5 ms·

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,

by 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.
- hahainternet 15y ago
  You didn't even read your original email from Wikipedia, but yet you feel that the people who work on the site should obey your whims despite your inability to be in any way polite. This is not a Wikipedia failure, the failure is on your behalf. You can easily contribute and in fact someone was nice enough to help you in the right direction. Your response to this person was to arrogantly insult them and complain that they did not do more to help you. Once again, the failure here is not Wikipedias.
- bigiain 15y ago
  I'd be curious to know if this resistance to input from "subject matter experts" is the same for, say, notable physicists or notable cardiac surgeons? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that because the subject matter in question is "SEO" that there are a lot of prejudices and suspicion of ulterior motives from the wikipedia end. In one sense, I'm of the opinion that if you're promoting yourself as "an SEO expert" your contributions to wikipedia should be treated with significant additional scrutiny due to the possibility of conflict of interest.
  - Codayus 15y ago
    I am aware of multiple cases where subject matter experts have tried to fix errors relating to their area of expertise, had the changes reverted, and given up. The phenomenon is by no means limited to "SEO experts", but extends to, for example, law professors, including law professors widely regarded as the foremost experts in their speciality, trying to fix obvious non-controversial errors in an article relating to their speciality. All it takes is one editor deciding that this is a good opportunity to play a status game. And it doesn't take long hanging around Wikipedia to learn that for a significant fraction of the active user base, every opportunity is a good opportunity for a status game.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    I don't know that this is specifically resistance to contribution by subject matter experts. I think Wikipedia is more precisely indifferent to their subject matter expertise when it comes to considering direct contributions. If Danny Sullivan wants to edit Wikipedia, he's welcome to, but nobody's going to treat him with more deference than any other editor. What they do make great use of is indirect contributions. If a physicist or a cardiac surgeon writes and publishes a paper on the topic of their expertise, that is fantastic raw material for Wikipedia. Which is precisely the relationship that most subject matter experts have with any other encyclopedia, so it seems reasonable to me.
daenz 15y ago
> If the author had just been willing to | <snip> Many many many people have had these types of problems with Wikipedia. This isn't an "everybody else" problem, this is a Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia is a success, but it does have serious flaws in the bureaucracies of how it deals with contributors and new content. > 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. Ok, I'll bite. Why would Wikipedia have failed?
- quanticle 15y ago
  Wikipedia policy is that articles must meet certain criteria, of which "notability" is only one. Were there verifiable sources? Was the article promotional? Was there original research in the article? Wikipedia has guidelines to ensure that the facts cited in articles are verifiable and accurate. These guidelines are overstrict by design. It's better to have some true information deleted than it is to allow false or promotional material into the encyclopedia. You don't cry when your patch gets rejected for failing unit tests. Likewise, you shouldn't cry when your article gets deleted for violating Wikipedia guidelines. If you do have verifiable sources and a version of the article that is factual, then it shouldn't be difficult to recreate the article in a manner that allows it to avoid deletion.
mustpax 15y ago
You missed the part where the author provided several citations of publications mentioning the unnotable person and books published by the said person. He also goes on to state, if the goal of Wikipedia is to encourage subject matter experts to contribute expertise it's not making it particularly easy to do so. Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says as much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules This is not about entitlement. This is about Wikipedia raising ridiculous bureaucratic barriers to people making good faith contributions of knowledge. In so doing, it undermines its basic mission.
- zbowling 15y ago
  It's not bureaucratic as much you think. There is a system that is very easy to follow. 1. First they missed the delete review that normally waits about 7 days before taking action. 2. Upon discovering that their page was deleted found the archive delete review discussion. 3. Didn't understand what they were looking at and with disregard to the notes posted at the top saying that it's archive and not to edit it, edited it anyways. 4. A bot was triggered to an admin that someone edited a locked discussion and so he happily went to go help and left a message for the user on how to handle things and where to find delete review. 5. The user wanted to send a message to the editor and got confused at another point (the editor's talk page vs their user page). 6. etc etc etc... It's sad the user is frustrated but lets stop the blame game here. I've been doing vandal patrol on wikipedia for 5 years. It's not some evil hive mind of control or something.
  - viraptor 15y ago
    re. 3, he was given instructions: don't change this, follow that process instead. Is the process is incorrect, how do you proceed? re. 3,5 - there's a lot of confusion here, coming from an experienced web user. If he can't figure out what's going on, is it a user problem, or instructions issue?
    - zbowling 15y ago
j_baker 15y ago
Interesting. You point all the bad things the author did in regard to wikipedia's process, which I suppose is fair. But at the same time, you don't really make a compelling argument that the person in question doesn't belong in wikipedia. Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?
- mangodrunk 15y ago
  I will take your comment as your ability to ignore all the comments showing how the article was correctly deleted.
  - j_baker 15y ago
    You might also take it as my inability to see comments that didn't yet exist.
angersock 15y ago
HN is full of people who pride themselves on caring about UX, right? Here's (effectively) a first-time user trying to make sense of the process of Wikipedia--this should be a great time for introspection about how to make it more usable (especially when pestering the users for money!). So--perhaps--it might be worth it to do something other than dismiss his complaint?
tnuc 15y ago
>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching... Half an hour? You cannot be serious?
- tptacek 15y ago
  "It takes half an hour to challenge the community decisions of the website than in 10 years will simply be referred to as the encyclopedia? You can't be serious!" You sound like the guy Louis CK talks about, complaining about how slow his smartphone is. "Give it a second!", one wants to respond, "It's going to space!"
- wpietri 15y ago
  Yes, he's serious. By this point, Wikipedians have collectively spent hours on the specific article Sullivan's in an uproar about. Many of the volunteers he's addressing have spent years getting good at what they do. And they've collectively spent decades of effort figuring out how best to decide which articles are worth keeping and which aren't. And then documenting that in a fair bit of detail. If Sullivan wants to tell Wikipedians they're all stupid and wrong, the least he could do is spend enough time to understand whether he has something approaching a point.
- tommorris 15y ago
  Yes. In the Internet of old it was called lurking. You have to understand the community of people and their practices. It used to be considered good netiquette to spend a few days or weeks lurking in a forum before contributing. Then the user experience designers came along and said that anything that requires more than a modicum of brainpower was a "bad user experience". And everyone bends over and listens to them rather than considering the point that actually requiring people to learn the culture they are going into is a good thing.
  - Flibbler 15y ago
    I hate to have to point this out but we nerds no longer have the internet to ourselves, they let the rest of the world in and for good or bad, not everyone knows the rules; that's not their problem, that's Wikipedias unless we want the community to wither and die. Wikipedia's supposed to be open to all and there's nothing that says an expert (in some obscure field we have no knowledge of) is also going to have the same understanding and experience of online communities as us. It's nothing to do with UI/UX bias and more to do with looking at the processes we currently have from the perspective of someone who isn't us and doesn't have the same knowledge/understanding we do. Wikipedia at the moment presents it's self as one thing 'an encyclopedia anyone can edit' but attempting to do so can be a daunting and labyrinthine process that does put people off. We're not practicing what we preach. TL;DR - Go easier on the N00Bs and build a better FAQ.
notatoad 15y ago
>Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works that's kind of the point. the author tried to figure out how wikipedia works. they couldn't figure anything out because, as far as i can tell, all wikipedia documentation is designed to scare away anybody who isn't already an established wikipedia editor.
- hahainternet 15y ago
  He doesn't even bother to read the original email correctly before going on a rant, he clicks the link that shows him the differences, then acts surprised when he gets a comparison page! Not to mention that his attitude in the Talk page was reprehensible, I am glad he was not able to contribute to Wikipedia as the last thing it needs is more egotism and arrogance.
philwelch 15y ago
You are more right than you know; the purpose of Wikipedia is to provide an arena for exclusionary status games among core contributors, and so allowing outsiders to do anything without learning how to follow tons of red tape (and dozens of assorted acronyms) is indeed a failure. Providing the sum of all human knowledge, for free, to the entire world, however, might be better served by making Wikipedia's software and editing processes more accessible and usable to others.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Sigh. The purpose of Wikipedia is to make an encyclopedia. The mechanism by which that happens can, yes, be seen as a giant MMORPG. That is what happens when you try to make a machine out of half-evolved monkeys. Monkeys like to do monkey things. Wikipedia is indeed putting a lot of effort into making the software and editing process more accessible and usable to others. Smart and dedicated people have devoted years to that very thing. It's not an easy problem, and Wikipedia is doing it on a shoestring.
caf 15y ago
The author is saying, among other things, that the editors who decided that the person was not notable did not have the domain-specific knowledge needed to enable them to do the research to make that determination.
- prodigal_erik 15y ago
  Editors are specifically expected not to do that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research Wikipedia does not want to be a primary source. That's what Sullivan seems to have overlooked about why subject matter experts' opinions are not eagerly included—they haven't yet been vetted by any third party. Notability is defended by bringing citations, not complaints.
  - caf 15y ago
    Finding citations is exactly the kind of research I was referring to. Original research is not at all the same thing.
- wpietri 15y ago
  The author is wrong. If he were right, the point would be irrelevant. One of the users who ended up recommending deletion, DGG, is a professional librarian who makes a habit of rescuing biographies from the rubbish bin. The domain here isn't search engine marketing: it's biographies. Plenty of Wikipedians understand that domain, and understand especially well Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion about biographies. But his point is irrelevant because Wikipedia can't require topic expertise for participation. They have no way of verifying it, and to try ends up with a totally different beast. (For people who have tried the domain-expertise approach, check out Citizendium.) Wikipedia has to be maintainable by non-experts, because that's 99% of the people who want to volunteer significant time to make a free encyclopedia.
Duff 15y ago
I agree. The wikipedia people seem petty and bureaucratic at times, but their hearts are usually in the right place. My coworkers all got together a few years ago to create a gag article about another coworker as a practical joke. We built a web of subtle edits to associate our friend with some German rock band, a type of haircut, and a bunch of other things. We eventually got our article up, and there it sat for about a month. Some wikipedia person figured it out, though, and unraveled the whole network of references in a few hours.

by javert 15y ago

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.

hahainternet 15y ago
You didn't even read your original email from Wikipedia, but yet you feel that the people who work on the site should obey your whims despite your inability to be in any way polite. This is not a Wikipedia failure, the failure is on your behalf. You can easily contribute and in fact someone was nice enough to help you in the right direction. Your response to this person was to arrogantly insult them and complain that they did not do more to help you. Once again, the failure here is not Wikipedias.
bigiain 15y ago
I'd be curious to know if this resistance to input from "subject matter experts" is the same for, say, notable physicists or notable cardiac surgeons? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that because the subject matter in question is "SEO" that there are a lot of prejudices and suspicion of ulterior motives from the wikipedia end. In one sense, I'm of the opinion that if you're promoting yourself as "an SEO expert" your contributions to wikipedia should be treated with significant additional scrutiny due to the possibility of conflict of interest.
- Codayus 15y ago
  I am aware of multiple cases where subject matter experts have tried to fix errors relating to their area of expertise, had the changes reverted, and given up. The phenomenon is by no means limited to "SEO experts", but extends to, for example, law professors, including law professors widely regarded as the foremost experts in their speciality, trying to fix obvious non-controversial errors in an article relating to their speciality. All it takes is one editor deciding that this is a good opportunity to play a status game. And it doesn't take long hanging around Wikipedia to learn that for a significant fraction of the active user base, every opportunity is a good opportunity for a status game.
- wpietri 15y ago
  I don't know that this is specifically resistance to contribution by subject matter experts. I think Wikipedia is more precisely indifferent to their subject matter expertise when it comes to considering direct contributions. If Danny Sullivan wants to edit Wikipedia, he's welcome to, but nobody's going to treat him with more deference than any other editor. What they do make great use of is indirect contributions. If a physicist or a cardiac surgeon writes and publishes a paper on the topic of their expertise, that is fantastic raw material for Wikipedia. Which is precisely the relationship that most subject matter experts have with any other encyclopedia, so it seems reasonable to me.

daenz 15y ago

> If the author had just been willing to | <snip> Many many many people have had these types of problems with Wikipedia. This isn't an "everybody else" problem, this is a Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia is a success, but it does have serious flaws in the bureaucracies of how it deals with contributors and new content. > 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. Ok, I'll bite. Why would Wikipedia have failed?

quanticle 15y ago
Wikipedia policy is that articles must meet certain criteria, of which "notability" is only one. Were there verifiable sources? Was the article promotional? Was there original research in the article? Wikipedia has guidelines to ensure that the facts cited in articles are verifiable and accurate. These guidelines are overstrict by design. It's better to have some true information deleted than it is to allow false or promotional material into the encyclopedia. You don't cry when your patch gets rejected for failing unit tests. Likewise, you shouldn't cry when your article gets deleted for violating Wikipedia guidelines. If you do have verifiable sources and a version of the article that is factual, then it shouldn't be difficult to recreate the article in a manner that allows it to avoid deletion.

mustpax 15y ago

You missed the part where the author provided several citations of publications mentioning the unnotable person and books published by the said person. He also goes on to state, if the goal of Wikipedia is to encourage subject matter experts to contribute expertise it's not making it particularly easy to do so. Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says as much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules This is not about entitlement. This is about Wikipedia raising ridiculous bureaucratic barriers to people making good faith contributions of knowledge. In so doing, it undermines its basic mission.

zbowling 15y ago
It's not bureaucratic as much you think. There is a system that is very easy to follow. 1. First they missed the delete review that normally waits about 7 days before taking action. 2. Upon discovering that their page was deleted found the archive delete review discussion. 3. Didn't understand what they were looking at and with disregard to the notes posted at the top saying that it's archive and not to edit it, edited it anyways. 4. A bot was triggered to an admin that someone edited a locked discussion and so he happily went to go help and left a message for the user on how to handle things and where to find delete review. 5. The user wanted to send a message to the editor and got confused at another point (the editor's talk page vs their user page). 6. etc etc etc... It's sad the user is frustrated but lets stop the blame game here. I've been doing vandal patrol on wikipedia for 5 years. It's not some evil hive mind of control or something.
- viraptor 15y ago
  re. 3, he was given instructions: don't change this, follow that process instead. Is the process is incorrect, how do you proceed? re. 3,5 - there's a lot of confusion here, coming from an experienced web user. If he can't figure out what's going on, is it a user problem, or instructions issue?
  - zbowling 15y ago

j_baker 15y ago

Interesting. You point all the bad things the author did in regard to wikipedia's process, which I suppose is fair. But at the same time, you don't really make a compelling argument that the person in question doesn't belong in wikipedia. Should I take this to mean that the merits of the article in question are secondary to Wikipedia's processes?

mangodrunk 15y ago
I will take your comment as your ability to ignore all the comments showing how the article was correctly deleted.
- j_baker 15y ago
  You might also take it as my inability to see comments that didn't yet exist.

angersock 15y ago

HN is full of people who pride themselves on caring about UX, right? Here's (effectively) a first-time user trying to make sense of the process of Wikipedia--this should be a great time for introspection about how to make it more usable (especially when pestering the users for money!). So--perhaps--it might be worth it to do something other than dismiss his complaint?

tnuc 15y ago

>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching... Half an hour? You cannot be serious?

tptacek 15y ago
"It takes half an hour to challenge the community decisions of the website than in 10 years will simply be referred to as the encyclopedia? You can't be serious!" You sound like the guy Louis CK talks about, complaining about how slow his smartphone is. "Give it a second!", one wants to respond, "It's going to space!"
wpietri 15y ago
Yes, he's serious. By this point, Wikipedians have collectively spent hours on the specific article Sullivan's in an uproar about. Many of the volunteers he's addressing have spent years getting good at what they do. And they've collectively spent decades of effort figuring out how best to decide which articles are worth keeping and which aren't. And then documenting that in a fair bit of detail. If Sullivan wants to tell Wikipedians they're all stupid and wrong, the least he could do is spend enough time to understand whether he has something approaching a point.
tommorris 15y ago
Yes. In the Internet of old it was called lurking. You have to understand the community of people and their practices. It used to be considered good netiquette to spend a few days or weeks lurking in a forum before contributing. Then the user experience designers came along and said that anything that requires more than a modicum of brainpower was a "bad user experience". And everyone bends over and listens to them rather than considering the point that actually requiring people to learn the culture they are going into is a good thing.
- Flibbler 15y ago
  I hate to have to point this out but we nerds no longer have the internet to ourselves, they let the rest of the world in and for good or bad, not everyone knows the rules; that's not their problem, that's Wikipedias unless we want the community to wither and die. Wikipedia's supposed to be open to all and there's nothing that says an expert (in some obscure field we have no knowledge of) is also going to have the same understanding and experience of online communities as us. It's nothing to do with UI/UX bias and more to do with looking at the processes we currently have from the perspective of someone who isn't us and doesn't have the same knowledge/understanding we do. Wikipedia at the moment presents it's self as one thing 'an encyclopedia anyone can edit' but attempting to do so can be a daunting and labyrinthine process that does put people off. We're not practicing what we preach. TL;DR - Go easier on the N00Bs and build a better FAQ.

notatoad 15y ago

>Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works that's kind of the point. the author tried to figure out how wikipedia works. they couldn't figure anything out because, as far as i can tell, all wikipedia documentation is designed to scare away anybody who isn't already an established wikipedia editor.

hahainternet 15y ago
He doesn't even bother to read the original email correctly before going on a rant, he clicks the link that shows him the differences, then acts surprised when he gets a comparison page! Not to mention that his attitude in the Talk page was reprehensible, I am glad he was not able to contribute to Wikipedia as the last thing it needs is more egotism and arrogance.

philwelch 15y ago

You are more right than you know; the purpose of Wikipedia is to provide an arena for exclusionary status games among core contributors, and so allowing outsiders to do anything without learning how to follow tons of red tape (and dozens of assorted acronyms) is indeed a failure. Providing the sum of all human knowledge, for free, to the entire world, however, might be better served by making Wikipedia's software and editing processes more accessible and usable to others.

wpietri 15y ago
Sigh. The purpose of Wikipedia is to make an encyclopedia. The mechanism by which that happens can, yes, be seen as a giant MMORPG. That is what happens when you try to make a machine out of half-evolved monkeys. Monkeys like to do monkey things. Wikipedia is indeed putting a lot of effort into making the software and editing process more accessible and usable to others. Smart and dedicated people have devoted years to that very thing. It's not an easy problem, and Wikipedia is doing it on a shoestring.

caf 15y ago

The author is saying, among other things, that the editors who decided that the person was not notable did not have the domain-specific knowledge needed to enable them to do the research to make that determination.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
Editors are specifically expected not to do that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research Wikipedia does not want to be a primary source. That's what Sullivan seems to have overlooked about why subject matter experts' opinions are not eagerly included—they haven't yet been vetted by any third party. Notability is defended by bringing citations, not complaints.
- caf 15y ago
  Finding citations is exactly the kind of research I was referring to. Original research is not at all the same thing.
wpietri 15y ago
The author is wrong. If he were right, the point would be irrelevant. One of the users who ended up recommending deletion, DGG, is a professional librarian who makes a habit of rescuing biographies from the rubbish bin. The domain here isn't search engine marketing: it's biographies. Plenty of Wikipedians understand that domain, and understand especially well Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion about biographies. But his point is irrelevant because Wikipedia can't require topic expertise for participation. They have no way of verifying it, and to try ends up with a totally different beast. (For people who have tried the domain-expertise approach, check out Citizendium.) Wikipedia has to be maintainable by non-experts, because that's 99% of the people who want to volunteer significant time to make a free encyclopedia.

Duff 15y ago

I agree. The wikipedia people seem petty and bureaucratic at times, but their hearts are usually in the right place. My coworkers all got together a few years ago to create a gag article about another coworker as a practical joke. We built a web of subtle edits to associate our friend with some German rock band, a type of haircut, and a bunch of other things. We eventually got our article up, and there it sat for about a month. Some wikipedia person figured it out, though, and unraveled the whole network of references in a few hours.