14 ms·

The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History

115 points by drcube 14y ago

drcube 14y ago
Is Wiki server space scarce? I should be able to post an article about the tree in my back yard if I want. "Notability" is simply not something an online encyclopedia should be worried about. Not that BBS history isn't notable. I'm just saying it would be wrong to delete it even if it wasn't.
- solarflair 14y ago
  "Notability" attempts to give Wikipedia the credibility that "anyone can edit this" takes away.
- riffraff 14y ago
  while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc. And the notability argument is that you can already post an article about that tree, on the larger internet.
  - Goronmon 14y ago
    while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc. This argument doesn't seem helpful. All of those problems will continue to exist regardless of whether some articles pass the "Notability" requirement or not.
    - riffraff 14y ago
      absolutely, I see it as a band aid measure, but that doesn't mean it's void of usefulness.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    This is a furphy. "It makes the interface less pleasant" is not an argument for the destruction of condensed knowledge.
    - riffraff 14y ago
      it's not, it's an argument that wikipedia _as of now_ is not suitable for an indefinitely large number of pages. I am not a wikipedia editor and am not defending strawman deletionists, I am only giving an opinion based on my daily findings of broken links, flags raised years ago and never updated, missing links between languages et cetera.
  - gwern 14y ago
    Nice post hoc excuse. In all the hundreds/thousands of AfDs I've participated in or closed, I don't think I've ever seen anyone say 'this article should be deleted because it will make a disambig page smaller'.
    - riffraff 14y ago
      It's not an excuse, as I have never flagged anything for deletion. It's a purely external reasoning: wikipedia as I see it is already in a un-maintained state for many not notable articles, more articles without a change to how WP works will lead to more of those diminishing the overall quality of the project. And no, I don't buy that not deleting articles will magically increase the number of contributors.
      - gwern 14y ago
        > more articles without a change to how WP works will lead to more of those diminishing the overall quality of the project. You know, if you let everyone use the Internet, the average quality of the writing will go down!!! The average is completely the wrong metric to be using here. Not as good articles do not 'infect' the good articles, and the average is meaningless. If you don't need to know about a topic covered by an article you disapprove of... you don't have to read it.
- ErrantX 14y ago
  Content is already hard enough (i.e. nearly impossible) to keep accurate and updated. If all of us wanted to record the tree in our garden... it would be too much noise compared to signal. The "aha" moment with Wikipedia is realising that it is not an archive (which is what some people want). It summarises archives, of course, but the point is to write a compendium of useful knowledge. Where to draw the line is not easy; I think we are too heavy on the notability front. A better way is usually to think "how many people would find this useful or interesting", and if it is a reasonably significant then it is worth writing about. The culture is a monolith and can be hard to break into - I've long moaned about that. Changing that is hard; I don't begrudge people moaning or criticising it, but I suggest that the most constructive approach is to take part and bring some common sense on board :) Just don't get sucked into the politiking and game mongering.
Nursie 14y ago
I don't really know why they do this either. A friend of mine is a (light) sci-fi author with a few books published, not self-published, each one launched in a bookshop in Notting Hill in London, carried nationally in Waterstones etc etc. His page, written by someone else, was deleted too, on vague notability grounds, and he was accused of vanity driven self-publisher by some or other wikipedia insider who decided it had to go. Never mind that the label he was published by had booker-prize nominees, never mind the mainstream availability, it has been decided by me and my two buddies that you're out. I guess it probably saved them ~5k disk space in text, ~50k for an image and all of half a megabyte a month in hosting costs. --edit-- this is not to say that my friend is as important as retaining the history of BBS and other pre-internet computer culture BUT it was the day I realised that something weird and tragic was afoot inside wiki. Before that I assumed the only thing deleted from such a place was spam and blatant self promotion.
- Bakkot 14y ago
  Prefacing this, I'm largely with Jason Scott on this (and most issues). That said: The deletionist argument is not and has never been been that it's going to save storage or bandwidth. (Generally, it's about it being difficult to keep up the average quality of the encyclopedia when there's a lot of less notable stuff. Which is absolutely true.) You should at least try to understand the argument for the opposition before you make up your mind. Policy debates should not appear one sided, etc, etc.
nicholassmith 14y ago
The fact that all it takes is 3 people to try, decide, and kill an article has always baffled me. The internet isn't exactly known for it's lack of sock puppets and mini-gangs, so the fact that Wiki allows 3 people to be the arbiters of article deletion is bizarre. I'd say culturally BBS' are massively important to the idea of Wikipedia, to lose their history is to turn a blind eye to the roots of where it came from.
- contingencies 14y ago
  Yes. Wikipedia is fundamentally broken. As a Wikipedia admin since 2003, trying to make basic, intelligent changes to articles that are 'protected' of late has just baffled me. It is very sad that this has occurred to what was previously a strong community. The notion of 'notability' is basically obsolete in these internet days, and should be dropped from Wikipedia's (many and spurious) policies. People that spend their days deleting others' contributions should have to write three times as much accredited content to delete something.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Meta is killing wikipedia. Look at the number of username boards there are - it's bizarre. Just push a list of unaccepted stuff to developers and hard code what isn't allowed. (eg, dotted quads used the be usable as names, but are not any more.)
- morsch 14y ago
  It's been years since I did AfD, but there were always more than 3 people involved. It's quite easy to participate, incidently, I encourage people to try it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion People re-submitting articles in AfD until they get their way is a problem. I think either articles should be banned from AfD after being kept, or resubmissions should go through mandatory arbitration process with more eyeballs and longer times to make a decision. Admin power abuse was also a small problem when I did AfD (again, years ago), ie. admins deleting articles when there was no clear consensus or the 7 days weren't over.
apaprocki 14y ago
Tangentially related, I've suffered a quiet death of my own BBS history because nearly a decade of 90's data is jailed on old 250MB+ QIC tape backups that were recorded with various unknown programs running from DOS to Win 3.1/95 days. Has anyone had a positive experience with using a service to migrate data from media this old and unknown backup programs at a reasonable cost?
- djt 14y ago
  The author of the article runs an archive service. He might be happy to do it for free and send you a copy?
- aw3c2 14y ago
  comment on the linked blog or mail Jason directly, he'll get you sorted.
- rsync 14y ago
  Jason will help you with this. Email him.
Uchikoma 14y ago
"... the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." but we can delete what we want.
jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations. Plus the big problem of sources curation, those are more unreliable in unpopular articles for the lack of eyeballs on them. The amount of work mods have to do would grow exponentially if they didn't take notability into account. Of course Wikipedia could do better, but it is a hard problem, not an easy one.
- morsch 14y ago
  Yep, those are the two arguments for notability criteria I found most convincing. Anybody arguing for total inclusionism will have have to provide answers to those. And if you're not arguing for total inclusionism, you need to provide better notability criteria that work with all the edge cases. That's also really really hard.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations. Just recently (only last century) some clever fellows came up with a workable solution for this. Look up www.google.com in your web browser and see if works for you.
  - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
    They came out for a solution for themselves, or do you happen to have the link to their github repo? Otherwise you may want to donate a few million dollars so they can come out with a similar solution.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      Sarcasm doesn't work like it used to. My point Wikipedia is an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Google aims to "index all the world's information". These are different but complementary goals. That the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't improved a user interface that was slapped together in the early 2000s is not somehow a mathematical, universal constraint on the growth of the subjects that are covered. It just isn't. I am prepared to bet honest folding money that almost nobody uses the internal mechanisms of search and navigation that Wikipedia provides. Apart from clicking an in-text link referring to another subject, I am prepared to bet that traffic to Wikipedia is dominated by search engine referrals by at least one order of magnitude. Probably two. Google so dominates the actual usage of Wikipedia that it is ridiculous to advance the poor UI of the Wikipedia platform as some kind of serious argument in favour of deletionism. It'd be like walking into a library circa 1950 and saying "All these index cards are a schlep, let's start throwing away books". You'd be committed to a loony bin. And now we have unlimited search and retrieval capability and you suppose that a poor interface is the killer blow for deletionism? I believe I am having a Mugatu Moment here.
topbanana 14y ago
It appears to me that Wikipedia needs to come up with a measure of notability for each article - NotabilityRank if you will. An arbitrary watermark is bound to cause all sorts of issues
jacques_chester 14y ago
As I've said on HN before, Wikipedia is a lie. The façade says "come and contribute!" The actual operation of the site is no longer like that. There has been a total inversion of the premise. Wikipedia should have an anti-deletion bias. There. I said it. It should take a massive number of people to delete a page. Hundreds. Thousands maybe. Some particular amount of registered users (5% say, or double the square root. Whatever).
- tptacek 14y ago
  This is a series of radical assertions each presented without evidence. Anyone who spends serious time on Wikipedia could tell you immediately what the site would be like if it required "hundreds" of people to delete a page: completely overrun with spam and vanity pages --- not about BBS door games or individual BBS's or open source authors or even bloggers, but about individual local little league teams, bands that have never played gigs or released tracks, marketing professionals, individual episodes of fake TV shows, attempts at defaming individual high school girls, 6th place finishers in city council elections, political parties with one member, "microbrew" beer pages for each of some guy's homebrew projects, made up cities in made up countries as part of some guy's counterfactual world history, repeat all previous entries in this list for each of Japan, England, Belgium, and South Africa, amateur open-mic-night standup comedians, individual bootlegged videos of concerts, "one of the 100 most influential Chinese-Canadians in British Columbia", individual unpublished short stories, as-yet-unreleased new energy drinks from as-yet-unstarted startups, 9000 pages about individual aspects of the Ron Paul campaign, film festivals from towns in Nebraska with fewer than 5000 people, repeat all previous entries in this list 10 times over the course of a year with slightly permuted names, fake professors at real universities, real professors occupying fake posts at fake universities, 46 different theories of cold fusion, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, world championship players from nonexistant Starcraft leagues, aspirational pages about made-up video games, individual authors of self-published ebooks, and of course, 1-5 pages about every single company incorporated in every US state. In other words: exactly what you'd expect from an "encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit". The site would be every naysayer's 1999 prediction for what Wikipedia would become.
Udo 14y ago
Every time this comes up I'm reminded of a very simple idea: fork Wikipedia, in a way that articles still get synced from the original but at the same time deleted articles just stay in the database. If you want to make it really fancy, put in some code that tries to detect whether parts of an article have been deleted and, when in doubt, keep the old version it live. Maybe there could even be some neat UI that makes it easy to navigate different versions of articles (no, the Wikipedia UI isn't it). I think in time a project like that could become very successful. Keep using Wikipedia as a source, but give new life to the underlying idea that is no longer being taken seriously over there.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  It would be very interesting to see forking become a core feature of Wikipedia. That way groups with different ideas about how to make the better encyclopedia could directly share the least controversial parts of the thing. (I do think there is quite some chance that nothing much would come of it)
- aw3c2 14y ago
  a killer feature for me would be coloring text in articles by its age. under the assumption that old = unchanged = good. might be interesting.
  - eli 14y ago
    Seems like that would be doable in a browser extension.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    Here are some people fooling with history visualization: http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/ http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/ (I have no idea if anything still works, just had some vague memory of it floating around)
- Jtsummers 14y ago
  I started to type something similar then did some research into the costs. The DB download is 8.8GB, they say it expands to terrabytes when uncompressed. That's no longer an impossibly difficult amount of storage to acquire though. The Wikimedia Foundation budget for this next year is $42.1 million, I only skimmed so I didn't find a breakdown on costs of things like electricity and bandwidth out of that. I like the idea, though wonder how you could gain traction from potential contributors. Would those alienated by the current Wikipedia processes along with some other people interested in the novelty be enough to start a community?
luckystarr 14y ago
Why care to participate if contributions can be deleted at any moment? In WikiMedia's "Movement Strategic Plan Summary" they have an interesting graph to show. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Increase_Participation http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate... So something must have happend around '07. What was it?
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  There are a number of things at play. 1. The rise of deletionism. 2. The tendency for many pages to attract zealous guardians. I've had spelling errors immediately backed out. I expect that 99.9% of potential contributors quit at this point and never return. 3. Diminishing subjects to cover. All the "major" ones are done, all that's left are the billions of pieces of harmless trivia that deletionists decide, apparently at random, to do away with. Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles on anything that happened before 1990.
  - gwern 14y ago
    > Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles on anything that happened before 1990. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Vast articles? No, the Pokemon articles were purged pretty early on; look at lists like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_characters or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2%80%93251%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2... which devote a few lines to main characters or major pokemon, and just compare some with their respective entries in Bulbapedia (where the Pokemon Wikipedia editors ultimately fled to escape the deletionists, much like the Star Wars editors earlier fled en masse to Wookieepedia). Even the Pikachu article has been eviscerated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu (Hope you enjoy a list of awards and mentions... It's 'out of universe' material donchaknow)
CJefferson 14y ago
This article motivated me to go and investigate if wikipedia had got any better. Started writing an article about a technical topic I consider important which was not present. When it was only 2 short paragraphs long, only 8 minutes after I had created it, gone without warning or comment. So, nothing has changed at all.
- reportingsjr 14y ago
  Would you mind saying what the topic of the article you started writing was? Also, did you do it in a sandbox on your account page or just out in the open? Without more context your statement creates an extremely biased view against Wikipedia.
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    Why is it a extremely biased view against Wikipedia? I just stated exactly what happened, when I tried to make a new article. Now, you can argue that I shouldn't just start making an article, but that's another discussion. I started writing an article about 'C++14', the new C++ standard. I was writing a nicely referenced list of the new features which have already been voted into the standard, when a box popped up telling me there was a conflict, as someone else had wiped the page clean. So I threw my text away and left wikipedia again.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      And that, right there, is the ratchet function which has shut the door on wikipedia. Insiders can quickly undo anything. They are familiar with the tools and the procedures. You might have contributed for the rest of your life. That potential stream of valuable contributions is now lost to wikipedia, potentially forever. Now compound that over every single expert to whom so much was promised by the interface, and from whom the promise was removed by wikipedians.
      - rsync 14y ago
        Bingo. I just experienced this myself merely days ago. No details. Just a well formed, minor contribution to an article that was insta-deleted because of "notability". Which was news to me because, while I am aware articles themselves need to be notable, now some folks are enforcing notability on subsets of articles. In this case, a single row in a table listing like items.
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
Wasn't there an article on HN recently about fishing old games for gaming concepts? I wonder if someone took up that idea and thought that the next best course of action was to conceal their source before blatantly ripping off every classic game mechanic from the last 30 years? After all "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" I really can't imagine any other reason to target BBS games specifically. Also, the deleter happens to be a programmer as well. /conspiracy
afterburner 14y ago
Let Wikipedia be some weirdly curated thing that is often useful but not the primary source for everything. I agree wholeheartedly with the article: if you care about something, cover it and protect it separately from Wikipedia. It'll get found through search anyways.
- chc 14y ago
  > It'll get found through search anyways. If I could actually make this guarantee for any page I created, I would be richer than Gates.
  - afterburner 14y ago
    It'll get found by anyone who's looking for it... that, anyone can do.
    - chc 14y ago
      Looking for that specific page, which they already know about? Sure, they'll just enter the URL or click the bookmark. Looking for some page containing similar keywords to mine? Again, if I could reliably cause people with relevant interests to come to any page I create, I'd be in a great place financially. I'd just start an online poker site, then go out and buy myself a pony made of diamonds.
raverbashing 14y ago
Wikipedia seem to "suffer" from the same issues that plague Google making their "community" do their support for them In essence, the "most popular" community members think they own the services, not only because of unchecked "work"
- cmccabe 14y ago
  Do you "think" you could "use" more "quotes" in your "post"?
nerfhammer 14y ago
wikipedia should be like github. I should be able to clone it, write whatever I want in my branch, and you can merge it into your branch if you want, or not if you don't. End of story.
languagehacker 14y ago
I'm assuming someone may have already said this, but content isn't locked into Wikipedia. It's Creative Commons-licensed, meaning that if someone cared about curating and maintaining this history, they could have moved those articles over to another wiki. There are even wiki hosting solutions that make these kind of moves relatively easy. The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.
- nollidge 14y ago
  > Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether. His entire point is that this process is broken and heavily biased against the person who wishes to stand up for the content. Did you have a specific reason why he's wrong about that?
  - languagehacker 14y ago
    My point is more that if the community has an issue with the content, then take it someplace else. There are more wikis than Wikipedia. If you imagine that all knowledge in the world is a library, then Wikipedia is only the two or three shelves of big, heavy encyclopedias. If you don't think there's a wiki for your domain, then start one.
- Goronmon 14y ago
  The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether. If that's the case, I don't see why anyone should value a resource where the content is decided by whoever wastes the most time judging which content is "worthwhile". It seems like it's a lot easier for a small group of people to go around flagging articles for deletion than it is for people to go around finding articles to defend against deletion. So if group A decides they are just going to start deleting all articles older than X years old, whose job is it to stand up to them and why would that situation be a good thing? Edit: And how is this similar to how other records of history are kept? Do you expect authors to have to physically defend a library from roving bands of book burners? "If they really thought the content was important, why would have stopped people from burning the books."
nuckin-futz 14y ago
Perhaps not what you were hoping for, yet never-the-less: its up to - you - Mr. Scott. Keep your remembrances of that era alive at your site. If not you, who will?

115 points by drcube 14y ago

Is Wiki server space scarce? I should be able to post an article about the tree in my back yard if I want. "Notability" is simply not something an online encyclopedia should be worried about. Not that BBS history isn't notable. I'm just saying it would be wrong to delete it even if it wasn't.

solarflair 14y ago
"Notability" attempts to give Wikipedia the credibility that "anyone can edit this" takes away.
riffraff 14y ago
while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc. And the notability argument is that you can already post an article about that tree, on the larger internet.
- Goronmon 14y ago
  while I'd like the "everything inside wikipedia" approach to work, the problem with it is that every new page makes it less maintainable, disambiguation pages grow larger, category listings grow larger, search results and suggestions multiply etc. This argument doesn't seem helpful. All of those problems will continue to exist regardless of whether some articles pass the "Notability" requirement or not.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    absolutely, I see it as a band aid measure, but that doesn't mean it's void of usefulness.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  This is a furphy. "It makes the interface less pleasant" is not an argument for the destruction of condensed knowledge.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    it's not, it's an argument that wikipedia _as of now_ is not suitable for an indefinitely large number of pages. I am not a wikipedia editor and am not defending strawman deletionists, I am only giving an opinion based on my daily findings of broken links, flags raised years ago and never updated, missing links between languages et cetera.
- gwern 14y ago
  Nice post hoc excuse. In all the hundreds/thousands of AfDs I've participated in or closed, I don't think I've ever seen anyone say 'this article should be deleted because it will make a disambig page smaller'.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    It's not an excuse, as I have never flagged anything for deletion. It's a purely external reasoning: wikipedia as I see it is already in a un-maintained state for many not notable articles, more articles without a change to how WP works will lead to more of those diminishing the overall quality of the project. And no, I don't buy that not deleting articles will magically increase the number of contributors.
    - gwern 14y ago
      > more articles without a change to how WP works will lead to more of those diminishing the overall quality of the project. You know, if you let everyone use the Internet, the average quality of the writing will go down!!! The average is completely the wrong metric to be using here. Not as good articles do not 'infect' the good articles, and the average is meaningless. If you don't need to know about a topic covered by an article you disapprove of... you don't have to read it.
ErrantX 14y ago
Content is already hard enough (i.e. nearly impossible) to keep accurate and updated. If all of us wanted to record the tree in our garden... it would be too much noise compared to signal. The "aha" moment with Wikipedia is realising that it is not an archive (which is what some people want). It summarises archives, of course, but the point is to write a compendium of useful knowledge. Where to draw the line is not easy; I think we are too heavy on the notability front. A better way is usually to think "how many people would find this useful or interesting", and if it is a reasonably significant then it is worth writing about. The culture is a monolith and can be hard to break into - I've long moaned about that. Changing that is hard; I don't begrudge people moaning or criticising it, but I suggest that the most constructive approach is to take part and bring some common sense on board :) Just don't get sucked into the politiking and game mongering.

Nursie 14y ago

I don't really know why they do this either. A friend of mine is a (light) sci-fi author with a few books published, not self-published, each one launched in a bookshop in Notting Hill in London, carried nationally in Waterstones etc etc. His page, written by someone else, was deleted too, on vague notability grounds, and he was accused of vanity driven self-publisher by some or other wikipedia insider who decided it had to go. Never mind that the label he was published by had booker-prize nominees, never mind the mainstream availability, it has been decided by me and my two buddies that you're out. I guess it probably saved them ~5k disk space in text, ~50k for an image and all of half a megabyte a month in hosting costs. --edit-- this is not to say that my friend is as important as retaining the history of BBS and other pre-internet computer culture BUT it was the day I realised that something weird and tragic was afoot inside wiki. Before that I assumed the only thing deleted from such a place was spam and blatant self promotion.

Bakkot 14y ago
Prefacing this, I'm largely with Jason Scott on this (and most issues). That said: The deletionist argument is not and has never been been that it's going to save storage or bandwidth. (Generally, it's about it being difficult to keep up the average quality of the encyclopedia when there's a lot of less notable stuff. Which is absolutely true.) You should at least try to understand the argument for the opposition before you make up your mind. Policy debates should not appear one sided, etc, etc.

nicholassmith 14y ago

The fact that all it takes is 3 people to try, decide, and kill an article has always baffled me. The internet isn't exactly known for it's lack of sock puppets and mini-gangs, so the fact that Wiki allows 3 people to be the arbiters of article deletion is bizarre. I'd say culturally BBS' are massively important to the idea of Wikipedia, to lose their history is to turn a blind eye to the roots of where it came from.

contingencies 14y ago
Yes. Wikipedia is fundamentally broken. As a Wikipedia admin since 2003, trying to make basic, intelligent changes to articles that are 'protected' of late has just baffled me. It is very sad that this has occurred to what was previously a strong community. The notion of 'notability' is basically obsolete in these internet days, and should be dropped from Wikipedia's (many and spurious) policies. People that spend their days deleting others' contributions should have to write three times as much accredited content to delete something.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Meta is killing wikipedia. Look at the number of username boards there are - it's bizarre. Just push a list of unaccepted stuff to developers and hard code what isn't allowed. (eg, dotted quads used the be usable as names, but are not any more.)
morsch 14y ago
It's been years since I did AfD, but there were always more than 3 people involved. It's quite easy to participate, incidently, I encourage people to try it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion People re-submitting articles in AfD until they get their way is a problem. I think either articles should be banned from AfD after being kept, or resubmissions should go through mandatory arbitration process with more eyeballs and longer times to make a decision. Admin power abuse was also a small problem when I did AfD (again, years ago), ie. admins deleting articles when there was no clear consensus or the 7 days weren't over.

apaprocki 14y ago

Tangentially related, I've suffered a quiet death of my own BBS history because nearly a decade of 90's data is jailed on old 250MB+ QIC tape backups that were recorded with various unknown programs running from DOS to Win 3.1/95 days. Has anyone had a positive experience with using a service to migrate data from media this old and unknown backup programs at a reasonable cost?

djt 14y ago
The author of the article runs an archive service. He might be happy to do it for free and send you a copy?
aw3c2 14y ago
comment on the linked blog or mail Jason directly, he'll get you sorted.
rsync 14y ago
Jason will help you with this. Email him.

Uchikoma 14y ago

"... the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." but we can delete what we want.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago

Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations. Plus the big problem of sources curation, those are more unreliable in unpopular articles for the lack of eyeballs on them. The amount of work mods have to do would grow exponentially if they didn't take notability into account. Of course Wikipedia could do better, but it is a hard problem, not an easy one.

morsch 14y ago
Yep, those are the two arguments for notability criteria I found most convincing. Anybody arguing for total inclusionism will have have to provide answers to those. And if you're not arguing for total inclusionism, you need to provide better notability criteria that work with all the edge cases. That's also really really hard.
jacques_chester 14y ago
> Its a noise to signal ratio problem; when you search for any person you don't want a list of one thousand people; you probably want to read about the few popularly know ones. Same thing happens with acronyms, dates and abbreviations. Just recently (only last century) some clever fellows came up with a workable solution for this. Look up www.google.com in your web browser and see if works for you.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  They came out for a solution for themselves, or do you happen to have the link to their github repo? Otherwise you may want to donate a few million dollars so they can come out with a similar solution.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    Sarcasm doesn't work like it used to. My point Wikipedia is an "encyclopedia anyone can edit". Google aims to "index all the world's information". These are different but complementary goals. That the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't improved a user interface that was slapped together in the early 2000s is not somehow a mathematical, universal constraint on the growth of the subjects that are covered. It just isn't. I am prepared to bet honest folding money that almost nobody uses the internal mechanisms of search and navigation that Wikipedia provides. Apart from clicking an in-text link referring to another subject, I am prepared to bet that traffic to Wikipedia is dominated by search engine referrals by at least one order of magnitude. Probably two. Google so dominates the actual usage of Wikipedia that it is ridiculous to advance the poor UI of the Wikipedia platform as some kind of serious argument in favour of deletionism. It'd be like walking into a library circa 1950 and saying "All these index cards are a schlep, let's start throwing away books". You'd be committed to a loony bin. And now we have unlimited search and retrieval capability and you suppose that a poor interface is the killer blow for deletionism? I believe I am having a Mugatu Moment here.

topbanana 14y ago

It appears to me that Wikipedia needs to come up with a measure of notability for each article - NotabilityRank if you will. An arbitrary watermark is bound to cause all sorts of issues

jacques_chester 14y ago

As I've said on HN before, Wikipedia is a lie. The façade says "come and contribute!" The actual operation of the site is no longer like that. There has been a total inversion of the premise. Wikipedia should have an anti-deletion bias. There. I said it. It should take a massive number of people to delete a page. Hundreds. Thousands maybe. Some particular amount of registered users (5% say, or double the square root. Whatever).

tptacek 14y ago
This is a series of radical assertions each presented without evidence. Anyone who spends serious time on Wikipedia could tell you immediately what the site would be like if it required "hundreds" of people to delete a page: completely overrun with spam and vanity pages --- not about BBS door games or individual BBS's or open source authors or even bloggers, but about individual local little league teams, bands that have never played gigs or released tracks, marketing professionals, individual episodes of fake TV shows, attempts at defaming individual high school girls, 6th place finishers in city council elections, political parties with one member, "microbrew" beer pages for each of some guy's homebrew projects, made up cities in made up countries as part of some guy's counterfactual world history, repeat all previous entries in this list for each of Japan, England, Belgium, and South Africa, amateur open-mic-night standup comedians, individual bootlegged videos of concerts, "one of the 100 most influential Chinese-Canadians in British Columbia", individual unpublished short stories, as-yet-unreleased new energy drinks from as-yet-unstarted startups, 9000 pages about individual aspects of the Ron Paul campaign, film festivals from towns in Nebraska with fewer than 5000 people, repeat all previous entries in this list 10 times over the course of a year with slightly permuted names, fake professors at real universities, real professors occupying fake posts at fake universities, 46 different theories of cold fusion, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, fake cancer cure, world championship players from nonexistant Starcraft leagues, aspirational pages about made-up video games, individual authors of self-published ebooks, and of course, 1-5 pages about every single company incorporated in every US state. In other words: exactly what you'd expect from an "encyclopedia that anyone in the world can edit". The site would be every naysayer's 1999 prediction for what Wikipedia would become.

Udo 14y ago

Every time this comes up I'm reminded of a very simple idea: fork Wikipedia, in a way that articles still get synced from the original but at the same time deleted articles just stay in the database. If you want to make it really fancy, put in some code that tries to detect whether parts of an article have been deleted and, when in doubt, keep the old version it live. Maybe there could even be some neat UI that makes it easy to navigate different versions of articles (no, the Wikipedia UI isn't it). I think in time a project like that could become very successful. Keep using Wikipedia as a source, but give new life to the underlying idea that is no longer being taken seriously over there.

maxerickson 14y ago
It would be very interesting to see forking become a core feature of Wikipedia. That way groups with different ideas about how to make the better encyclopedia could directly share the least controversial parts of the thing. (I do think there is quite some chance that nothing much would come of it)
aw3c2 14y ago
a killer feature for me would be coloring text in articles by its age. under the assumption that old = unchanged = good. might be interesting.
- eli 14y ago
  Seems like that would be doable in a browser extension.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  Here are some people fooling with history visualization: http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/ http://waxy.org/2005/06/wikipedia_histo/ (I have no idea if anything still works, just had some vague memory of it floating around)
Jtsummers 14y ago
I started to type something similar then did some research into the costs. The DB download is 8.8GB, they say it expands to terrabytes when uncompressed. That's no longer an impossibly difficult amount of storage to acquire though. The Wikimedia Foundation budget for this next year is $42.1 million, I only skimmed so I didn't find a breakdown on costs of things like electricity and bandwidth out of that. I like the idea, though wonder how you could gain traction from potential contributors. Would those alienated by the current Wikipedia processes along with some other people interested in the novelty be enough to start a community?

luckystarr 14y ago

Why care to participate if contributions can be deleted at any moment? In WikiMedia's "Movement Strategic Plan Summary" they have an interesting graph to show. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Increase_Participation http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate... So something must have happend around '07. What was it?

jacques_chester 14y ago
There are a number of things at play. 1. The rise of deletionism. 2. The tendency for many pages to attract zealous guardians. I've had spelling errors immediately backed out. I expect that 99.9% of potential contributors quit at this point and never return. 3. Diminishing subjects to cover. All the "major" ones are done, all that's left are the billions of pieces of harmless trivia that deletionists decide, apparently at random, to do away with. Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles on anything that happened before 1990.
- gwern 14y ago
  > Note also that half the editors are under 22. This is probably why you can find vast articles on Pokemon and deletionists go around flushing articles on anything that happened before 1990. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Vast articles? No, the Pokemon articles were purged pretty early on; look at lists like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_characters or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2%80%93251%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon_%28202%E2... which devote a few lines to main characters or major pokemon, and just compare some with their respective entries in Bulbapedia (where the Pokemon Wikipedia editors ultimately fled to escape the deletionists, much like the Star Wars editors earlier fled en masse to Wookieepedia). Even the Pikachu article has been eviscerated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu (Hope you enjoy a list of awards and mentions... It's 'out of universe' material donchaknow)

CJefferson 14y ago

This article motivated me to go and investigate if wikipedia had got any better. Started writing an article about a technical topic I consider important which was not present. When it was only 2 short paragraphs long, only 8 minutes after I had created it, gone without warning or comment. So, nothing has changed at all.

reportingsjr 14y ago
Would you mind saying what the topic of the article you started writing was? Also, did you do it in a sandbox on your account page or just out in the open? Without more context your statement creates an extremely biased view against Wikipedia.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  Why is it a extremely biased view against Wikipedia? I just stated exactly what happened, when I tried to make a new article. Now, you can argue that I shouldn't just start making an article, but that's another discussion. I started writing an article about 'C++14', the new C++ standard. I was writing a nicely referenced list of the new features which have already been voted into the standard, when a box popped up telling me there was a conflict, as someone else had wiped the page clean. So I threw my text away and left wikipedia again.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    And that, right there, is the ratchet function which has shut the door on wikipedia. Insiders can quickly undo anything. They are familiar with the tools and the procedures. You might have contributed for the rest of your life. That potential stream of valuable contributions is now lost to wikipedia, potentially forever. Now compound that over every single expert to whom so much was promised by the interface, and from whom the promise was removed by wikipedians.
    - rsync 14y ago
      Bingo. I just experienced this myself merely days ago. No details. Just a well formed, minor contribution to an article that was insta-deleted because of "notability". Which was news to me because, while I am aware articles themselves need to be notable, now some folks are enforcing notability on subsets of articles. In this case, a single row in a table listing like items.

IheartApplesDix 14y ago

Wasn't there an article on HN recently about fishing old games for gaming concepts? I wonder if someone took up that idea and thought that the next best course of action was to conceal their source before blatantly ripping off every classic game mechanic from the last 30 years? After all "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" I really can't imagine any other reason to target BBS games specifically. Also, the deleter happens to be a programmer as well. /conspiracy

afterburner 14y ago

Let Wikipedia be some weirdly curated thing that is often useful but not the primary source for everything. I agree wholeheartedly with the article: if you care about something, cover it and protect it separately from Wikipedia. It'll get found through search anyways.

chc 14y ago
> It'll get found through search anyways. If I could actually make this guarantee for any page I created, I would be richer than Gates.
- afterburner 14y ago
  It'll get found by anyone who's looking for it... that, anyone can do.
  - chc 14y ago
    Looking for that specific page, which they already know about? Sure, they'll just enter the URL or click the bookmark. Looking for some page containing similar keywords to mine? Again, if I could reliably cause people with relevant interests to come to any page I create, I'd be in a great place financially. I'd just start an online poker site, then go out and buy myself a pony made of diamonds.

raverbashing 14y ago

Wikipedia seem to "suffer" from the same issues that plague Google making their "community" do their support for them In essence, the "most popular" community members think they own the services, not only because of unchecked "work"

cmccabe 14y ago
Do you "think" you could "use" more "quotes" in your "post"?

nerfhammer 14y ago

wikipedia should be like github. I should be able to clone it, write whatever I want in my branch, and you can merge it into your branch if you want, or not if you don't. End of story.

languagehacker 14y ago

I'm assuming someone may have already said this, but content isn't locked into Wikipedia. It's Creative Commons-licensed, meaning that if someone cared about curating and maintaining this history, they could have moved those articles over to another wiki. There are even wiki hosting solutions that make these kind of moves relatively easy. The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether.

nollidge 14y ago
> Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether. His entire point is that this process is broken and heavily biased against the person who wishes to stand up for the content. Did you have a specific reason why he's wrong about that?
- languagehacker 14y ago
  My point is more that if the community has an issue with the content, then take it someplace else. There are more wikis than Wikipedia. If you imagine that all knowledge in the world is a library, then Wikipedia is only the two or three shelves of big, heavy encyclopedias. If you don't think there's a wiki for your domain, then start one.
Goronmon 14y ago
The problem is not that the Wikipedia community was curating their content, but that that batch of content was not being actively curated by someone. This is how history works. Someone has to determine something notable and worth preserving. If no one stands up for a piece of content, then it eventually dissipates into the ether. If that's the case, I don't see why anyone should value a resource where the content is decided by whoever wastes the most time judging which content is "worthwhile". It seems like it's a lot easier for a small group of people to go around flagging articles for deletion than it is for people to go around finding articles to defend against deletion. So if group A decides they are just going to start deleting all articles older than X years old, whose job is it to stand up to them and why would that situation be a good thing? Edit: And how is this similar to how other records of history are kept? Do you expect authors to have to physically defend a library from roving bands of book burners? "If they really thought the content was important, why would have stopped people from burning the books."

nuckin-futz 14y ago

Perhaps not what you were hoping for, yet never-the-less: its up to - you - Mr. Scott. Keep your remembrances of that era alive at your site. If not you, who will?