5 ms·

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 popula

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.
    - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
      "Use google please, our searching and listing algorithm is not as good as theirs". Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects. And I will surely throw away some books from the library if random people were allowed to put their books in there. And the killer blow is the second part.
      - jacques_chester 14y ago
        ... huh? Edit: since you added this -- > Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects. I'll bet you $100, AUD or USD, to be donated to the charity of your choice, that this is not so, by a factor of at least 10 to 1. As I said, this does not include following links in articles. I am talking about the wikipedia search engine and category pages. I am talking about search engines generally, though I expect google to be the dominant one.
        jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
        I will gladly accept the bet if you can find a trustful way of getting that data, because honestly I can't think about one. And you overall do have a point, but is not as strong as you think it is.
        stephenhuey 14y ago
        How are you so sure most people don't return to Google? I do it more than half the time, and just add Wikipedia as a search term to narrow the results. For years I've felt it made my search more fruitful than using Wikipedia's search. Maybe my feelings are wrong, but if I feel this way, then a lot of other people could, too!
        gojomo 14y ago
        You can tell from auto-complete many people add 'wiki' or 'wikipedia' to searches at Google. And with the growth of Google-search-from-browser fields, I would also strongly expect that most people who type reformulated queries during an extended Wikipedia session do so through Google, not Wikipedia's much weaker onsite search.
  - mkr-hn 14y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+hacker https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+hack...
Goronmon 14y ago
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. Maybe you didn't intend this but it sounds like you are saying that Popularity == Notability. I don't think that's a helpful stance to take. Especially since as time progresses, older things will generally become less popular and thus trend towards deletion if what you say is true.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  There is way too many people writing everyday in Wikipedia for time degradation to be a viable solution, plus it doesn't do anything for the problem of source curation.
  - Goronmon 14y ago
    My point was that it sounded like you were basically saying that only popular articles should be allowed on Wikipedia, regardless of whether that meant anything older than a few years old should be deleted. Since I don't agree, I was pointing that out.
Shivetya 14y ago
I guess it helps if your an anime character. Between anime and pop music I am not sure which has more pages dedicated to it. You can find page after page about individual episodes of an anime series just as you can find many individual pages for one song off an album. So what quantifies notability? I would love to know how an obscure; at least to me; anime or song qualifies versus some of what does get deleted.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  The bias of individuals play a major role in the historical and biographical accuracy of the articles they write, not so much in obscure songs. Also the credibility reduction in the public eyes is virtually none for mistakes in such things as obscure songs.
crazygringo 14y ago
As someone who recently imported Wikipedia information for a project, it's trivially easy to determine notability, either by monthly pageviews (publicly available), or by incoming links within Wikipedia. As long as articles always take popularity into account when ranking (in searches, etc.) there isn't any problem.
- mjn 14y ago
  The bigger problem is verifiability via citations to third-party sources, not really notability. If you can cite a good reference, in some kind of scholarly or otherwise decent source, and not written by the actual subject of the article, it typically stays in. I've written articles on some very obscure things, but they were well-cited, so nobody challenged them. My usual methodology is actually to start from a good source: pick up a book like Knuth's TAOCP, find algorithms he discusses that have no article, do a little searching to find a 2nd or 3rd source on the algorithm, then write a little article cited to those 2-3 sources. Haven't run into any problems doing things that way. There didn't used to be as much emphasis on citations, but a mixture of hoaxes, libel controversies, and an influx of fringe-physics people led to a significant clampdown on unverified material around 2005-06. The good side of it is that the previous focus on notability is mostly gone: if you have good sources, it's ipso-facto notable, due to having, in fact, been noted in good sources. This is quite nice when I write articles on obscure subjects which will get only a handful of visits, but which are well-referenced. The downside is that subjects which are notable but for which there isn't good material to cite end up in an awkward place. I wrote a bit on that shift last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
  - pekk 14y ago
    In fact, you can provide citations which don't actually say what you are using them for (or say what you want while totally failing to substantiate it in any way) and it tends to work as long as the group of people who camp that particular article agree with your editorial slant on the matter. I'm always chasing down citations on wikipedia and finding this to be the case.

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.
  - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
    "Use google please, our searching and listing algorithm is not as good as theirs". Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects. And I will surely throw away some books from the library if random people were allowed to put their books in there. And the killer blow is the second part.
    - jacques_chester 14y ago
      ... huh? Edit: since you added this -- > Most people don't return to Google after the initial access to the website, they keep using the Wikipedia interface when they need to search related subjects. I'll bet you $100, AUD or USD, to be donated to the charity of your choice, that this is not so, by a factor of at least 10 to 1. As I said, this does not include following links in articles. I am talking about the wikipedia search engine and category pages. I am talking about search engines generally, though I expect google to be the dominant one.
      - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
        I will gladly accept the bet if you can find a trustful way of getting that data, because honestly I can't think about one. And you overall do have a point, but is not as strong as you think it is.
        stephenhuey 14y ago
        How are you so sure most people don't return to Google? I do it more than half the time, and just add Wikipedia as a search term to narrow the results. For years I've felt it made my search more fruitful than using Wikipedia's search. Maybe my feelings are wrong, but if I feel this way, then a lot of other people could, too!
        gojomo 14y ago
        You can tell from auto-complete many people add 'wiki' or 'wikipedia' to searches at Google. And with the growth of Google-search-from-browser fields, I would also strongly expect that most people who type reformulated queries during an extended Wikipedia session do so through Google, not Wikipedia's much weaker onsite search.
- mkr-hn 14y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+hacker https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aen.wikipedia.org+hack...

Goronmon 14y ago

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. Maybe you didn't intend this but it sounds like you are saying that Popularity == Notability. I don't think that's a helpful stance to take. Especially since as time progresses, older things will generally become less popular and thus trend towards deletion if what you say is true.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
There is way too many people writing everyday in Wikipedia for time degradation to be a viable solution, plus it doesn't do anything for the problem of source curation.
- Goronmon 14y ago
  My point was that it sounded like you were basically saying that only popular articles should be allowed on Wikipedia, regardless of whether that meant anything older than a few years old should be deleted. Since I don't agree, I was pointing that out.

Shivetya 14y ago

I guess it helps if your an anime character. Between anime and pop music I am not sure which has more pages dedicated to it. You can find page after page about individual episodes of an anime series just as you can find many individual pages for one song off an album. So what quantifies notability? I would love to know how an obscure; at least to me; anime or song qualifies versus some of what does get deleted.

jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
The bias of individuals play a major role in the historical and biographical accuracy of the articles they write, not so much in obscure songs. Also the credibility reduction in the public eyes is virtually none for mistakes in such things as obscure songs.

crazygringo 14y ago

As someone who recently imported Wikipedia information for a project, it's trivially easy to determine notability, either by monthly pageviews (publicly available), or by incoming links within Wikipedia. As long as articles always take popularity into account when ranking (in searches, etc.) there isn't any problem.

mjn 14y ago
The bigger problem is verifiability via citations to third-party sources, not really notability. If you can cite a good reference, in some kind of scholarly or otherwise decent source, and not written by the actual subject of the article, it typically stays in. I've written articles on some very obscure things, but they were well-cited, so nobody challenged them. My usual methodology is actually to start from a good source: pick up a book like Knuth's TAOCP, find algorithms he discusses that have no article, do a little searching to find a 2nd or 3rd source on the algorithm, then write a little article cited to those 2-3 sources. Haven't run into any problems doing things that way. There didn't used to be as much emphasis on citations, but a mixture of hoaxes, libel controversies, and an influx of fringe-physics people led to a significant clampdown on unverified material around 2005-06. The good side of it is that the previous focus on notability is mostly gone: if you have good sources, it's ipso-facto notable, due to having, in fact, been noted in good sources. This is quite nice when I write articles on obscure subjects which will get only a handful of visits, but which are well-referenced. The downside is that subjects which are notable but for which there isn't good material to cite end up in an awkward place. I wrote a bit on that shift last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
- pekk 14y ago
  In fact, you can provide citations which don't actually say what you are using them for (or say what you want while totally failing to substantiate it in any way) and it tends to work as long as the group of people who camp that particular article agree with your editorial slant on the matter. I'm always chasing down citations on wikipedia and finding this to be the case.