again I continued using Wikipedia so in the end I got over it ;-)

zotz 15y ago

Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the place.

ceejayoz 15y ago
> The above treatment of a dead young coder... That treatment was six people casting "delete" votes, which did not succeed. That's one hell of a small tolerance you have for disagreement. Your post is a little like saying "I won't go to New York City any more because a few people posted on Yelp that they didn't like this one restaurant I enjoyed going to."
- zotz 15y ago
  If I got treated in NYC like I've been treated and have seen people treated on Wikipedia, I'd never go back there either.
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are more than six people who'd treat you like that in NYC.
slyall 15y ago
The article wasn't created until after he had died as is made clear by the discussion and the edit history. People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the person was otherwise noteable. If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in history even if he was special to you.

rospaya 15y ago

The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.

zbowling 15y ago
We go out of our way on Wikipedia to make everyone feel welcome to edit anything. If someone makes a good faith mistake, more often or not, you are sent a welcome message fairly quickly by either a vandal patroller or an admin. New users will get hit up after their 2nd or 3rd edit with a Welcome message too. I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part of what I do. No body should feel afraid to edit Wikipedia. Ever. It's a public resource.
- iFire 15y ago
  If it fails once, why aren't we fixing it?

wpietri 15y ago

There's a lot of Wikipedia I think should be more transparent or more approachable. But deletion discussions aren't really one of them. Deciding what really fits in an encyclopedia isn't simple. Wikipedia has spent literally a decade working out a set of rules that balances utility, fairness, quality, and maintainability. Those rules will inevitably seem bureaucratic and opaque to people who haven't worked on a number of articles and then really considered the problem. Deletion discussions are perennial magnets for non-participants who believe that they or their (friend|band|ancestor|website) belong in Wikipedia. They are inevitably upset. Worse, in Pauli's phrase, they aren't even wrong: they start with the premise the article should be kept and then say whatever they think will let them win. In this case, the bloggy ranter doesn't get basic Wikipedia fundamentals. E.g. that Wikipedia isn't about what's true, it's about what's verifiable[1]. Suppose he thinks that his pal is the most important person ever. He might be right, but what matters is what can be proven from reliable sources[2]. Making deletion review more approachable to the personally outraged would certainly increase the number of reviews, but it wouldn't materially change the number of articles kept. What it would do is waste a lot of valuable editor and admin time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS

gergles 15y ago
You have deliberately ignored the most contentious part of the Wikipedia policy regarding articles, which is the "Notability" rule. Why an Internet-based encyclopedia with no editors, printed version, or quality control feels the need to limit articles to "notable subjects" is beyond me - it isn't like we're going to run out of electrons any time soon. In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed and that she worked in SEM. There were plenty of sources to back that up. That should be the relevant criterion for whether an article can exist in an Internet-based encyclopedia. There was no reason to delete this article other than "Ha ha, I know the rules of this bizarre system and will throw W:PDQXYZ links at you until you go away".
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

Chirael 15y ago

I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular community of bureaucracy. I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this article did. Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.

lincolnwebs 15y ago

My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.

wpietri 15y ago

For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page. The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing". Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion. So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.

_delirium 15y ago
That's what makes this particular discussion strange. Of all the problems Wikipedia does actually have, this isn't one of them: the system worked ok here, in a pretty straightforward way. It also lacks any evidence that the person in question was even interested in contributing to Wikipedia in the first place, except for the sole purpose of inserting a backlink to herself. Those aren't the kinds of contributions Wikipedia is most direly lacking, so when it comes to improving the community, I'd focus effort on not scaring away the people who are actually attempting to contribute things (other than self-promotion). I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person, though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.
wpietri 15y ago
Oops! I'm too late to edit, but as is probably obvious from context, I meant to write "the article was basically untouched until September 2011".

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

laurentoget 15y ago

If Wikipedia let Search Engine <strike>Abuse</strike> Marketing experts decide what is worthy to be on wikipedia, Wikipedia would end up being as relevant as ehow.com and experts-exchange.com.

njharman 15y ago

Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot. The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to is fail.

waqf 15y ago
I love how you spelled "idiosyncrasies" correctly but failed with "its".

SeanLuke 15y ago

Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page still has an "example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the revert button is so easy to press?

mrbill 15y ago

Can be summed up pretty easily: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt

richardw 15y ago

A few years back, the list page for "gtd software" was deleted, the data was lifted, moved to a private web page, the "gtd" page was pointed at the latter as a reference! I (strongly) suspected the private company of arranging it via a wiki-fu but couldn't prove it. Perfect example of gaming the system.

greenyoda 15y ago

"About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn’t notable enough." Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these standards.

corin_ 15y ago
Because a far higher number of people know about and have an interest in Buffy The Vampire Slayer than this Jessie person?

vacri 15y ago

Reading a lot of these and previous comments on HN, it seems: Steve Jobs, harsh policies, shiny product: Good! Jim Wales, harsh policies, shiny product: Bad!

spullara 15y ago

Looks like Danny's article on wikipedia has now come under scrutiny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist) "The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (November 2011)" Personally, I think the notability guidelines are pretty outrageous and wildly out of date. I mean, how long before there aren't any "legitimate publications" by their standard?

yuvipanda 15y ago
Quoting from the talk page: > Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them. --Jezebel'sPonyo And the tag has been removed.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

BasDirks 15y ago

"I’m a notable person on Wikipedia, as well as an expert in search marketing. So for what it’s worth, you’re seriously questioning whether Jessie should have her own page? That’s just crazy. The page should be restored, and immediately. She’s clearly notable." These lines make it clear enough what kind of clown we're dealing with.

SaltwaterC 15y ago

The Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is a heap of crap. Maybe somebody should donate Jimmy a dictionary, besides the cash he's looking for.

giddas 15y ago

First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud" Then they came for me

chalst 15y ago

The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you do not. Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth" is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the "truth" we work to here. " http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Flavius_Vanillus#Dialogue_with_FT2 http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi... If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might be more effective, which is why I have hopes for http://hypothes.is/index.html http://hypothes.is/index.html

budley 15y ago

What most amuses me about all this is that it is the most famous Jessie Stricchiola has ever been.

nomdeplume 15y ago

... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor Wikipedia

IsaacL 15y ago

From the action deletion discussion: "The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6 in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete !votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength. DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted, without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the sourcing. That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete" More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion.... Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non-experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all unfriendly deletionists.

test5625 15y ago

http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 doesn't work in Opera web browser.

Aramgutang 15y ago

I'm unable to view the article; on Firefox, it never loads, and on Chrome, there are two scrollbars, but none of them actually scroll, so I can't get past the first page. Anyone care to provide a working copy?

Flibbler 15y ago

I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the uninitiated. We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules. Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want. I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing about who's in the right. How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances? Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?

nachteilig 15y ago

It seems like one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the admin class. They often adopt this "us vs them" bunker mentality like one discovers with a few bad police apples. This especially true with new and unregistered users.