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Searching around with HN Search after seeing this thread reminded me of this comment by tptacek about Wikipedia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720 ht

Searching around with HN Search after seeing this thread reminded me of this comment by tptacek about Wikipedia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3272720 which is very, very good. P.S. I will always be behind one person who has the same join date I have, namely patio11, in both daily karma accumulation over time and total accumulated karma. And very deservedly so. I go looking for patio11's comments https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11 just in case I missed a few while browsing threads from the front page and the new page.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
I disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring / distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their own bias, not because it was any good.
- tokenadult 13y ago
  I think the comment is good because it responds to a frequent misconception about Wikipedia seen here on HN (I am a Wikipedian of several years' experience, and I have to live with those issues), not at all because tptacek (who has also been a Wikipedian) posted it. I would have upvoted that comment for its little-known (here) content no matter who posted it. It's a fair point that there have been other comments in other threads about Wikipedia here on HN. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedian+by%3Atokenadult&sortby=points+desc&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedia...
- tptacek 13y ago
  I agree that this isn't a great comment but I'm not seeing the fallacious ad hominem.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    >You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Ad hom: Person objects to treatment they receive from Wikimods, therefore they must lack experience. Ad hom: List of articles for deletion containing articles that are all obvious junk. Implies that all deleted articles must therefore have been junk. Maybe I have inferred too much here, but that's what I thought you were going for, and you have a point. There are probably a lot more pages that need deletion, but it doesn't support the infallibility of Wikimods or refute the validity of some of the complaints made by people about Wikimods. I have no idea if you culled the list, but that might make it worse depending upon what you culled. It's nothing worth getting our knickers in a twist for, and I guess I should disclose that I have created/edited a few Wikipedia pages myself and often found that experience, and working with some others on the site to be frustrating. I'm not talking about vanity pages for my friend's bands either. So I may have developed a natural reflex to unreserved or what I perceive to be unjustified defenses of Wikimods.
    - jholman 13y ago
      Respectfully, I think you're wrong on both counts. The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo), and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a complex (social) system, not perfectly documented). (A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.) As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible. Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep ignorance ...". And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the magnitude of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

I disagree. I think that's not one of tptacek's better comments. He uses ad-hom to support his (probably correct) evaluation that the person/subject of the OP was not notable enough for a Wikipedia article. While ignoring / distracting from the more important points about very real problems with the administration of Wikipedia. The mere fact that many of the proposed additions to Wikipedia are junk is not proof that all additions that get deleted by admins are junk. To his credit, at least he boldly confesses in that post to being a ranting windbag (his words). And to be clear, the real problem in this particular case is not with tptacek's comment, but that HN'ers probably just blindly upvoted his post because it was his, or because it appealed to their own bias, not because it was any good.

tokenadult 13y ago
I think the comment is good because it responds to a frequent misconception about Wikipedia seen here on HN (I am a Wikipedian of several years' experience, and I have to live with those issues), not at all because tptacek (who has also been a Wikipedian) posted it. I would have upvoted that comment for its little-known (here) content no matter who posted it. It's a fair point that there have been other comments in other threads about Wikipedia here on HN. https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedian+by%3Atokenadult&sortby=points+desc&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=Wikipedia...
tptacek 13y ago
I agree that this isn't a great comment but I'm not seeing the fallacious ad hominem.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Ad hom: Person objects to treatment they receive from Wikimods, therefore they must lack experience. Ad hom: List of articles for deletion containing articles that are all obvious junk. Implies that all deleted articles must therefore have been junk. Maybe I have inferred too much here, but that's what I thought you were going for, and you have a point. There are probably a lot more pages that need deletion, but it doesn't support the infallibility of Wikimods or refute the validity of some of the complaints made by people about Wikimods. I have no idea if you culled the list, but that might make it worse depending upon what you culled. It's nothing worth getting our knickers in a twist for, and I guess I should disclose that I have created/edited a few Wikipedia pages myself and often found that experience, and working with some others on the site to be frustrating. I'm not talking about vanity pages for my friend's bands either. So I may have developed a natural reflex to unreserved or what I perceive to be unjustified defenses of Wikimods.
  - jholman 13y ago
    Respectfully, I think you're wrong on both counts. The first is an attempt at drawing a correlation. "When you observe fact-pattern X, you can expect that property Y obtains." It might be derisive, but it's not AdHom. He's not using an unrelated character assassination to discredit an argument. I concede that it smells a bit ad-hom-y, but only because he has a lot bad to say about the article (all of it supported, imo), and so it kind of builds up momentum. That's the article's fault, though, for being so wrong about so much (although the article is right that WP is a complex (social) system, not perfectly documented). (A related mistake, which I don't think you're necessarily making, is that of thinking that anything that attacks credibility is AdHom. If you say "Bob is always wrong about biochemistry, so he's probably wrong about this claim about haemoglobin", that's not AdHom either.) As for the second, your inference might have been reasonable (if uncharitable), except that he later explains exactly why he brought it up: the AfD process has to operate at scale, it's not expected to be infallible. Combined with his other points about how notability has to work, it's build-up for his paragraph that starts with "Anyone who can snark... betraying a deep ignorance ...". And I think it's a pretty decent comment, overall, because it has a virtue I prize, of looking at a wrong-but-seductive view, and giving enough additional context to help readers form a better picture. Though of course the magnitude of the upvoting depends on name-recognition.