11 ms·
It is so fantastic that we have a single resource where I can find information on an unremarkable Peruvian moth, a random small town in Iran, or a type of readi
by chadash 3y ago
It is so fantastic that we have a single resource where I can find information on an unremarkable Peruvian moth, a random small town in Iran, or a type of reading material designed for Sunday reading in Victorian England. Before the advent of the internet this stuff wouldn’t be worth the paper it is published on. But now the cost of storing it in the cloud is effectively zero, so we get this amazing long tail of information that is just incredibly valuable. Thank you to the people who contribute and maintain this stuff!
Edit: what would be really cool is if I could leave a note on a page saying "hey, I visited this page and I'm looking to connect with other people interested in the Peruvian Foovius Barivius Moth"... ping me
- cosmojg 3y agoFor as much as I love Wikipedia as it is, I yearn for a return to the days of their old inclusionist[1] policy. [1] https://gwern.net/inclusionism https://gwern.net/inclusionism
- qingcharles 3y agoI came across a huge article on some magazine marked for deletion the other day. The amount of work that had gone into the article was extensive, and it made me sad. While my little article about a small pile of sand in the middle of nowhere has ironically been translated into nine languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeqertaq_Avannarleq
- xhkkffbf 3y agoI agree. Why throw away perfectly good work out of some bizarre idea about "notability?" What's notable now is now what will be notable in the future. Stop the destruction! End this dumb rule and make Wikipedia truly open to all.
- CYR1X 3y agoProbably because you exploit this. Do this a bunch in some what that leans towards whatever your agenda is and eventually one of those articles will get a bunch of hits and attention before anyone considers revising it.
- username3 3y agoWikipedia should allow more articles to have sections for viewpoints from different biases and agendas.
- flenserboy 3y ago"Notability" is a weapon used by many editors to get rid of entries that go against their views. I've seen it used to keep off pages for highly-selling authors who hold contrary views to certain viewpoints even though they are better-known and more highly cited than authors who advocate to those certain viewpoints who get to keep their pages. No one should be able to gatekeep in this way, and there should not be anyone who can claim a page and make it theirs, keeping off any and all edits or challenges by others.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agoI've seen it getting used against... games in particular language Same game in a one language can be extremely notable and well known to everyone, while in other it'd get deleted without a trace. Sometimes it feels like "racism" based on countries (countrism?)
- contravariant 3y agoI wish there was an easier way to find deleted articles. You can see all versions of an article but if it's gone there seems to be no way to see anything.
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y agoThere used to be deletionpedia.org but it has gone dormant (again)
- duskwuff 3y agoThis is by design. A lot of articles, especially recently created ones, get deleted because they consist of material which is legally problematic (e.g. text which is a copyright violation, which is libelous, which violates someone's privacy, etc).
- mardifoufs 3y agoDoesn't that use a different deletion mechanism? Afaik you can still see "normally" deleted edits and articles if you have the revision link, but those who have been deleted for legal reasons are wiped from history and their revision or edit link are blanked out
- duskwuff 3y ago> Doesn't that use a different deletion mechanism? Generally not. There is a separate process called "oversight" [1] which behaves the way you're describing, but it can only be invoked by a very small number of privileged users, and is only used in extreme cases. [1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oversight_policy https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Oversight_policy
- theonlybutlet 3y agoAs far as I understand, this idea of notability also adversely impacts science publishing, it's not published by reputable journals unless it's notable, which skews incentives and also means there's probably some useful information out there left to someone else to rediscover.
- hk__2 3y agoNothing is destroyed; the person who wrote the article can ask an admin to get its text back so they can publish it elsewhere. I don’t get this "Wikipedia should host everything" mentality: if you disagree with the rules, just publish your work somewhere else. The number of articles need to be manageable, so rules are needed.
- permo-w 3y agosurely if an article exists and is shown to be being poorly maintained, then perhaps it's worthy of dormancy or maybe deletion. why do it pre-emptively?
- doix 3y agoIt's interesting, I always theoretically appreciated that wikipedia could be inaccurate and that the strict requirements could be a bad thing, but I never saw it in action. Until I was in Tunisia and wanted to visit all the star wars film sites that I could. There's a place called Ksar Ouled Soltane [0] and I couldn't quite figure out if it was a film site or not. The locals assured me it was, but there were conflicting reports online. I saw that it was listed on Wikipedia, but when I went through the history, I saw that someone tried to remove it [1]. Unfortunately their removal was reverted and their source [2] wasn't considered good enough. That said, I read their article and I'm much more inclined to believe them than the wikipedia editors. It was the first time I ever encountered something like this in the wild. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksar_Ouled_Soltane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksar_Ouled_Soltane [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbavandy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbavandy [2] https://galaxytours.com/research/ksar-ouled-soltane-debunking-the-myth/ https://galaxytours.com/research/ksar-ouled-soltane-debunkin...
- irrational 3y agoI have to wonder if Billinghurst even looked at the galaxytours website. I suspect not. It is telling that he never responded to Davin Dbavandy question about why it is not a reliable source.
- epolanski 3y agoI have followed Ukraine-Russia related articles for a decade and saw thousands of articles changed over that time span. One thing that always stood out to me was how till 2014 you could find many references on wikipedia to pre-2014 attempts from Crimea to secede from Ukraine. "Crimea" (quoted, as it may refer to different groups/leaderships in Crimea) tried to split from Ukraine twice already during Soviet times. But this whole thing got edited away in years across dozens of articles. I think there's a significant nuance between the two narratives.
- ghaff 3y agoI'm much more inclusionist than deletionist. And find there's a lot of both randomness and irony in what qualifies as notable, especially given that notability can be a very local thing. On the other hand, it's probably fair that not everyone who has ever had their name in print or has a website should have a Wikipedia entry.
- bombcar 3y agoThey need something like "wikipedia adjacent" to allow for inclusionism without authority - it's not like they're limited by the size of a bound encyclopedia.
- ethbr1 3y agoWikipedia is an excellent example of something that would benefit from an upstream, less-authoritative, more-comprehensive source. Unfortunately, it seems so ossified that that work can only be done within Wikipedia (notable article, standards, etc). A far more reasonable approach would have been to have CommonPedia... and then regularly pull qualifying information into Wikipedia.
- hk__2 3y ago> They need something like "wikipedia adjacent" to allow for inclusionism without authority This is called "The Web". You’re free to write whatever you want, it’s just not on Wikipedia. > it's not like they're limited by the size of a bound encyclopedia. No, but articles still require maintainance, so it’s false to say that just because this is "in the cloud" you can have an infinite number of articles.
- ethbr1 3y agoThe ugliest edit war I've seen involved a less-known adult film star. Her legal name had appeared in some public court filings, and some user had added it to her Wikipedia page with the reference. Someone else (purportedly one of her co-stars) had requested removal. A Wikipedia editor then got involved, and refused to budge from the position the original actress was notable enough to merit inclusion of her legal name. Cue months of back-and-forth deletions and reversions. Finally, I think a year later, someone quietly edited the legal name out and it stuck. Sometimes people with a little power are the greatest assholes. Probably because they sought the little power.
- skitter 3y agoMe likewise – it makes me happy that there's an 800 word article about a pond that used to exist for less than 200 years in my town.
- twic 3y agoI genuinely believe that deletionism is rooted in mental disorder. It comes from a similar place as neurotic clean-freak OCD. Deletionists should be given ECT, not admin accounts.
- placesalt 3y agoI still miss the Trivia sections.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago> an unremarkable Peruvian moth Miloš Moth (Jan 3, 2023–May 17, 2023) was a Peruvian moth,
- slingnow 3y ago> Before the advent of the internet this stuff wouldn’t be worth the paper it is published on. Are you seriously suggesting that before the internet no one published or wrote about highly niche or uninteresting subjects? That you couldn't find mundane facts from history or nature written down somewhere? > Edit: what would be really cool is if I could leave a note on a page saying "hey, I visited this page and I'm looking to connect with other people interested in the Peruvian Foovius Barivius Moth"... ping me No, that wouldn't be cool at all. What we'd then have is a social network of people competing for some kind of points or popularity, or to prove who was the most expert or most interested in the subject. And we would see the quality of the articles degrade, and suddenly no one wants to work on the unpopular stuff. And people like you would be left wondering, "gee, why is it no one wants to write unpopular articles for this encyclopedia?"
- xhkkffbf 3y agoExactly. What does this person think the Wikipedia articles are based upon? There's supposed to be a real source!
- ethbr1 3y agoWikipedia's origination was almost 100% self-reported, uncited facts. The standards came much later.
- TheFreim 3y ago> No, that wouldn't be cool at all. It also already exists, but in a better form. If you find something is interesting, write about it. Then to connect with others you can find others who have written or researched it and then write them a letter/email/message. They will likely not be an island and you can get connected to a group of people who are genuinely interested in a subject without the degenerative downsides of a social media platform.
- chadash 3y ago> Are you seriously suggesting that before the internet no one published or wrote about highly niche or uninteresting subjects? That you couldn't find mundane facts from history or nature written down somewhere? Yes and no. I'm suggesting that before Wikipedia, no encyclopedia could have published an article about Jack Wade, Alaska, an incorporated community of probably < 100 people (I picked this place somewhat randomly off of google maps). If you put even one sentence about every town similar to that in an encyclopedia, you'd have an encyclopedia set that no one would be able to afford. > What we'd then have is a social network of people competing for some kind of points or popularity, or to prove who was the most expert or most interested in the subject. This really depends. For example, maybe I'm an American with a grandparent from Volosianka, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine (again, I picked this semi-randomly). Population is about 1500 today. There's probably a handful of people in the world who speak English and who have a particular interest in that town. Maybe my grandpa is from there and i'm looking to learn more about his life and i'd love to chat with someone else who knows more about the place. I think that there are a lot of articles on the long tail of wikipedia where there's probably only a few people in the world who care about the topic and if I'm one of them, I'd be interested in meeting with others. Obviously, there's plenty of topics where this isn't the case. I don't know how you'd implement this feature, because I don't think you want to turn wikipedia into a meeting room for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict [1]. But for these very very niche things, it could serve as an interesting meeting place. [1] In other words, I am stating a problem here... not a solution
- huytersd 3y agoI’m so thankful for Wikipedia. It’s the best part of the internet in my opinion.
- jghn 3y agoThe eye opener for me was in the mid-late aughts. A coworker for whatever reason did a deep dive into the world's knowledge of GI Joe lore. Before that I wouldn't have even considered there *was* lore that was that well fleshed out. And before Wikipedia I assume that knowledge was known by only a small handful of supernerds. And yet, some random person went down the wikipedia rabbit hole for a few hours and knew everything.
- dejawu 3y agoRe: your edit - I've always thought it'd make for a fun pet project to take the hyper-engagement-driven approach that social media apps take but apply it to Wikipedia. Like a Tiktok-style vertical feed of articles that tries to find the ones you'll engage with most (WikiScroll [0] is already part of the way there). Or a chatroom corresponding to each article that people can banter in, kind of like you described. Or a DM feature but you can only send Wikipedia links. The idea of Wikipedia as a social catalyst is super interesting to me. [0]: https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io/ https://wikiscroll.blankenship.io/
- halftheopposite 3y agoVery shameless plug on your last "Edit:", but I think it fits perfectly one feature that a web extension I made does: https://webcursors.click/ https://webcursors.click/. There's a feature to write a note and leave it on the page for others (with the extension installed) to see and maybe have luck someone contacting you.
- TheFreim 3y agoThe design on your site reminds me of kinopio.club, I like the sort of whimsical style that doesn't compromise on utility. > There's a feature to write a note and leave it on the page for others Your site says that "nothing is stored." Does writing a note require everyone to be on the site at the same time? At first I thought it was sort of like the old "Dissenter" extension that added comments sections to every page, but the description seems to indicate a more live chat style.