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Oh, this whole song and dance thing again. I have no idea where on Wikipedia this is a problem. Since this is Hacker News, I humbly request than you expand you

by ahelwer 14y ago

Oh, this whole song and dance thing again. I have no idea where on Wikipedia this is a problem. Since this is Hacker News, I humbly request than you expand your stomping grounds to include articles on algorithms. Coverage and quality is woefully inadequate, and I've yet to see the tracks of a deletion brigade running through any of them. Also, I've found learning then explaining algorithms is a wonderful way to retain them long-term. Benefits all around.

chc 14y ago
If coverage and quality is woefully inadequate, that means people haven't been doing much with them, so of course nobody is going around harassing these nonexistent people. Only pages that people are actually interested in get the jerk brigade's attention.
- mjn 14y ago
  What editors are interested in and what's important isn't necessarily the same, though. I try to focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to value of the content. I find that provides a much better effort-to-results ratio than trying to throw in my $0.02 on Israel-Palestine with 100 other people. It also leads to more pleasant colleagues, because when I'm writing about ancient Greek archaeological sites or mathematical theorems, my co-editors are typically other idealistic people who genuinely want to improve the Wikipedia articles on those subjects. If you're writing on something political, then a lot of your co-editors are going to be people with political agendas. On contentious areas where a lot of people are interested and strongly disagree, I'm not really sure how to do it better. Wikipedia is often suboptimal, but so is the opposite, "expert-based" model. I'm an academic, and if you get bunch of us in a room, from different strongly opposed viewpoints, and ask us to try to come up with a consensus survey article, that experience is usually going to end up being painful. I think I'd actually rather wade into a Wikipedia edit war than serve on those kinds of document-writing committees.
  - chc 14y ago
    It's not just political "hot button" topics. No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people — who are not the normal contributors to the articles — over stupid legalistic crap. This article with five sections and 20 references should really be a short subsection of that article because, well, he likes shuffling things around; another one should be deleted because the guy has never heard of it and most of the publications that covered it are online-only, etc. If your particular niche has avoided this, bully on you. But I personally wouldn't want to join it, because if more people come on board, that means more attention and thus (in my mind, at least) greater likelihood of attracting the wikilawyers.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      So, where did this happen to you, or anyone you know? It should be very easy to cite a source to "the jerk brigade" glomming onto some innocuous bit of good content. Most of what happens on the project is logged. Deleted articles "vanish", because the point of deleting content from the project is not to host it at all, but the discussions and talk page articles and AfD debates are still there.
      - chc 14y ago
        Remember the great programming language purge? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 You might agree or disagree with some particular cases, and sometimes things go the right way, but either way it's still a hassle that you have to fight. Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.
tptacek 14y ago
Here's a page I created years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson This is an article about an individual non-famous executive at a tech company. I've never once had to defend it (it's been more than a year since I even looked at it). Why hasn't it been deleted by roving bands of "deletionists" trying to score points? Because it cites sources and makes a clear statement of notability, as the Wikipedia project asks. Does the Wikipedia project make mistakes and delete articles it shouldn't? Sure! All the time. But, for the most part, if you do what Wikipedia asks you to do, the system works fine. If you write an article about an algorithm that cites the academic literature, it'll most likely survive. On the other hand, if you write an article about a well-known algorithm but fail to cite sources or include a single-sentence lede about why the algorithm is important, it is somewhat likely that some Wikipedian patrolling new articles will nominate it for deletion. Why? Because it'll be a member of a cohort of similar-looking articles most of which will be the CS equivalent of cold fusion research, and without citations, Wikipedians will have nothing to judge it by. To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that.
- chc 14y ago
  > To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that. A price is something you must give up in exchange for something else. I am not convinced that the wikilawyers are the price of Wikipedia any more than a crazy man punching people outside of McDonald's is the price of a hamburger. In reality, you could probably get rid of one and still have the other. The value of Wikipedia to most people is in the massive amount of work that is put into improving the articles and the breadth of information it contains despite all the deletion — I know not a single normal person who looks at Wikipedia and says, "Thank God I cannot find anything non-notable on here. I was worried about that."
  - 14y ago

by ahelwer 14y ago

chc 14y ago

If coverage and quality is woefully inadequate, that means people haven't been doing much with them, so of course nobody is going around harassing these nonexistent people. Only pages that people are actually interested in get the jerk brigade's attention.

mjn 14y ago
What editors are interested in and what's important isn't necessarily the same, though. I try to focus my efforts on areas with the lowest ratio of editors to value of the content. I find that provides a much better effort-to-results ratio than trying to throw in my $0.02 on Israel-Palestine with 100 other people. It also leads to more pleasant colleagues, because when I'm writing about ancient Greek archaeological sites or mathematical theorems, my co-editors are typically other idealistic people who genuinely want to improve the Wikipedia articles on those subjects. If you're writing on something political, then a lot of your co-editors are going to be people with political agendas. On contentious areas where a lot of people are interested and strongly disagree, I'm not really sure how to do it better. Wikipedia is often suboptimal, but so is the opposite, "expert-based" model. I'm an academic, and if you get bunch of us in a room, from different strongly opposed viewpoints, and ask us to try to come up with a consensus survey article, that experience is usually going to end up being painful. I think I'd actually rather wade into a Wikipedia edit war than serve on those kinds of document-writing committees.
- chc 14y ago
  It's not just political "hot button" topics. No matter how innocuous the topic, if somebody takes notice of it, you'll often find yourself constantly having to fight random people — who are not the normal contributors to the articles — over stupid legalistic crap. This article with five sections and 20 references should really be a short subsection of that article because, well, he likes shuffling things around; another one should be deleted because the guy has never heard of it and most of the publications that covered it are online-only, etc. If your particular niche has avoided this, bully on you. But I personally wouldn't want to join it, because if more people come on board, that means more attention and thus (in my mind, at least) greater likelihood of attracting the wikilawyers.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    So, where did this happen to you, or anyone you know? It should be very easy to cite a source to "the jerk brigade" glomming onto some innocuous bit of good content. Most of what happens on the project is logged. Deleted articles "vanish", because the point of deleting content from the project is not to host it at all, but the discussions and talk page articles and AfD debates are still there.
    - chc 14y ago
      Remember the great programming language purge? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2215168 Just Googling around Hacker News, I find a number of innocuous pages whose maintainers have had to defend themselves against deletion. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2752285 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=288200 You might agree or disagree with some particular cases, and sometimes things go the right way, but either way it's still a hassle that you have to fight. Personally, I don't remember what the specific pages were I used to help maintain. I was doing it because I wanted to help out and I saw those pages could use it rather than because I cared a lot about the topics. But I do remember it was unpleasant and I wouldn't want to deal with such people again.

tptacek 14y ago

Here's a page I created years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ann_Davidson This is an article about an individual non-famous executive at a tech company. I've never once had to defend it (it's been more than a year since I even looked at it). Why hasn't it been deleted by roving bands of "deletionists" trying to score points? Because it cites sources and makes a clear statement of notability, as the Wikipedia project asks. Does the Wikipedia project make mistakes and delete articles it shouldn't? Sure! All the time. But, for the most part, if you do what Wikipedia asks you to do, the system works fine. If you write an article about an algorithm that cites the academic literature, it'll most likely survive. On the other hand, if you write an article about a well-known algorithm but fail to cite sources or include a single-sentence lede about why the algorithm is important, it is somewhat likely that some Wikipedian patrolling new articles will nominate it for deletion. Why? Because it'll be a member of a cohort of similar-looking articles most of which will be the CS equivalent of cold fusion research, and without citations, Wikipedians will have nothing to judge it by. To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that.

chc 14y ago
> To me, it's a small miracle that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and that Wikipedia has more or less replaced "real" encyclopedias. That they'll occasionally jump the gun on deleting articles that don't look legitimate seems like a very, very small price to pay for that. A price is something you must give up in exchange for something else. I am not convinced that the wikilawyers are the price of Wikipedia any more than a crazy man punching people outside of McDonald's is the price of a hamburger. In reality, you could probably get rid of one and still have the other. The value of Wikipedia to most people is in the massive amount of work that is put into improving the articles and the breadth of information it contains despite all the deletion — I know not a single normal person who looks at Wikipedia and says, "Thank God I cannot find anything non-notable on here. I was worried about that."
- 14y ago