5 ms·

As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off a

by a3_nm 3y ago

As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?

starkparker 3y ago
It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there. It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway. Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies. > you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles? Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead. CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia. If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust. And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules.
crdrost 3y ago
It's really not a bad idea, but the problem is structuring. It's odd but I come back to Cantrill's "Fork Yeah" talk here. So the basic problem is one of resources: forked wikis still have hosting costs, so they need either a patron community (often just one person) or a for-profit company (with lots of crappy ads), while Wikipedia by all accounts is rolling in the dough with very little accountability (i.e. when professors and teachers remind students "don't believe 100% of what you read on Wikipedia," the-Wiki-community is blamed moreso than Wikipedia-the-nonprofit). If you fork Wikipedia then you lose out on the resources. Without that, you do have a "forkophobic" culture which is why you get this "governance orgy" -- the notability guidelines and so forth. But the difference is, Cantrill's software examples expect the software to have some sort of editorial control, so if the Linux or Apache foundations take on some project it's because it's used by thousands or millions of people and they don't really take kindly to "oh yeah upstream was vandalized by someone who came in and just made every request to the Apache server return 'HTTP 499 BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS'." In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. Worse, those random passersby are usually the people who visited the article in the first place and saw that it was up for deletion, so they'll say things that are nonsensical like "oh, he's a very notable figure in the XYZ community, Googling him turns up 40,000 results so clearly he is notable."
- starkparker 3y ago
  > In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. 20! That'd be a luxury. Here are some of those footballer AfDs from this month that passed with 1 vote on top of the nomination. Without passing any judgment on whether the subjects are notable, see if you notice any participation trends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yvrase_Gerville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Aba%C3%AFna_Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yavgeniya_Khatskevich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Veronika_Maksimenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
eterm 3y ago
Indeed it's not a bad thing at all. I remember in the early days of wikipedia it seemed like every single Pokemon had their own article while actually notable real life topics had scant information. Migrating all that cruft to a separate pokemon wiki was an improvement for everyone, no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article. With a separate wiki, Pokemon fans can go into as much depth and lore as they like. Personally I think the criteria for fictional things should be even stronger. There ought to be an article about the work of fiction itself, but not articles about fictional characters or events unless they're notable outside of the work of fiction. This keeps wikipedia about facts, not fictional canon. e.g. Pikachu derves a separate article, Charmander does not. To elaborate further, the Charizard article has a "Physical characteristics" section. It's a anime / computer game. It's not a physical being, so any "physical characteristics" is not factual information, it's fictional information. Wikipedia does a poor job at separation of fact and fiction in articles about fictional beings.
- registeredcorn 3y ago
  I'm sure there's some very good reasons for it, but what exactly is the reason why there cannot be articles for very niche things like articles for each Pokemon individually listed on Wikipedia? I find the idea of having a complete tome of everything to be an incredibly neat idea! At a guess, it's probably something like practical restraints around "not enough people monitoring for quality", or the fact that the hard drive space to save all of this information is not free and unlimited, or that simply, it might be better served by niche communities who will be devoted to caring far more about such specific topics? I just find it frustrating that there isn't a kind of...ultra, super mega colossal set of all human knowledge of everything stored under a single digital roof. I suppose that ideal itself probably isn't practical for the reasons mentioned...it just seems so neat in concept. Just one place for everything.
  - timeinput 3y ago
    > because I don't want it that way. - some editor probably In my handful of encounters trying to contribute to wikipedia it's always been such a frustrating experience. "not enough people monitoring for quality" is one way to put it, but I've often found it to be one very zealous person monitoring for their idea of quality. It ends up quite frustrating, especially if you're a domain expert. I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.
lmm 3y ago
If the Wikimedia foundation spent its immense donation income on supporting those specialized wikis - something far more appropriate to the spirit in which it was given than what it actually gets spent on - then I'd agree with you. But in practice these other wikis are generally struggling to keep the lights on and resort to advertising, and then the censorship that follows from that.

by a3_nm 3y ago

starkparker 3y ago

It's not a bad thing in concept, and probably won't be a bad thing in execution since Roads has a pretty solid core of editors moving. They've already implemented technical improvements on AARoads, like better and newer road maps. The potential is there. It's often a bad thing in practice, much like how splitting off entirely separate social networks for specific subjects is often a bad idea. If there aren't enough people or activity, interest wanes. If the project relies on one or two heavily active editors, it collapses when they're unavailable. If you never hit critical mass for SEO or can't/don't know how to promote your content, all the work is done in a vacuum and everyone sees the Wikipedia stubs over your stuff anyway. Fandom (as in the company), as awful as it is, largely exists by virtue of participation in the subjects where there's enough interest to facilitate it; the mass wiki-farm infrastructure gives them enough of a SEO boost to dominate even some of the wikis that fork off of Fandom to escape its policies. > you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles? Developing an article on a separate wiki has additional technical and administrative overhead. CC BY-SA requires attribution. Wikipedia attributes contributions by article history. The only way to import article history is via Special:Import. You have to be an admin or have import rights to use Special:Import on Wikipedia. If you can clear all those hurdles, then in theory you can import changes with the required attribution from another wiki. But if the imported changes conflict with changes made in parallel on Wikipedia, resolving them can be very contentious, especially if any of the editors involved disagree on the resolution. Or the import might fail, because Special:Import isn't particularly robust. And as the forked wiki admin, do you decide to set up scheduled imports _from_ Wikipedia to keep up with upstream? These forks often split because Wikipedia is deficient in some way beyond just editing the text. AARoads' fork's use of improved maps, for instance, would probably break the article on Special:Import because it looks like they use different wiki templates and modules.

crdrost 3y ago

It's really not a bad idea, but the problem is structuring. It's odd but I come back to Cantrill's "Fork Yeah" talk here. So the basic problem is one of resources: forked wikis still have hosting costs, so they need either a patron community (often just one person) or a for-profit company (with lots of crappy ads), while Wikipedia by all accounts is rolling in the dough with very little accountability (i.e. when professors and teachers remind students "don't believe 100% of what you read on Wikipedia," the-Wiki-community is blamed moreso than Wikipedia-the-nonprofit). If you fork Wikipedia then you lose out on the resources. Without that, you do have a "forkophobic" culture which is why you get this "governance orgy" -- the notability guidelines and so forth. But the difference is, Cantrill's software examples expect the software to have some sort of editorial control, so if the Linux or Apache foundations take on some project it's because it's used by thousands or millions of people and they don't really take kindly to "oh yeah upstream was vandalized by someone who came in and just made every request to the Apache server return 'HTTP 499 BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS'." In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. Worse, those random passersby are usually the people who visited the article in the first place and saw that it was up for deletion, so they'll say things that are nonsensical like "oh, he's a very notable figure in the XYZ community, Googling him turns up 40,000 results so clearly he is notable."

starkparker 3y ago
> In Wikipedia you get this strange direct democracy by "whoever happened to show up." Deletion votes are often done with like, 20 votes or less of just random passersby. 20! That'd be a luxury. Here are some of those footballer AfDs from this month that passed with 1 vote on top of the nomination. Without passing any judgment on whether the subjects are notable, see if you notice any participation trends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yvrase_Gerville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Aba%C3%AFna_Louis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Yavgeniya_Khatskevich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Veronika_Maksimenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

eterm 3y ago

Indeed it's not a bad thing at all. I remember in the early days of wikipedia it seemed like every single Pokemon had their own article while actually notable real life topics had scant information. Migrating all that cruft to a separate pokemon wiki was an improvement for everyone, no matter how "notable" you think Beedrill might be, it doesn't need it's own separate wikipedia article. With a separate wiki, Pokemon fans can go into as much depth and lore as they like. Personally I think the criteria for fictional things should be even stronger. There ought to be an article about the work of fiction itself, but not articles about fictional characters or events unless they're notable outside of the work of fiction. This keeps wikipedia about facts, not fictional canon. e.g. Pikachu derves a separate article, Charmander does not. To elaborate further, the Charizard article has a "Physical characteristics" section. It's a anime / computer game. It's not a physical being, so any "physical characteristics" is not factual information, it's fictional information. Wikipedia does a poor job at separation of fact and fiction in articles about fictional beings.

registeredcorn 3y ago
I'm sure there's some very good reasons for it, but what exactly is the reason why there cannot be articles for very niche things like articles for each Pokemon individually listed on Wikipedia? I find the idea of having a complete tome of everything to be an incredibly neat idea! At a guess, it's probably something like practical restraints around "not enough people monitoring for quality", or the fact that the hard drive space to save all of this information is not free and unlimited, or that simply, it might be better served by niche communities who will be devoted to caring far more about such specific topics? I just find it frustrating that there isn't a kind of...ultra, super mega colossal set of all human knowledge of everything stored under a single digital roof. I suppose that ideal itself probably isn't practical for the reasons mentioned...it just seems so neat in concept. Just one place for everything.
- timeinput 3y ago
  > because I don't want it that way. - some editor probably In my handful of encounters trying to contribute to wikipedia it's always been such a frustrating experience. "not enough people monitoring for quality" is one way to put it, but I've often found it to be one very zealous person monitoring for their idea of quality. It ends up quite frustrating, especially if you're a domain expert. I've corrected articles where things I've written have been cited and had the changes reverted. It was enough to just give up.

lmm 3y ago

If the Wikimedia foundation spent its immense donation income on supporting those specialized wikis - something far more appropriate to the spirit in which it was given than what it actually gets spent on - then I'd agree with you. But in practice these other wikis are generally struggling to keep the lights on and resort to advertising, and then the censorship that follows from that.