8 ms·

> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. Henc

> On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. Hence articles about species and populated places are generally not deleted, even if the topic is only weakly sourced This is not why this happens on Wikipedia; sourcing is a factor, but notability derived from the nature and quality of the cited sources is the most commonly used criteria to delete articles. For example, Wikipedia once had a notability guideline that a person who completed in a sport at the international level was probably notable, so a weakly sourced article on, say, a footballer with a single international cap could be notable enough to avoid deletion. But then editors removed this guideline and fell back onto the general notability guideline (GNG), which is much stricter for people: substantial biographical coverage from reliable mainstream sources at the national level. Match reports don't count (too routine), no local interviews (too primary), no enthusiast publications (not reliable enough), etc. Of course, this meant that hundreds of stubs and dozens of full articles about women's international footballers would never meet GNG due to a relative lack of mainstream media coverage, even if they won a World Cup. So all it took was one editor to decide to do almost nothing but flag hundreds such articles since the opening of the Women's World Cup this summer, almost all of which were deleted. So it's not this reason that keeps moths and places: > On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. But rather, very different standards of notability are why there are more low-traffic articles on items and places that can't sue Wikipedia editors for libel.

ghaff 3y ago
>reliable mainstream sources at the national level And does anyone actually believe this is applied consistently? I'm willing to bet that there are countless Wikipedia articles about people in technical, academic, local political, etc., etc. roles/positions that wouldn't meet that criterion.
- starkparker 3y ago
  No Wikipedia policy is applied consistently. They're applied when editors want to apply them to justify a decision. That's how every individual decision on Wikipedia works; precedent doesn't even apply.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  nope, but that's the neat part (well, neat in the "morbidly scary" sort of way). They don't need to. If a topic is niche enough there won't be enough wiki editors well versed enough to argue for nor against the obviously asinine requirements. they can quash women's football for lacking a national mainstream source but then pull out some esoteric source for their own pet project uninhibited (again, assuming the topic is niche enough to go under the "mainstream editor" radar). Classic lawful evil behavior.
- hk__2 3y ago
  Of course it’s not 100% consistent, just like any rule in any project where tens of thousands of people work together. That’s what makes Wikipedia great: you don’t have to get your article validated by some random comitee of 20 persons; you just read the rules and try to respect them. It won’t be perfect, but you can always ask someone with more experience to review the article.
jovial_cavalier 3y ago
I don't believe this is actually enforced. I created a small website called "Man of the Hour", which filtered Wikipedia with the Wikidata code Q8441 (man - male adult human), selected a random entry every hour, and displayed it. I would go there a few times a day, and noticed that almost every single article it gave me was some random amateur athlete, with only a results page as a source. [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8441 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8441
- starkparker 3y ago
  I gave an example of enforcement. It takes an editor to flag the article for deletion. Chances are, like the women's footballer stubs up until an editor decided to go through all of them, there hasn't been an editor motivated to do so.
  - teachrdan 3y ago
    To say the quiet part out loud: It only takes one misogynist to go out of their way to flag hundreds of pages of women athletes. No one is out there flagging men's pages to delete for the same reasons. I was at an early Wikipedia meetup and a woman editor told me that women porn stars were more likely to get (and keep) a profile page than a woman sci-fi author. It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's quality has been diminished by this level of misogyny.
    - starkparker 3y ago
      There's a part of that, but the women's stubs are also unjustifiable because of the foundational mandates around sourcing and notability. Once upon a time, subject-specific notability guidelines carved out exceptions by arbitrarily defining typical notability for a given subject at a lower standard than general notability. Those exceptions are being rolled back toward the higher bar of general notability. When a women's sport gets 1/10th the mainstream coverage of the men's equivalent, there's no policy justification to have articles under general notability. Even if Wikipedia was capable of banning every editor whose focus is in deleting articles about women (and it's sincerely not capable of banning any of them), the core policies themselves would justify not creating articles — especially for almost all who played in the decades before the recent boom in coverage and investment — because the coverage wasn't and isn't there.
wavemode 3y ago
It's really funny - just this morning I was reading the Wikipedia article for Interstate 94, which led me to the WikiProject that maintains it (US Roads) and an open letter they wrote a month ago that they were leaving Wikipedia and starting their own wiki, because of how painful it's been having their articles deleted due to arbitrary notability guidelines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume10/Issue01 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roa...
- starkparker 3y ago
  A couple points on their complaints: you _can_ cite primary sources, but you can't _rely_ on them. That's beyond notability altogether. It's still relevant to why Roads would want to fork (there aren't a lot of news publications doing feature stories on random highways) but it comes down to informal nonenforcement giving way to a few hardasses flagging everything they can as soon as their attention is turned toward a particular domain. Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. And WP:GEOROAD is a subject-specific notability guideline, like WP:NSPORT is. Those aren't immutable; NSPORT was fundamentally changed in 2022,[1] and those changes now justify all these deletions of international footballer articles created before. If the Roads editors have all left, there'll be little or no opposition to changing WP:GEOROAD,[2] and deletions of that content from WP could get done even faster. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Sports_notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geographic_features)#Requesting_feedback_re._GEOROAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geo... - and I see some of the editors who participated in NSPORT-related deletions this summer also in there advocating to change GEOROAD and make it more explicitly defer to GNG, and therefore easier to delete articles.
  - gregmac 3y ago
    > Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. Pretty much sums up the problem with every community-run moderated site. It directly leads to the downfall because contributors get discouraged and leave, and eventually all that's left is people with the same view as the heavy-handed moderators. Having hours of work wiped out from editors/moderators who've spent less than a minute on it sucks. Stackoverflow is another notable example of this.
terribleperson 3y ago
Wikipedia's notability guidelines have been too tight for a very long time. I remember being flabbergasted that highly popular webcomics couldn't get a wiki article.
- rendall 3y ago
  I remember reading an accusation from someone upset about a page deletion that the notability guidelines are so tight in order to drive traffic to Fandom. At the time I thought it was absurd, but I find myself wondering about that a lot.
  - equinoxnemesis 3y ago
    WMF has had nothing to do with Wikia/Fandom for years (apparently they shared some hosting costs back in 2009). Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom. So at the very least that's not actively motivating the continued state of the notability guidelines, though I don't know if it's possible the original motivation was as you suggest.
    - rendall 3y ago
      Yes, and that was what I myself thought as I scrolled past. "Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom." Except these two facts niggle. He's on the board, and will always be the founder. He is SV aristocracy in a town where the money you earn is less important than the people you know and the things you have built. He will always have influence and it's naive to believe he wouldn't. So, it is not entirely accurate to say he has no control, just less control than he did. Is it too little control? Perhaps, perhaps not. If I wanted to construct a set of policies that drove traffic to another site, I would make them quite like Wikipedia has now e.g. Wikipedia is not a gamers manual. Then I would target for deletion much of the nerd content, quite like now. This is quite a coincidence. I'm not attached to this theory. Also, I don't like spreading negativity. But to me it seems at least somewhat plausible, and that possibility disturbs me a little.
jordigh 3y ago
I wrote an article on a somewhat niche person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mexican_Runner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mexican_Runner I had to fight a bit with other editors to convince them that this guy was notable. He had coverage in Polygon and Kotaku, so that seemed enough to me, but it was a difficult task at first. Is some dude who pushes buttons very quickly notable?
- starkparker 3y ago
  The primary thing that establishes general notability on Wikipedia for biographies is significant coverage from reliable secondary sources independent from both each other and the subject. If someone gets significant coverage from multiple reliable secondary sources for taking a shit, they can have a Wikipedia article. They don't have to win an award for it (though it'd help) or contribute to society (though it'd help). The action itself might be broadly, by common sense, not notable. Only the notoriety of the person _in published sources_ is relevant.
- lurkerforawhile 3y ago
  That's a good read. I'm glad it wasn't deleted.
- chongli 3y ago
  Thanks for this! I watched some of NESMania back in the day. TMR is great! A bit weird that the article includes details of his mother's medical condition though!
  - jordigh 3y ago
    He's public about it, and the citation for that is an NPR interview, which seemed to me like a reputable source.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Ahhh okay. I had no idea he was interviewed by NPR!
hammock 3y ago
I was looking up Gall Wasps last week... :)
flipbrad 3y ago
Thank you for this answer. The only thing I'd add is that Wikipedia is not a monolithic entity, and whilst you're probably referring to English Wikipedia (not unreasonable, given this is HN), my understanding is that other versions of Wikipedia have their own, sometimes quite different notability requirements.
michaelhoney 3y ago
Why did the notability-obsessed editor take it on themselves to flag the World Cup footballers? Sounds like a dick move.

ghaff 3y ago

>reliable mainstream sources at the national level And does anyone actually believe this is applied consistently? I'm willing to bet that there are countless Wikipedia articles about people in technical, academic, local political, etc., etc. roles/positions that wouldn't meet that criterion.

starkparker 3y ago
No Wikipedia policy is applied consistently. They're applied when editors want to apply them to justify a decision. That's how every individual decision on Wikipedia works; precedent doesn't even apply.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
nope, but that's the neat part (well, neat in the "morbidly scary" sort of way). They don't need to. If a topic is niche enough there won't be enough wiki editors well versed enough to argue for nor against the obviously asinine requirements. they can quash women's football for lacking a national mainstream source but then pull out some esoteric source for their own pet project uninhibited (again, assuming the topic is niche enough to go under the "mainstream editor" radar). Classic lawful evil behavior.
hk__2 3y ago
Of course it’s not 100% consistent, just like any rule in any project where tens of thousands of people work together. That’s what makes Wikipedia great: you don’t have to get your article validated by some random comitee of 20 persons; you just read the rules and try to respect them. It won’t be perfect, but you can always ask someone with more experience to review the article.

jovial_cavalier 3y ago

I don't believe this is actually enforced. I created a small website called "Man of the Hour", which filtered Wikipedia with the Wikidata code Q8441 (man - male adult human), selected a random entry every hour, and displayed it. I would go there a few times a day, and noticed that almost every single article it gave me was some random amateur athlete, with only a results page as a source. [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8441 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8441

starkparker 3y ago
I gave an example of enforcement. It takes an editor to flag the article for deletion. Chances are, like the women's footballer stubs up until an editor decided to go through all of them, there hasn't been an editor motivated to do so.
- teachrdan 3y ago
  To say the quiet part out loud: It only takes one misogynist to go out of their way to flag hundreds of pages of women athletes. No one is out there flagging men's pages to delete for the same reasons. I was at an early Wikipedia meetup and a woman editor told me that women porn stars were more likely to get (and keep) a profile page than a woman sci-fi author. It's pretty clear that Wikipedia's quality has been diminished by this level of misogyny.
  - starkparker 3y ago
    There's a part of that, but the women's stubs are also unjustifiable because of the foundational mandates around sourcing and notability. Once upon a time, subject-specific notability guidelines carved out exceptions by arbitrarily defining typical notability for a given subject at a lower standard than general notability. Those exceptions are being rolled back toward the higher bar of general notability. When a women's sport gets 1/10th the mainstream coverage of the men's equivalent, there's no policy justification to have articles under general notability. Even if Wikipedia was capable of banning every editor whose focus is in deleting articles about women (and it's sincerely not capable of banning any of them), the core policies themselves would justify not creating articles — especially for almost all who played in the decades before the recent boom in coverage and investment — because the coverage wasn't and isn't there.

wavemode 3y ago

It's really funny - just this morning I was reading the Wikipedia article for Interstate 94, which led me to the WikiProject that maintains it (US Roads) and an open letter they wrote a month ago that they were leaving Wikipedia and starting their own wiki, because of how painful it's been having their articles deleted due to arbitrary notability guidelines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roads/Newsletter/Issues/Volume10/Issue01 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_U.S._Roa...

starkparker 3y ago
A couple points on their complaints: you _can_ cite primary sources, but you can't _rely_ on them. That's beyond notability altogether. It's still relevant to why Roads would want to fork (there aren't a lot of news publications doing feature stories on random highways) but it comes down to informal nonenforcement giving way to a few hardasses flagging everything they can as soon as their attention is turned toward a particular domain. Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. And WP:GEOROAD is a subject-specific notability guideline, like WP:NSPORT is. Those aren't immutable; NSPORT was fundamentally changed in 2022,[1] and those changes now justify all these deletions of international footballer articles created before. If the Roads editors have all left, there'll be little or no opposition to changing WP:GEOROAD,[2] and deletions of that content from WP could get done even faster. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Sports_notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geographic_features)#Requesting_feedback_re._GEOROAD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(geo... - and I see some of the editors who participated in NSPORT-related deletions this summer also in there advocating to change GEOROAD and make it more explicitly defer to GNG, and therefore easier to delete articles.
- gregmac 3y ago
  > Because there's very little effort required to flag articles for deletion, and the burden to keep is often on the contributors doing research on a 7-day timeframe if there are even just one or two editors supporting deletion, most times the contributors eventually give up running the research treadmill and the content gets deleted anyway. Pretty much sums up the problem with every community-run moderated site. It directly leads to the downfall because contributors get discouraged and leave, and eventually all that's left is people with the same view as the heavy-handed moderators. Having hours of work wiped out from editors/moderators who've spent less than a minute on it sucks. Stackoverflow is another notable example of this.

terribleperson 3y ago

Wikipedia's notability guidelines have been too tight for a very long time. I remember being flabbergasted that highly popular webcomics couldn't get a wiki article.

rendall 3y ago
I remember reading an accusation from someone upset about a page deletion that the notability guidelines are so tight in order to drive traffic to Fandom. At the time I thought it was absurd, but I find myself wondering about that a lot.
- equinoxnemesis 3y ago
  WMF has had nothing to do with Wikia/Fandom for years (apparently they shared some hosting costs back in 2009). Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom. So at the very least that's not actively motivating the continued state of the notability guidelines, though I don't know if it's possible the original motivation was as you suggest.
  - rendall 3y ago
    Yes, and that was what I myself thought as I scrolled past. "Jimmy Wales also hasn't exerted control over Wikipedia policy in a long time, and as of this year no longer even nominally has the right to overrule ArbCom." Except these two facts niggle. He's on the board, and will always be the founder. He is SV aristocracy in a town where the money you earn is less important than the people you know and the things you have built. He will always have influence and it's naive to believe he wouldn't. So, it is not entirely accurate to say he has no control, just less control than he did. Is it too little control? Perhaps, perhaps not. If I wanted to construct a set of policies that drove traffic to another site, I would make them quite like Wikipedia has now e.g. Wikipedia is not a gamers manual. Then I would target for deletion much of the nerd content, quite like now. This is quite a coincidence. I'm not attached to this theory. Also, I don't like spreading negativity. But to me it seems at least somewhat plausible, and that possibility disturbs me a little.

jordigh 3y ago

I wrote an article on a somewhat niche person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mexican_Runner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mexican_Runner I had to fight a bit with other editors to convince them that this guy was notable. He had coverage in Polygon and Kotaku, so that seemed enough to me, but it was a difficult task at first. Is some dude who pushes buttons very quickly notable?

starkparker 3y ago
The primary thing that establishes general notability on Wikipedia for biographies is significant coverage from reliable secondary sources independent from both each other and the subject. If someone gets significant coverage from multiple reliable secondary sources for taking a shit, they can have a Wikipedia article. They don't have to win an award for it (though it'd help) or contribute to society (though it'd help). The action itself might be broadly, by common sense, not notable. Only the notoriety of the person _in published sources_ is relevant.
lurkerforawhile 3y ago
That's a good read. I'm glad it wasn't deleted.
chongli 3y ago
Thanks for this! I watched some of NESMania back in the day. TMR is great! A bit weird that the article includes details of his mother's medical condition though!
- jordigh 3y ago
  He's public about it, and the citation for that is an NPR interview, which seemed to me like a reputable source.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Ahhh okay. I had no idea he was interviewed by NPR!

hammock 3y ago

I was looking up Gall Wasps last week... :)

flipbrad 3y ago

Thank you for this answer. The only thing I'd add is that Wikipedia is not a monolithic entity, and whilst you're probably referring to English Wikipedia (not unreasonable, given this is HN), my understanding is that other versions of Wikipedia have their own, sometimes quite different notability requirements.

michaelhoney 3y ago

Why did the notability-obsessed editor take it on themselves to flag the World Cup footballers? Sounds like a dick move.