5 ms·

Anyone else find it a bit "conflict of interest"-y that Wikipedia often limits creation of niche articles because they have to be 'notable' enough, meanwhile it

by rahidz 2y ago

Anyone else find it a bit "conflict of interest"-y that Wikipedia often limits creation of niche articles because they have to be 'notable' enough, meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem?

YawningAngel 2y ago
I have had this exact thought and am deeply irritated by it
pocketarc 2y ago
I don’t even really understand why things have to be notable for Wikipedia. If people wanted to maintain all of the Runescape articles in Wikipedia (as mentioned by nouser76)… why not? Why not have Wikipedia literally be the central place for all information for all these different things?
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence as either no one is monitoring for changes, or due to information wars between parties with conflicting interest. I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think would actually work? How would you approach removing the notability requirement without immediately opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest to be vetted by more than one person per year?
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system. A user or entity maintain a private cryptographic key. Each service is given a different sub-key which anonymizes the entity for each service, if they choose. A myriad of voting systems could be employed depending on the needs of each service, via other site users, site admins or both. These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate. Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key. This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold. I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information. Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    I would argue that quite some "fandom" content gathers more views than many "notable" pages on Wikipedia. That said, I think there is a distinction between fact and made up.
- stevage 2y ago
  There are many places on Wikipedia that explain exactly why. The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they cause more problems than they are worth.
  - Gormo 2y ago
    What does it mean to "maintain" an article as something distinct from posting and updating it?
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      It would be quite bloated if Wikipedia had 1000 Runescape articles about different minutia I guess. But I'd like if Wikipedia had 'subwikis' with that kind of stuff.
    - stevage 2y ago
      Amongst other things, looking out for vandalism and misinformation. Also managing categories, infoboxes etc as they get updated. There's quite a lot. Just look at the history of any article.
- i80and 2y ago
  It's been frustrating watching articles for stuff I cared about in the 2000's get deleted because the mere passage or time has rendered the topics non-notable
  - bpeebles 2y ago
    It's not always clear but notability is not temporary[0] under English Wikipedia's guidelines. Standards of what makes something notable have shifted over the years and sometimes the different is hard to tease out. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_is_not_temporary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notabilit...
    - i80and 2y ago
      I understand this to be the case, but in practice the distinction is mostly immaterial. Topics are notable for a decade, then not notable the next.
Retr0id 2y ago
I see what you're saying, but in practice, not really? It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every minecraft crafting recipe.
- binary132 2y ago
  why?
  - Retr0id 2y ago
    I was going to say "it would be like documenting every chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings
    - RheingoldRiver 2y ago
      In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where the conflict of interest really gets in the way
    - nextaccountic 2y ago
      This is a list of notable chess moves though, not an exhaustive list of all possible chess moves
    - slyall 2y ago
      Every single one of those chess openings has multiple books written about it. The most popular openings have hundreds of books about them. Not to mention courses, articles, blog posts, discussion and youtube videos
      - makeitdouble 2y ago
        If we're going by volume written about, minecraft isn't lacking any. Try to find more about red stone or mining techniques. The main difference would be history, the split between books and online resources, and how the older generation sees it.
thih9 2y ago
I am a user of both Wikipedia and Fandom, Vampire Survivors Wiki[1] in particular. I would very much prefer to read niche articles on Wikipedia. I can understand strict rules about reliable sources, independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still, satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some workaround to the notability rule. Or something else. Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run. [1]: https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_Wiki https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JustLeafy 2y ago
  Hey there, the other admin of the Vampire Survivors Wiki here. What do you think of moving this wiki to wiki.gg?
  - thih9 2y ago
    To clarify, I’m not an admin or editor, just a reader. In any case, as a reader, wiki.gg looks good to me and better than fandom.
Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
It goes hand in hand with Wikipedia's stricter source requirements. You would need to source all the information from books and news articles (from a select choice of reliable sites decided by wikipedia editors). Essentially Wikipedia's definition of notable is 3 reliable sources writing about the topic. So it's really more about reliability (or, what Wikipedia admins consider reliable) than notability.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Partly unrelated, but I wonder how Wikipedia's source requirements will move in the future as: - more "reputable" news sources AI generate their articles - traditional publications are facing existential threats as their revenue source is drying out ("Google Zero"), and we can't expect their number to grow in the future - more experts and analysts are gatekeeping their work under subscription paywalls and alternative services. Paid mailing lists for instance won't be a valid and verifiable source It feels like at some point Wikipedia could be basically frozen if they can't adapt to the new landscape, but from the outside it doesn't look like an organization that can sensibly move on and change core parts in a pragmatic way.
stevage 2y ago
No, that's a real stretch. Jimmy Wales is barely involved in Wikipedia, and certainly has no say in editorial policy like that. The notability policy predates the creation of Wikicities significantly.
- Fatnino 2y ago
  Then why does his face show up at the top of every page asking for money at the end of every year?
  - stevage 2y ago
    I think you're probably smart enough to answer that one.
- vintermann 2y ago
  It's not simply about there being a notability policy. Wikipedia was famous for having a conflict between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" who had disagreements on what these policies should be and how they should be interpreted. Deletionists are generally considered to have won because Wales and the circle around him sided with them.
garrettgarcia 2y ago
Where's the conflict of interest in having two different products for two different purposes?
Affric 2y ago
Not at all. Once you start permitting large amounts of fiction in Wikipedia then what’s to stop any sort of fiction being included? Why not just have articles full of lies? Fundamentally fiction is lies. Just because a large group of people enjoy indulging the lies doesn’t mean it should be included in an encyclopaedia. I say this as a lover of fiction and video games. Notability criterion is important.
- eurleif 2y ago
  There's plenty of fiction on Wikipedia already; fictionality is orthogonal to notability; and it's possible to describe what occurs within a work of fiction without asserting that it occurs in the real world.
  - Affric 2y ago
    I don’t think that fictionality is orthogonal to notability. I do think that something that occurs in fiction is inherently less notable than the equivalent event occurring in real life no matter how popular the work of fiction. I agree on the second point but fundamentally extensively in depth information about the inner workings of a fictional piece are best acquired from the work itself. Not gleaned from an encyclopaedia.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
No. Before the internet the encyclopedia didn't have over 10,000 articles about The Simpsons and it's reasonable that that would be outside the scope of Wikipedia as well. Just because someone profits from a situation doesn't make it improper.
celemap 2y ago
You realise Wikipedia is not for Monster Hunter character builds right? A video game Wiki is different than Wikipedia.
TZubiri 2y ago
Worth noting that "the creator" of wikipedia doesn't run wikipedia.
bawolff 2y ago
> meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem? My understanding is that the series of events was - stuff kept getting rejected from wikipedia, so jimmy and some other people made wikicities (now fandom). I dont think its coincidence that jimmy saw a business oportunity, but wikipedia rejecting stuff came first, and jimmy does not control wikipedia processes.
- vintermann 2y ago
  > jimmy does not control wikipedia processes He and the employees of his organization obviously had an outsized influence on it.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    In the very early days maybe, but his influence waned a lot faster than you would expect.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
account42 2y ago
I'm all for criticizing Jimmy for his involvement in Fandom but I also don't think Wikipedia needs to be given even more power as the de-facto source of truth for everything. Instead we should work towards having more independent websites.

by rahidz 2y ago

YawningAngel 2y ago

I have had this exact thought and am deeply irritated by it

pocketarc 2y ago

I don’t even really understand why things have to be notable for Wikipedia. If people wanted to maintain all of the Runescape articles in Wikipedia (as mentioned by nouser76)… why not? Why not have Wikipedia literally be the central place for all information for all these different things?

soulofmischief 2y ago
The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence as either no one is monitoring for changes, or due to information wars between parties with conflicting interest. I've personally been approached to build tech to monitor and revert changes matching keywords using residential proxy systems as a service for low-stakes clients (and declined).
- lolinder 2y ago
  > The most lazy approach possible to solve the issue that low-traffic and low-interest data becomes increasingly low-confidence Can you suggest some alternate approaches that you think would actually work? How would you approach removing the notability requirement without immediately opening the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of additional sketchy articles about niche topics that don't have enough interest to be vetted by more than one person per year?
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I've been advocating this for years, but I think a lot of problems on the internet could be solved with a universal, decentralized, anonymous reputation system. A user or entity maintain a private cryptographic key. Each service is given a different sub-key which anonymizes the entity for each service, if they choose. A myriad of voting systems could be employed depending on the needs of each service, via other site users, site admins or both. These differing voting systems (stars, points, etc) could be normalized through some standardized process into a final reputation score. Other services could then either consider the aggregate score, or only focus on ratings from particular other services, which could be grouped into service types for convenience. Ratings are cryptographically backed and could be fuzzed to increase anonymity. Scores would also be weighted by the relative reputation of other entities. Participating services would also themselves need to maintain a high reputation for their scoring to have much weight in the aggregate. Services could use these scores to wall of certain site features to entities without sufficient reputation, or even wholesale deny read/write access. Obviously there are particulars to work out to prevent brigading, etc. but there is a balance to strike such that farmed accounts could still quickly be punished the moment they begin spamming/astroturfing. Perhaps a flag/vouch system similar to HN could be employed. Voting rings could also be detected, though with limits given that each vote comes from an anonymized sub-key. This system would even protect against a future where the majority of content on the web will likely be aided or entirely produced by LLMs or AI. I welcome such synthetic content, but only if it matches or surpasses the general quality of human posts on the internet (which is much worse than one might think). On top of this, users could themselves use these scores as a way to filter out content which is signed with a reputation score below some threshold. I imagine some kind of hierarchical web, where some services are harder to gain write access to than others, allowing users to gain reputation in low-stakes environments with some level of decentralized moderation, but without compromising the integrity of higher-stakes information. Each piece of information on the internet should be signed with some sort of introspectable reputation score, and this kind of system would make it possible without compromising privacy and security of users in any political environment.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  I would argue that quite some "fandom" content gathers more views than many "notable" pages on Wikipedia. That said, I think there is a distinction between fact and made up.
stevage 2y ago
There are many places on Wikipedia that explain exactly why. The short answer is, because it costs time and effort, and a little bit of money, to maintain all those articles, and they cause more problems than they are worth.
- Gormo 2y ago
  What does it mean to "maintain" an article as something distinct from posting and updating it?
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    It would be quite bloated if Wikipedia had 1000 Runescape articles about different minutia I guess. But I'd like if Wikipedia had 'subwikis' with that kind of stuff.
  - stevage 2y ago
    Amongst other things, looking out for vandalism and misinformation. Also managing categories, infoboxes etc as they get updated. There's quite a lot. Just look at the history of any article.
i80and 2y ago
It's been frustrating watching articles for stuff I cared about in the 2000's get deleted because the mere passage or time has rendered the topics non-notable
- bpeebles 2y ago
  It's not always clear but notability is not temporary[0] under English Wikipedia's guidelines. Standards of what makes something notable have shifted over the years and sometimes the different is hard to tease out. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notability_is_not_temporary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Notabilit...
  - i80and 2y ago
    I understand this to be the case, but in practice the distinction is mostly immaterial. Topics are notable for a decade, then not notable the next.

Retr0id 2y ago

I see what you're saying, but in practice, not really? It would be weird for wikipedia to host, for example, every minecraft crafting recipe.

binary132 2y ago
why?
- Retr0id 2y ago
  I was going to say "it would be like documenting every chess opening move", but I looked it up and the article exists, so I guess I've just argued against myself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_openings
  - RheingoldRiver 2y ago
    In disambiguation issues alone, it would be a nightmare if wikipedia hosted niche-topic content within the same namespacing as everything else. What would be good is not wikipedia being more lax, it's WMF providing the same service that Miraheze does; and here, I think, is where the conflict of interest really gets in the way
  - nextaccountic 2y ago
    This is a list of notable chess moves though, not an exhaustive list of all possible chess moves
  - slyall 2y ago
    Every single one of those chess openings has multiple books written about it. The most popular openings have hundreds of books about them. Not to mention courses, articles, blog posts, discussion and youtube videos
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      If we're going by volume written about, minecraft isn't lacking any. Try to find more about red stone or mining techniques. The main difference would be history, the split between books and online resources, and how the older generation sees it.

thih9 2y ago

I am a user of both Wikipedia and Fandom, Vampire Survivors Wiki[1] in particular. I would very much prefer to read niche articles on Wikipedia. I can understand strict rules about reliable sources, independent point of view, or fighting SEO/spam. Still, satellite wikis could exist. Or Portals could serve as some workaround to the notability rule. Or something else. Wikipedia is by nerds and largely for nerds, I'm sure allowing nerdy topics there would help everyone in the long run. [1]: https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_Wiki https://vampire-survivors.fandom.com/wiki/Vampire_Survivors_...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JustLeafy 2y ago
Hey there, the other admin of the Vampire Survivors Wiki here. What do you think of moving this wiki to wiki.gg?
- thih9 2y ago
  To clarify, I’m not an admin or editor, just a reader. In any case, as a reader, wiki.gg looks good to me and better than fandom.

Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago

It goes hand in hand with Wikipedia's stricter source requirements. You would need to source all the information from books and news articles (from a select choice of reliable sites decided by wikipedia editors). Essentially Wikipedia's definition of notable is 3 reliable sources writing about the topic. So it's really more about reliability (or, what Wikipedia admins consider reliable) than notability.

makeitdouble 2y ago
Partly unrelated, but I wonder how Wikipedia's source requirements will move in the future as: - more "reputable" news sources AI generate their articles - traditional publications are facing existential threats as their revenue source is drying out ("Google Zero"), and we can't expect their number to grow in the future - more experts and analysts are gatekeeping their work under subscription paywalls and alternative services. Paid mailing lists for instance won't be a valid and verifiable source It feels like at some point Wikipedia could be basically frozen if they can't adapt to the new landscape, but from the outside it doesn't look like an organization that can sensibly move on and change core parts in a pragmatic way.

stevage 2y ago

No, that's a real stretch. Jimmy Wales is barely involved in Wikipedia, and certainly has no say in editorial policy like that. The notability policy predates the creation of Wikicities significantly.

Fatnino 2y ago
Then why does his face show up at the top of every page asking for money at the end of every year?
- stevage 2y ago
  I think you're probably smart enough to answer that one.
vintermann 2y ago
It's not simply about there being a notability policy. Wikipedia was famous for having a conflict between "deletionists" and "inclusionists" who had disagreements on what these policies should be and how they should be interpreted. Deletionists are generally considered to have won because Wales and the circle around him sided with them.

garrettgarcia 2y ago

Where's the conflict of interest in having two different products for two different purposes?

Affric 2y ago

Not at all. Once you start permitting large amounts of fiction in Wikipedia then what’s to stop any sort of fiction being included? Why not just have articles full of lies? Fundamentally fiction is lies. Just because a large group of people enjoy indulging the lies doesn’t mean it should be included in an encyclopaedia. I say this as a lover of fiction and video games. Notability criterion is important.

eurleif 2y ago
There's plenty of fiction on Wikipedia already; fictionality is orthogonal to notability; and it's possible to describe what occurs within a work of fiction without asserting that it occurs in the real world.
- Affric 2y ago
  I don’t think that fictionality is orthogonal to notability. I do think that something that occurs in fiction is inherently less notable than the equivalent event occurring in real life no matter how popular the work of fiction. I agree on the second point but fundamentally extensively in depth information about the inner workings of a fictional piece are best acquired from the work itself. Not gleaned from an encyclopaedia.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

No. Before the internet the encyclopedia didn't have over 10,000 articles about The Simpsons and it's reasonable that that would be outside the scope of Wikipedia as well. Just because someone profits from a situation doesn't make it improper.

celemap 2y ago

You realise Wikipedia is not for Monster Hunter character builds right? A video game Wiki is different than Wikipedia.

TZubiri 2y ago

Worth noting that "the creator" of wikipedia doesn't run wikipedia.

bawolff 2y ago

> meanwhile its creator is heavily involved in running for-profit Fandom that just so happens to solve that problem? My understanding is that the series of events was - stuff kept getting rejected from wikipedia, so jimmy and some other people made wikicities (now fandom). I dont think its coincidence that jimmy saw a business oportunity, but wikipedia rejecting stuff came first, and jimmy does not control wikipedia processes.

vintermann 2y ago
> jimmy does not control wikipedia processes He and the employees of his organization obviously had an outsized influence on it.
- bawolff 2y ago
  In the very early days maybe, but his influence waned a lot faster than you would expect.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

account42 2y ago

I'm all for criticizing Jimmy for his involvement in Fandom but I also don't think Wikipedia needs to be given even more power as the de-facto source of truth for everything. Instead we should work towards having more independent websites.