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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

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!
- tptacek 15y ago
  It's been a long time since I participated in Wikipedia's "community", and I agree that the community is dysfunctional, but I think it's going to be comically hard to justify that the largest and most successful reference project on the Internet --- and possibly in the entire world --- is a "side effect". I sure hope it isn't a side effect, because if it is, we need more communities like Wikipedia's.
- sethg 15y ago
  On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    That eloquently summarizes of my take on Wikipedia, and the reason I stopped participating several years ago.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it in the first place.
    - zbowling 15y ago
      sigh It doesn't work like that.
derleth 15y ago
Everyone is a deletionist about some things. Now, watch people try to delete my post by downvoting it.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Ha! You were right! You totally got downvoteed. I tried to help you with an up vote. It's probably true that Wikipedia is a big game of politics but that's just a side effect of community involvement. It may suck sometimes but what other way is more democratic? Do we give one person the ability to be the Decider or do we put up with a lot of ego games? I go for ego. At least in that scenario there can be some people to challenge decisions.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nnythm 15y ago
Interestingly, I recognized the handle DGG from the article partially because he is a notable inclusionist.

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!

tptacek 15y ago
It's been a long time since I participated in Wikipedia's "community", and I agree that the community is dysfunctional, but I think it's going to be comically hard to justify that the largest and most successful reference project on the Internet --- and possibly in the entire world --- is a "side effect". I sure hope it isn't a side effect, because if it is, we need more communities like Wikipedia's.
sethg 15y ago
On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand.... 95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.
- tptacek 15y ago
  That eloquently summarizes of my take on Wikipedia, and the reason I stopped participating several years ago.
- philwelch 15y ago
  That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you make the sausage. Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it in the first place.
  - zbowling 15y ago
    sigh It doesn't work like that.

derleth 15y ago

Everyone is a deletionist about some things. Now, watch people try to delete my post by downvoting it.

billpatrianakos 15y ago
Ha! You were right! You totally got downvoteed. I tried to help you with an up vote. It's probably true that Wikipedia is a big game of politics but that's just a side effect of community involvement. It may suck sometimes but what other way is more democratic? Do we give one person the ability to be the Decider or do we put up with a lot of ego games? I go for ego. At least in that scenario there can be some people to challenge decisions.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

nnythm 15y ago

Interestingly, I recognized the handle DGG from the article partially because he is a notable inclusionist.