8 ms·

I joined this discussion at 32 comments and the all down-voted comments ones were people with the same sentiment. I really don't understand the anti-wikipedia s

I joined this discussion at 32 comments and the all down-voted comments ones were people with the same sentiment. I really don't understand the anti-wikipedia sentiment hackernews is having in general around this. I've been through the AfD process 30 to 40 times myself. I normally don't see it because I spend most of my time on vandal patrol where I've contributed code and countless hours to that effort over the last 5 years. Most of my deletes are speedy deletes for vandalism and not notability except where it's clear and someone is trying to make wikipedia their personal homepage. It's a massive multi-gigabyte site and it takes a lot work to maintain it. That's why admin's have an icon of a broom. I've seen this same type blog post all over the place. Someone burt hurt around an AfD. I've seen full campaigns to try and tarnish Wikipedia as having some kind of secret underground conspiracy against another group. It really doesn't work like that. You see that quickly if you get really involved in the site.

philwelch 15y ago
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. And it's absolutely retarded that by default, unless you spend the time and energy to learn dozens of acronyms and policies and "get really involved with the site", your input is at best ignored and at worst openly suspected of bad motives.
- tptacek 15y ago
  And yet somehow, as absolutely retarded as Wikipedia is, it continues to be the most successful reference site on the Internet. Funny how often stuff geeks find "absolutely retarded" turn out not to matter in the real world. I really shouldn't dignify your comment though, because it dubs "absolutely retarded" a process that got a non-notable SEO consultant's book considered by someone who could find out how many libraries carried it, and no money changed hands to make that happen. Seriously: the interface you're complaining about? Even if it had been perfect: that article wasn't a keep. Jessie Stricchiola doesn't belong in an encyclopedia; at least, not yet. Maybe she'll fix all of click fraud, instead of commenting about it; then she'll be notable.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    > I really shouldn't dignify your comment though You could try to comprehend my comment first, instead of interpreting it as an indirect ego-attack. Wikipedia's software and community aren't magically immune from criticism, especially from a usability standpoint, just because they produce a lot of useful content.
    - tptacek 15y ago
      Wikipedia's current UX produced the optimal decision in this case. That's what I'm trying to say. It's goofy to deride it as "absolutely retarded" when your case study is one where the system appears to have worked rather well. But of course, I don't think this is actually a UX discussion at all; the participants here are: * An SEO consultant who may have written her own promotional article on Wikipedia * Her friend, who was upset at the experience he had attempting to convince Wikipedia to keep that article * Hacker News, which is convinced that Wikipedia suffers from "rampant deletionism" (despite --- for the most part --- never having seriously participated in anything at Wikipedia) and viewing every story about Wikipedia through that lens.
      - philwelch 15y ago
        I guess you can frame it however you want. My main takeaway is that Wikipedia is completely opaque to someone who has a specific concern about something, but isn't already a committed contributor and insider to the community. If you're of the opinion that Wikipedia should be an insular community, than maybe they should be more honest about it, disable anonymous edits, and save everyone a lot of time. If you think Wikipedia should be accessible, well, it isn't, and that should be fixed, too. Either way, there's room for improvement.
        tptacek 15y ago
        Explain how so many dumb people can become so adept at navigating Wikipedia's processes in between shifts at the gas station and 17 hour Farmville jags, and I'll concede that you have a point. Mediawiki, and Wikipedia's incarnation of it in particular, is outmoded and obtuse. But it's not hard to do things on Wikipedia. If anything, it's too f'ing easy.
- lordlicorice 15y ago
  It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn Wikipedia policy before debating whether an article conforms to Wikipedia policy?
- hahainternet 15y ago
  While your first point may have merit, lets just consider your second point for a second. You say that it's ridiculous that to revert a community decision on a major international knowledge resource, someone should have to learn about their policies. Is it really that 'retarded'? I actually went and followed the instructions while actually paying attention, and I found that the header of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review fully explains the situation, and within 2 clicks you can be instructed on what to do and where to do it. This process is only opaque or difficult if your attention span is such that reading two paragraphs is a strain. Given that the writer of the original article didn't even bother to read the email he was sent then I think we can assume that the fault lies there.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    And, again: he could simply have clicked on the highlighted name of the admin who deleted the article, prominently displayed on the Wikipedia landing page for the deleted article, and then, like a human being, asked what to do next. He would have gotten a straight answer.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    It's not insurmountable, and if the stated purpose of the project is to exclude the input of insufficiently dedicated contributors then it's even a good idea. But if your tagline is "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit" and you allow anonymous edits from people who don't even have user accounts, you should at least have some type of clear venue for someone to suggest relevant facts and provide relevant sources and citations for, say, the "notability" of deleted article subjects. Then the insiders could judge those facts and sources and handle the bureaucracy themselves, or else explain the rationale, rather than shuffling him around the system with a thick instruction manual and a "do it yourself". Or you could have a deletion policy that's less complicated in itself. When I was a heavy contributor to Wikipedia and actually knew all these dumb policies, people argued that notability shouldn't be a criteria and verifiability was the only truly necessary criterion for including content. I find it hard to argue with that.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Maybe you're right on 20% but I'll tell you that 100% of the article was a temper tantrum. Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Instead he rattled on about how it was hard for him to nag people into seeing things his way and upset that all his effort went to waste. People who argue about the campaigns to tarnish Wikipedia's name and repeat the fact that Wikipedia still manages to be respectable and successful are right! The same things the author rails against are the very things that keep the riff raft out. The author didn't get his way after a lengthy, well reasoned, and obviously thoroughly thought through debate. Not every website needs a reworking of their user experience. Sometimes we make you jump through hoops for a reason. This process weeds out the people who would use Wikipedia to advertise. At the end, despite the author believing his submission was fitting of its own Wikipedia page, the community still disagreed. I call sour grapes.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    > Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Suggesting more efficient processes for Wikipedia is a never ending tarpit that doesn't get anywhere, no matter how committed you are and how established you are in the community. Any hidebound culture filled with red tape has horror stories and experiences that seem to justify every broken thing they do. If your answer to a usability critique is "they should learn the last several years of Wikipedia history, which isn't documented anywhere, and understand where all these rules came from", isn't that just a concession that you might as well not even bother unless contributing to Wikipedia is going to be one of your primary hobbies for the foreseeable future?
    - billpatrianakos 15y ago
      I see your point but I still believe Wikipedia should be hard to submit to. We obviously know Wikipedia's history and I've only contributed once. The rest I've read from other sources. I would ask why it's so very important for his contribution to be accepted? This really isn't about the process as much as it is the OP not getting his way. He just shields himself with an argument over user experience as an excuse to whine. It's all there in the subtext.
- scott_s 15y ago
  It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. I'm actually not convinced of that. That is, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing that people have to learn policy and acronyms in order to participate in a discussion. Wikipedia is - like any large, distributed group effort - entirely dependent on its processes. Without those processes, I don't think it could function. Your argument, as I understand it, is that people shouldn't have to become familiar with the processes that enable Wikipedia to function in order to be a part of how it functions. That seems contradictory to me.
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    I think the complaint is not that there are processes - clearly there must be - but that the processes are opaquely documented, poorly tracked, not transparent to start with, and arbitrarily and often capriciously enforced.
    - wpietri 15y ago
      Are they opaquely documented? I went to Google, typed in "Wikipedia deletion policy" and got what seems like some good documentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy Imagining it from Sullivan's perspective, I read down to the bit that says "If you disagree: Take the matter to Wikipedia:Deletion review", which leads me here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review Reading down a bit, I find this bit in bold: "This process should not be used simply because you disagree with a deletion debate's outcome [...]" which seems to directly address his condition. I agree that one needs a basic facility with Wikipedia and Mediawiki to usefully participate, which is definitely a barrier to novices. Which certainly makes it seem murky and hard to follow. It's also somewhat stochastic; a lot of outcomes depends on who happens to show up and participate. A lot of these problems, though, are things you personally could fix. Anybody can edit the documentation and get involved with processes like Articles For Deletion. If you think it could be better, please get involved! And if you don't like it and won't get involved, then please keep in mind that much of Wikipedia's software and all of its content comes from volunteers. Telling people that they aren't doing enough free work for you is unlikely to improve much of anything.
- antiterra 15y ago
  While I agree that it's clunky, there's something to be said for using the same functionality for articles and discussion pages. Adding a messaging system, a forum and an editable user profile would suddenly add three more interfaces for a potential contributor to learn.
  - brazzy 15y ago
    Except those would be interfaces suited for the task and easy to learn, instead of a single interface being abused for tasks it is completely unfit to do.
  - estel 15y ago
    wikiHow adopted the solution of templating message posts; but their implementation lacks any sort of threading: http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Main-Page http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Main-Page
nowarninglabel 15y ago
I think you miss the point, which is that the process is insanely opaque, which you note yourself by saying > if you get really involved in the site When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I've only managed to ever get 1 article on wikipedia (a bio of an expert in behavioral economics / negotiations) and that was after many deletion reviews. So while I agree that the blog author's actual article under discussion may deserve to be deleted, that's not the point. The point is, it's extremely difficult to participate, and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out. The process needs to be simplified. Wikipedia itself great, the creation/editing process is not. To all those who call for more participation in Wikipedia, don't ask me to participate in or like a process that sucks, fix the process first, just as the blog author suggests.
- geraldalewis 15y ago
  > it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest contributions to OSS, and I've never expected anyone to accept a patch based on the fact that I feel like I'm a competent programmer.
  - gergles 15y ago
    > I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Perhaps because the tagline of Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit", not "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit after conducting 20 hours of intense self-study into the arbitrary bureaucracy and 'standards' that let us have a page for every Pokemon and Justine Ezarik's 300-page iPhone bill but not a page for a band that's won 15 local music festivals and produced 3 records"?
    - zbowling 15y ago
Angostura 15y ago
I think there are two parts to the article. The specific issue of whether Ms X the SEO person is notable - I think you can ignore that as a bit of a rant. The other part of the article - the critique of the usability of the site looks much more useful and contains issues that could be addressed.

philwelch 15y ago

The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. And it's absolutely retarded that by default, unless you spend the time and energy to learn dozens of acronyms and policies and "get really involved with the site", your input is at best ignored and at worst openly suspected of bad motives.

tptacek 15y ago
And yet somehow, as absolutely retarded as Wikipedia is, it continues to be the most successful reference site on the Internet. Funny how often stuff geeks find "absolutely retarded" turn out not to matter in the real world. I really shouldn't dignify your comment though, because it dubs "absolutely retarded" a process that got a non-notable SEO consultant's book considered by someone who could find out how many libraries carried it, and no money changed hands to make that happen. Seriously: the interface you're complaining about? Even if it had been perfect: that article wasn't a keep. Jessie Stricchiola doesn't belong in an encyclopedia; at least, not yet. Maybe she'll fix all of click fraud, instead of commenting about it; then she'll be notable.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > I really shouldn't dignify your comment though You could try to comprehend my comment first, instead of interpreting it as an indirect ego-attack. Wikipedia's software and community aren't magically immune from criticism, especially from a usability standpoint, just because they produce a lot of useful content.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Wikipedia's current UX produced the optimal decision in this case. That's what I'm trying to say. It's goofy to deride it as "absolutely retarded" when your case study is one where the system appears to have worked rather well. But of course, I don't think this is actually a UX discussion at all; the participants here are: * An SEO consultant who may have written her own promotional article on Wikipedia * Her friend, who was upset at the experience he had attempting to convince Wikipedia to keep that article * Hacker News, which is convinced that Wikipedia suffers from "rampant deletionism" (despite --- for the most part --- never having seriously participated in anything at Wikipedia) and viewing every story about Wikipedia through that lens.
    - philwelch 15y ago
      I guess you can frame it however you want. My main takeaway is that Wikipedia is completely opaque to someone who has a specific concern about something, but isn't already a committed contributor and insider to the community. If you're of the opinion that Wikipedia should be an insular community, than maybe they should be more honest about it, disable anonymous edits, and save everyone a lot of time. If you think Wikipedia should be accessible, well, it isn't, and that should be fixed, too. Either way, there's room for improvement.
      - tptacek 15y ago
        Explain how so many dumb people can become so adept at navigating Wikipedia's processes in between shifts at the gas station and 17 hour Farmville jags, and I'll concede that you have a point. Mediawiki, and Wikipedia's incarnation of it in particular, is outmoded and obtuse. But it's not hard to do things on Wikipedia. If anything, it's too f'ing easy.
lordlicorice 15y ago
It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn Wikipedia policy before debating whether an article conforms to Wikipedia policy?
hahainternet 15y ago
While your first point may have merit, lets just consider your second point for a second. You say that it's ridiculous that to revert a community decision on a major international knowledge resource, someone should have to learn about their policies. Is it really that 'retarded'? I actually went and followed the instructions while actually paying attention, and I found that the header of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review fully explains the situation, and within 2 clicks you can be instructed on what to do and where to do it. This process is only opaque or difficult if your attention span is such that reading two paragraphs is a strain. Given that the writer of the original article didn't even bother to read the email he was sent then I think we can assume that the fault lies there.
- tptacek 15y ago
  And, again: he could simply have clicked on the highlighted name of the admin who deleted the article, prominently displayed on the Wikipedia landing page for the deleted article, and then, like a human being, asked what to do next. He would have gotten a straight answer.
- philwelch 15y ago
  It's not insurmountable, and if the stated purpose of the project is to exclude the input of insufficiently dedicated contributors then it's even a good idea. But if your tagline is "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit" and you allow anonymous edits from people who don't even have user accounts, you should at least have some type of clear venue for someone to suggest relevant facts and provide relevant sources and citations for, say, the "notability" of deleted article subjects. Then the insiders could judge those facts and sources and handle the bureaucracy themselves, or else explain the rationale, rather than shuffling him around the system with a thick instruction manual and a "do it yourself". Or you could have a deletion policy that's less complicated in itself. When I was a heavy contributor to Wikipedia and actually knew all these dumb policies, people argued that notability shouldn't be a criteria and verifiability was the only truly necessary criterion for including content. I find it hard to argue with that.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
Maybe you're right on 20% but I'll tell you that 100% of the article was a temper tantrum. Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Instead he rattled on about how it was hard for him to nag people into seeing things his way and upset that all his effort went to waste. People who argue about the campaigns to tarnish Wikipedia's name and repeat the fact that Wikipedia still manages to be respectable and successful are right! The same things the author rails against are the very things that keep the riff raft out. The author didn't get his way after a lengthy, well reasoned, and obviously thoroughly thought through debate. Not every website needs a reworking of their user experience. Sometimes we make you jump through hoops for a reason. This process weeds out the people who would use Wikipedia to advertise. At the end, despite the author believing his submission was fitting of its own Wikipedia page, the community still disagreed. I call sour grapes.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > Had the author looked into why these rules are necessary and suggested a more efficient process maybe he could have been taken seriously. Suggesting more efficient processes for Wikipedia is a never ending tarpit that doesn't get anywhere, no matter how committed you are and how established you are in the community. Any hidebound culture filled with red tape has horror stories and experiences that seem to justify every broken thing they do. If your answer to a usability critique is "they should learn the last several years of Wikipedia history, which isn't documented anywhere, and understand where all these rules came from", isn't that just a concession that you might as well not even bother unless contributing to Wikipedia is going to be one of your primary hobbies for the foreseeable future?
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    I see your point but I still believe Wikipedia should be hard to submit to. We obviously know Wikipedia's history and I've only contributed once. The rest I've read from other sources. I would ask why it's so very important for his contribution to be accepted? This really isn't about the process as much as it is the OP not getting his way. He just shields himself with an argument over user experience as an excuse to whine. It's all there in the subtext.
scott_s 15y ago
It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. I'm actually not convinced of that. That is, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing that people have to learn policy and acronyms in order to participate in a discussion. Wikipedia is - like any large, distributed group effort - entirely dependent on its processes. Without those processes, I don't think it could function. Your argument, as I understand it, is that people shouldn't have to become familiar with the processes that enable Wikipedia to function in order to be a part of how it functions. That seems contradictory to me.
- Vivtek 15y ago
  I think the complaint is not that there are processes - clearly there must be - but that the processes are opaquely documented, poorly tracked, not transparent to start with, and arbitrarily and often capriciously enforced.
  - wpietri 15y ago
    Are they opaquely documented? I went to Google, typed in "Wikipedia deletion policy" and got what seems like some good documentation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy Imagining it from Sullivan's perspective, I read down to the bit that says "If you disagree: Take the matter to Wikipedia:Deletion review", which leads me here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review Reading down a bit, I find this bit in bold: "This process should not be used simply because you disagree with a deletion debate's outcome [...]" which seems to directly address his condition. I agree that one needs a basic facility with Wikipedia and Mediawiki to usefully participate, which is definitely a barrier to novices. Which certainly makes it seem murky and hard to follow. It's also somewhat stochastic; a lot of outcomes depends on who happens to show up and participate. A lot of these problems, though, are things you personally could fix. Anybody can edit the documentation and get involved with processes like Articles For Deletion. If you think it could be better, please get involved! And if you don't like it and won't get involved, then please keep in mind that much of Wikipedia's software and all of its content comes from volunteers. Telling people that they aren't doing enough free work for you is unlikely to improve much of anything.
antiterra 15y ago
While I agree that it's clunky, there's something to be said for using the same functionality for articles and discussion pages. Adding a messaging system, a forum and an editable user profile would suddenly add three more interfaces for a potential contributor to learn.
- brazzy 15y ago
  Except those would be interfaces suited for the task and easy to learn, instead of a single interface being abused for tasks it is completely unfit to do.
- estel 15y ago
  wikiHow adopted the solution of templating message posts; but their implementation lacks any sort of threading: http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Main-Page http://www.wikihow.com/Discussion:Main-Page

nowarninglabel 15y ago

I think you miss the point, which is that the process is insanely opaque, which you note yourself by saying > if you get really involved in the site When I meet wikipedia people here in SF, they say, "Get involved!" Then, when I have tried to get involved, I get endless bureaucracy and everything eventually deleted. I've only managed to ever get 1 article on wikipedia (a bio of an expert in behavioral economics / negotiations) and that was after many deletion reviews. So while I agree that the blog author's actual article under discussion may deserve to be deleted, that's not the point. The point is, it's extremely difficult to participate, and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out. The process needs to be simplified. Wikipedia itself great, the creation/editing process is not. To all those who call for more participation in Wikipedia, don't ask me to participate in or like a process that sucks, fix the process first, just as the blog author suggests.

geraldalewis 15y ago
> it's extremely difficult to participate, I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? > and I don't want to need to spend a bunch at Wikipedia reading countless rules trying to figure that out You don't want to spend time contributing, you just want readers to accept your contribution? I hope I'm misreading your intent, as it sounds like you feel you're above the vetting process? I've made some modest contributions to OSS, and I've never expected anyone to accept a patch based on the fact that I feel like I'm a competent programmer.
- gergles 15y ago
  > I ask honestly: why should it be easy to participate? Perhaps because the tagline of Wikipedia is "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit", not "The free encyclopedia anyone can edit after conducting 20 hours of intense self-study into the arbitrary bureaucracy and 'standards' that let us have a page for every Pokemon and Justine Ezarik's 300-page iPhone bill but not a page for a band that's won 15 local music festivals and produced 3 records"?
  - zbowling 15y ago

Angostura 15y ago

I think there are two parts to the article. The specific issue of whether Ms X the SEO person is notable - I think you can ignore that as a bit of a rant. The other part of the article - the critique of the usability of the site looks much more useful and contains issues that could be addressed.