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There have been attempts. They've mostly failed. A "Wikipedia that allows everything". Try it. It'd turn to shit really quickly. People seem to have this idea

There have been attempts. They've mostly failed. A "Wikipedia that allows everything". Try it. It'd turn to shit really quickly. People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users. Articles need to be maintained. To be useful for readers, they have to be reasonably accurate, and in Wikipedia-land, we base accuracy on external sources. And if there aren't any external sources, how the hell can we even try and be accurate? Fortunately, there is a solution: the rest of the web. Wikipedia has a constrained mission, namely the production of an encyclopedia. Outside Wikipedia, there is a big wide web where you can do whatever you like. Wikis that have explicit points of view, that are focussed on specific topics... all that kind of stuff.

acdha 14y ago
> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. The most common complaint I've heard was rather different: nobody questioned that some pruning is necessary but complained that the standards were incredibly arbitrary and niche interests like anime characters or minor porn stars frequently made the cut while e.g. academics were deleted because they didn't have a mainstream book, New Yorker article, etc. and the deletionist cadre wasn't interested in widely-cited papers, broad recognition within a particular field, etc. Jason Scott also highlighted a similar problem in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 noting that the question again has never been quality but a very small number of people deciding a topic wasn't of interest to anyone else despite demonstrated activity. Attempting to portray this as a question of spam control or lack of external sources is either uninformed or whitewashing.
- tommorris 14y ago
  I'm not going to say there isn't a problem at all. But I spend more than enough time in the trenches dealing with deletion to know that the vast majority of the time, the stuff that gets deleted probably ought to have been. The standards aren't that arbitrary: for an article to exist, there needs to be significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    False positive in wiki editing is much, much worse than false negative. Just as with spam - if your spam filter deletes one email from your CEO, it is much worse than letting in 20 spam emails. Here, also, letting one uninformed, but active Wikipedia bureaucrat to prevail over a more informed scientist is much worse than letting 10 crappy articles to stay on the site and quietly rot while nobody visits them. The latter just wastes tiny bit of resources, the former actually has high potential to spread false information. And given lazy journalists frequently limit their research to looking up stuff in wikipedia, soon the falsity becomes "common knowledge" and then becomes its own source as publications quote Wikipedia which quotes publications.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      There is a deletion review, and articles can be undeleted.
      - gwern 14y ago
        DRV is completely worthless; it is purely for procedural issues, not a second AfD where the merits might be debated by a different group. Undeletion is about as common as hen's teeth: stuff deleted stays deleted.
        chris_wot 14y ago
        Voted down? There's irony.
  - bane 14y ago
    with "significant", "multiple", "independent" and "reliable" all being decided arbitrarily depending on which deletionist you are dealing with
  - brigade 14y ago
    My problem is that for wikipedians, "independent reliable sources" means internet articles. If it's a printed book, it doesn't exist.
rohamg 14y ago
Quora's approach of first-party sourcing "enforced" with social transparency seems to work quite well for many subjects.
- mayanksinghal 14y ago
  Working with Quora admins is just as bad. There are legitimate questions that are deleted/locked because some admin feels like it has to. Putting in requests to undelete/unlock requires incredible amount of effort and knowledge of the system which is weird because there are so many easy to use functionality for everything else. Same goes for actually getting something to be deleted, locked or marked for abuse. If you know a moderator and have experience with their boards, it's a piece of cake for you - else, you just wait in line for a long time. I don't understand why the developers resort to an irritating method for getting things reviewed - find the right community, know the right people, go to their court and appeal to their higher order with wonderful pitches about what should be done. There has to be a better way of dealing with things.
bane 14y ago
Why oh why is this argument always framed like this? "If Deltionists can't cull at their whim, WP will simply end up as a pile of rubbish!" Junk is typically not that hard to find and cull, it's the actual content that gets removed, and the absurd politics behind it, that will probably bring about the end of WP.
- vacri 14y ago
  By 'end of WP', do you mean 'one of the top 5 websites by traffic' and 'now generally considered the default canonical source of knowledge in the English-speaking world'?
- tommorris 14y ago
  So, here is a deletion listing from a week or so back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2012_December_12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... I'd love to know which of these deletions are bringing about the end of Wikipedia.
saraid216 14y ago
> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. Deleting it is a service to the reader in the same way anti-spam filters are to email users. Citation needed.

acdha 14y ago

> People seem to have this idea that there was this golden age of Wikipedia where you could write everything, and then the EVIL DELETIONISTS took over. The fact is, huge amounts of what gets put up on Wikipedia is junk. The most common complaint I've heard was rather different: nobody questioned that some pruning is necessary but complained that the standards were incredibly arbitrary and niche interests like anime characters or minor porn stars frequently made the cut while e.g. academics were deleted because they didn't have a mainstream book, New Yorker article, etc. and the deletionist cadre wasn't interested in widely-cited papers, broad recognition within a particular field, etc. Jason Scott also highlighted a similar problem in http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3826 noting that the question again has never been quality but a very small number of people deciding a topic wasn't of interest to anyone else despite demonstrated activity. Attempting to portray this as a question of spam control or lack of external sources is either uninformed or whitewashing.

tommorris 14y ago
I'm not going to say there isn't a problem at all. But I spend more than enough time in the trenches dealing with deletion to know that the vast majority of the time, the stuff that gets deleted probably ought to have been. The standards aren't that arbitrary: for an article to exist, there needs to be significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources.
- smsm42 14y ago
  False positive in wiki editing is much, much worse than false negative. Just as with spam - if your spam filter deletes one email from your CEO, it is much worse than letting in 20 spam emails. Here, also, letting one uninformed, but active Wikipedia bureaucrat to prevail over a more informed scientist is much worse than letting 10 crappy articles to stay on the site and quietly rot while nobody visits them. The latter just wastes tiny bit of resources, the former actually has high potential to spread false information. And given lazy journalists frequently limit their research to looking up stuff in wikipedia, soon the falsity becomes "common knowledge" and then becomes its own source as publications quote Wikipedia which quotes publications.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    There is a deletion review, and articles can be undeleted.
    - gwern 14y ago
      DRV is completely worthless; it is purely for procedural issues, not a second AfD where the merits might be debated by a different group. Undeletion is about as common as hen's teeth: stuff deleted stays deleted.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
        Voted down? There's irony.
- bane 14y ago
  with "significant", "multiple", "independent" and "reliable" all being decided arbitrarily depending on which deletionist you are dealing with
- brigade 14y ago
  My problem is that for wikipedians, "independent reliable sources" means internet articles. If it's a printed book, it doesn't exist.

rohamg 14y ago

Quora's approach of first-party sourcing "enforced" with social transparency seems to work quite well for many subjects.

mayanksinghal 14y ago
Working with Quora admins is just as bad. There are legitimate questions that are deleted/locked because some admin feels like it has to. Putting in requests to undelete/unlock requires incredible amount of effort and knowledge of the system which is weird because there are so many easy to use functionality for everything else. Same goes for actually getting something to be deleted, locked or marked for abuse. If you know a moderator and have experience with their boards, it's a piece of cake for you - else, you just wait in line for a long time. I don't understand why the developers resort to an irritating method for getting things reviewed - find the right community, know the right people, go to their court and appeal to their higher order with wonderful pitches about what should be done. There has to be a better way of dealing with things.

bane 14y ago

Why oh why is this argument always framed like this? "If Deltionists can't cull at their whim, WP will simply end up as a pile of rubbish!" Junk is typically not that hard to find and cull, it's the actual content that gets removed, and the absurd politics behind it, that will probably bring about the end of WP.

vacri 14y ago
By 'end of WP', do you mean 'one of the top 5 websites by traffic' and 'now generally considered the default canonical source of knowledge in the English-speaking world'?
tommorris 14y ago
So, here is a deletion listing from a week or so back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2012_December_12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... I'd love to know which of these deletions are bringing about the end of Wikipedia.

saraid216 14y ago