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my son created an account and tried to add a page for his middle-school, only to have the page deleted and told it's not notable enough to have a page. after t
by novaleaf 3y ago
my son created an account and tried to add a page for his middle-school, only to have the page deleted and told it's not notable enough to have a page.
after that my son hasn't tried editing Wikipedia.
- gopher_space 3y agoI think this is the central issue with both Wikipedia and stack overflow, and a bit of a problem for HN. I don't need people less interested in a subject than I am deciding what I read about. I've worked on two separate projects where having every middle-school in the state on wikipedia would've helped, so tell your son I appreciate his work!
- Washuu 3y agoSimilar here. I corrected some statistics on a page for a vehicle. I had multiple different years of the owner and service manuals in had to verify these facts and able to source them. Nope, some overlord of the page just kept reverting it with no recourse. I never bother to try editing again. It is not worth my time to deal with that.
- Tomte 3y agoSimilar. I use Wikipedia a lot, but will under no circumstances whatsoever contribute anything, after a bad experience with my first edit.
- zozbot234 3y agoThe trick with any sort of halfway controversial edits is to discuss at length your planned contribution on the talk page, wait until nobody complains, then make the actual edit. If you do get reverted, you can point out that you had announced the edit in the talk page and no objections had been raised. It helps to post on the message boards for relevant WikiProjects too. Yes, Wikipedia policy pages say to be "bold" with editing, but that only really works for things like fixing typos. If you know that someone might object, you should focus on in-depth discussion and let concerns be addressed that way.
- vasco 3y agoThe trick with any sort of halfway controversial edits is to not do them, if you want to remain sane.
- Avamander 3y agoYou can also revert the revert a few times, that requires arbitration usually.
- Analemma_ 3y agoSeems like Wikipedia should change their policy to say "be bold for trivial edits only" then. In fact, if they would just say "you're only allowed to make serious changes if you're part of the elite cabal of senior editors who have devoted their lives to memorizing our volumes of policy" instead of continuing to call itself "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit", we wouldn't be having this discussion; people would at least know what the situation is.
- JohnMakin 3y agobut if "free encyclopedia anyone could edit" was literally true, wikipedia would make itself almost worthless in very little time.
- jeremyjh 3y agoExactly, these people are doing the valuable work of screening the crackpots, for no pay - and the only cost is that they'll also build an impregnable fortress to prevent almost anyone from ever changing anything unless they feel very strong with it and can traverse challenge social and organizational obstacle courses. This keeps the rate of change at a nice, steady, manageable trickle.
- mongol 3y agoI did that once. Got banned, with no recourse. It was a country-specific Wikipedia though, not the English one. But I did not even edit the page, just made the case for it on the Talk page, someone else edited it and I got banned with a bunch of others. Never again.
- shagie 3y agoThere are roughly 13,000 middle schools in the United States. Creating a page for each one and curating it represents a significant amount of volunteer work. The "not notable enough" is in place in part to try to limit the amount of pages that need curating. Whether or not that's a good thing is debatable - but the allocation of volunteer curation resources are often stretched quite thin on sites that crowdsource their content.
- rurp 3y agoBut his son already did the work to add his school! I don't see why adding one random middle school requires that all 13,000 be added and kept up to date. Wikipedia has all sorts of inconsistencies in what is covered, because it is so driven by volunteers and what they want to invest time into. I don't see how people adding public institutions that they are interested in adding goes against the spirit or practical realities of Wikipedia.
- jl6 3y agoThey have to draw a line somewhere or the project gets spammed with self-promotional articles. Requiring notability does a decent job of keeping the spam out.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoI'd believe this if it wasn't for the thousands upon thousands of pages about the most absurdly obscure Star Trek and Star Wars shit. If wikipedia policies result in pages for minor subplot characters in auxiliary pulp trash novels for a space western series but not for a real-life school, we have a problem.
- jl6 3y agoA lot of those articles should probably be merged or deleted, but a lot of them probably do pass the notability standard, because despite being absurdly fancrufty, the subjects still get covered in independent sources, in a way that schools don’t.
- zlg_codes 3y agoyeah, that sort of stuff is ridiculous. When fictional characters and movies and other bullshit are getting Wikipedia pages, they can document a community school or some shit. At least it's real!