9 ms·

Deletionists slowing Wikipedia's growth

49 points by boredguy8 17y ago

pg 17y ago
Currently the entries for Hacker News, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell are all flagged as insufficiently notable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell Trevor's entry is a particularly interesting case of the pathology. Originally his bio talked about how he'd made the first dynamically balancing biped robot. That set off a firestorm about priority. One nutter got so mad that for a while Trevor's bio read as if the most significant thing about him was that he'd falsely claimed to have made the first dynamically balancing biped. Eventually the Wikipedians solved the problem by deletion, so now his bio simply says he's some guy who builds robots. Which of course wouldn't be notable, if that's all he was.
- LargeWu 17y ago
  I'm inclined to agree that they are not "generally notable" The entire HN entry is 4 sentences long. All of the footnotes are sourced from either blogs or YC itself. If HN must be included in Wikipedia, it's probably more appropriate as a mention in the YC page. The individuals are in the same boat. All the references about Trevor are either from his own site or his company site. The footnotes for Jessica are largely sourced from blogs and videos. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of general information. The fact that they are involved with YC or have a company that builds robots is not inherently notable or of general interest.
  - rottencupcakes 17y ago
    So, the question remains, how is the fact that those articles are on wikipedia harming you in any way? Even before this article came up, I've searched for and read those articles, and found them helpful. It provides a succinct overview of the individuals, with links if you want to pursue futher. What difference does it make where the links are sourced from? And who determines what 'general interest' is? It's of general interest to me!
    - joez 17y ago
      There is the possibility of analysis paralysis. In the extreme case where everyone had a Wiki page, an individual's name might return 100+ different results. I would have to say I am in the inclusionists camp though. If someone took the time to create an article for some obscure topic, then they find it worthy enough to share meaning that most likely someone else out there would also be interested in the topic.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        Spend some time patrolling AfD, and I bet you will lose that opinion quickly. You may not become a deletionist, but you will stop believing topics are worthwhile simply because "someone took the time to create an article". The sheer volume of dross people pump into WP every day is staggering.
    - halo 17y ago
      If there's no reliable sources, what happens when somebody adds lies (whether intentionally or not)?
    - biohacker42 17y ago
      Well you see paper is expensive and shelf space is even more expensive. How does this matter to wikipedia you ask? Well imagine a website trying very hard to be like a book, I don't mean the ideas therein, I mean the physical limitations - Wikipedia!
    - LargeWu 17y ago
      Well, Wikipedia determines this by setting their notability guidelines. At the end of the day, it's up to each individual community to determine what is and is not appropriate. It wouldn't hurt you if somebody started posting celebrity gossip articles on HN, but HN would probably downvote them into oblivion because it has decided those types of articles are not relevant to this community. I can say with a high degree of certainty that you would not object to this practice. With Wikipedia it's the same principle.
      - 17y ago
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Bio's of people have always been contentious on Wikipedia - especially in the realms of what is or is not notable. I think the current accepted theory is that you ask the question: if I googled their name could I get all of the information I want from one pre-existing (non WP) link. If the answer is yes then in most cases there is no need for the article.
  - rms 17y ago
    What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media? My problem with the current notability theory is that it isn't flexible enough for what should. For now, deletionists versus inclusionists isn't going to end, but the current notability policy could explicitly allow for the inclusion of articles with no mainstream media sources. For example, I think every professor that has ever had an article published in Nature should have their own Wikipedia page. More professors than just that, but I don't think there is any argument against a scientist that is extremely respected in his field, even if no one in the mainstream media has decided he is worth mentioning left. It is bad to depend on the mainstream media for what is notable because Wikipedia is already beyond that. I used the SFGate to establish notability on an article. Techcrunch has a better Alexa rank than the SF Gate, but Techcrunch doesn't count for some reason.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      > What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media? Exactly. In that case a Wikipedia article would be appropriate (I thought that was clear in my post, sorry) In the example of Jessica Livingston this page: http://ycombinator.com/people.html http://ycombinator.com/people.html provides all of the information found on wikipedia.
- rms 17y ago
  I flipped Hacker News back, notability is already established by the included references, as per Wikipedia rules. I've already had this argument on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia pages tend to unravel if you don't check them continuously. For Trevor and Jessica: shouldn't any of the feature length magazine articles that name them as founders of Y Combinator be enough to establish notability?
  - rms 17y ago
    I fixed the articles of Trevor and Jessica.
- GavinB 17y ago
  Web reach should be enough to trigger notability. Any website in the top 100,000 in terms of traffic for a year is important enough to merit Wikipedia attention. Notability should be determined by how useful the knowledge is, not whether or not the mainstream press bothers to pay attention. The level of notability should be set by Wikipedia's ability to reliably incorporate information, not by some arbitrary standard. As the number and expertise of editors increases, the notability standard should decrease. The goal of wikipedia is the "sum of human knowledge," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) not to "the sum of human knowledge that has been covered in the mainstream press."
  - rms 17y ago
    I had the Alexa rankings for Hacker News in there the last time I edited it, but a Wikipedia editor has deleted that reference in his or her infinite wisdom.
    - GavinB 17y ago
      Sadly, I was talking more about the wikipedia I would like to see than about the wikipedia that currently exists. Personally, number of people using something is a lot more meaningful to me than number of journalists writing about it. Of course, as a very occasional anonymous editor, I suppose I don't have much right to complain.
- tptacek 17y ago
  The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell. The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors. Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but because the article doesn't properly establish why. The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that.
  - ubernostrum 17y ago
    I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact, these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars"). And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles. Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays!
    - tptacek 17y ago
      If your whole argument is that {{Notability}} should instead be {{refimprove}} (or whatever that tag was), then, fine, but I think my point holds.
      - ubernostrum 17y ago
        My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars.
- uhgtyrfgv 17y ago
  physicsforums.com the largest science question and answer site, a partner of Scientific American and sited as a source for a number of wiki entries has been repeatedly rejected as not significant enough. It seems wiki won't let you create an article about another web site.
TrevorJ 17y ago
You have to first quantify whether or not the deletions make the information that is there more or less accurate. That's not an easy issue to decipher, as is evidenced. There's also the fact that we, as humans have a finite amount of knowledge and it appears likely that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the sense that all the 'easy' articles have been written.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
silentOpen 17y ago
Hooray for subcultures of internet sites and factionalization! Computers have created a bunch of strange new semi-political beliefs. "We believe that storage is essentially free and more information is almost always better." "We believe that maintaining quality SnR is most important in group editing situations." "We believe that fair use extends to sampling and remixing but copyright holders maintain most other control."
- tptacek 17y ago
  "We believe that it's possible for a group of unrelated uncompensated volunteers, acting together, accepting all comers, and embracing anonymity, to create an enyclopedia that will not only rival but possibly exceed the work of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that it's possible to do that without creating at the same time a galactically monstrous hairball of cruft, misinformation, advertising, and vanity pages." Some "factionalizations" are more interesting than others.
coffeeaddicted 17y ago
I think it could be replaced by a page building upon wikipedia. For example - same core-articles, but instead of just article+history versions +discussion page it would have more alternative versions of the same article. Maybe with some voting-system. And yeah - it would have to be inclusive - the amount of discussions and trouble caused by deletionists is just not worth it in a time of ever-increasing diskspace. Every single time I stumble upon a page recommended for deletion something in me dies a little. And why must all the articles be central anyway? Only thing that needs to be central seems to be the index. And some common layout, semantic information and the ability to allow everyone to change pages. Has anyone already tried building a de-central wikipedia which works by voting?
- icefox 17y ago
  Because experts are the type of people who can hang out all day voting?
  - coffeeaddicted 17y ago
    The writing is by experts but not for experts. So each reader is actually qualified to vote. And I think it would help experts to write better for their target audience.
- joez 17y ago
  My team and I are exploring that possibility right now. We have come across a few interesting tidbits considering the model: A concern is that without a way to direct your crowd sourcing (centralized articles) people will be all over the place and the knowledgebase suffers. (kind of along the lines of http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unboxed.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unbo...) A clear plus would be ability to include more view points. A less subtle plus (but a big one) would be that with a voting system, it would elevate some credibility concerns. Edit: In answering your question directly, there is Knol.google.com which is very similar to what you are suggesting.
- joeyo 17y ago
  Or how about a wikipedia mirror that doesn't propagate deletions? That way when an article on wikipedia is deleted, the mirror simply displays the last available version.
tjic 17y ago
The sad thing is that the Inclusionist / Deletionist war does not need to be fought at the data level - they could coexist at the view level. There could easily be two views into the db: * en.more.wikipedia.org * en.less.wikipedia.org Let the deletionists tag articles with a "less" bit all the want. Each article thus tagged is invisible from en.more.wikipedia.org. People are still fighting as if it's the 19th century and space is physical and rival.
- tome 17y ago
  It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is rival.
  - dkarl 17y ago
    Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter, will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose.
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  both sides want to declare "regular" wikipedia their lawn though.
  - tjic 17y ago
    I don't think the inclusionists care that much - they just want the information to be out there. The deletionists, though - yes, they do seem to care about the "right" version. IMO.
    - greendestiny 17y ago
      Seems like the simplest compromise is to leave wikipedia as is but change deletion into relegation to another tier.
inimino 17y ago
For more data and less journalistic hype, don't miss the ASC's own blog: http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/ http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/
stabbed 17y ago
baker talked a bit about the deletionists in his (great) article about wikipedia from last year http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131
donaldc 17y ago
What is "notable" is rather subjective and context-dependant. There ought to be somewhere for all these "non-notable" articles to go. The wikipedia approach to some such articles would be useful even if wikipedia itself doesn't find them notable.
jeroen 17y ago
"Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved just 12 months later." "... helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after breaking the 1m barrier ..." From the other numbers in the article 17 months seems right.
sielskr 17y ago
Suppose you started volunteering on Wikipedia years ago and for one reason or another you've acquired "insider status" in the form of admin priviledges or alliances with other insiders. Well, there is a natural human tendency to hoard power, that is, to navigate yourself in a position where your decisions matter. Sometimes this is called making your mark on the world or "working for change". Suppose further that it occurs to you to ask yourself whether you support the deletionists or the inclusionists. Well, it is difficult for a human being to make that choice without being influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by the knowledge that under a deletionist policy, insiders such as yourself and your allies make more decisions that matter (and consequently are in a position to earn the indebtedness of people with a stake in those decisions, e.g., over whether the 'pedia includes a bio of themselves or one of their allies).
tptacek 17y ago
My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia. The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking. pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell). The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages. There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid. The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability". "Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media. You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain.
eli 17y ago
What a lame argument. I thought there was a rule on HN against wading into Holy Wars anyway
- BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
  I upvoted because I have to agree. With that said, if I were really concerned about information, or the quality of the information, I would go to a legitimate source rather than some place that allows people with huge egos to decide what is and is not worthy of a quick internet search. But perhaps that point of view breaks the tradition of the Internet.
tokenadult 17y ago
"Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. 'In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies--where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model.' The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out." That's an interesting observation. The other time I have seen a growth curve like that is observing the growth of homeschooling in the United States from the 1980s through the 1990s http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html to the present. The scarce resource is parents who feel they have enough time to homeschool their children. That resource is not completely exhausted, but the growth of homeschooling in the United States follows the resource-constrained S-shaped curve model much better than an exponential, bigger-is-always-better model. It appears that the resource constraint now on Wikipedia is new editors willing to work with the existing editors. That resource isn't exhausted yet either, but it is scarce and limited, and thus Wikipedia's growth rate has slowed.
chrischen 17y ago
I put myself as one of the persons born in my home town on wikipedia, and they had the nerve to delete it... jk It seems the inclusionists built Wikipedia into what it is today. It also seems what the deletionists are trying to do: gain Wikipedia more credibility, is a futile effort given the nature of Wikipedia's volatility and inability to be used as a credible secondary source. The whole idea of a wiki that anyone can edit is so that the best final result always comes through. And this is based on the assumption that there are more reasonable people out there than unreasonable, so that the better article can come out on top through reason. But if some exclusive group does take over Wikipedia like this then this idea of an open wiki of information where the best content comes out on top is dead. However theoretically wikipedia is still open to everyone right? So to take back wikipedia we wouldn't have to make an alternative. All we have to do is to organize a counter group that's more powerful in numbers and out click those deletionists right? Correct me if I'm wrong I don't edit wikipedia. But if we can't do that then Wikipedia is no longer really open.
teeja 17y ago
There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject. Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common. For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year. "Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention.
- tptacek 17y ago
  The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague about what "Notability" means.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jongraehl 17y ago
I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted. Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare me.

49 points by boredguy8 17y ago

pg 17y ago

Currently the entries for Hacker News, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell are all flagged as insufficiently notable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Livingston http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Blackwell Trevor's entry is a particularly interesting case of the pathology. Originally his bio talked about how he'd made the first dynamically balancing biped robot. That set off a firestorm about priority. One nutter got so mad that for a while Trevor's bio read as if the most significant thing about him was that he'd falsely claimed to have made the first dynamically balancing biped. Eventually the Wikipedians solved the problem by deletion, so now his bio simply says he's some guy who builds robots. Which of course wouldn't be notable, if that's all he was.

LargeWu 17y ago
I'm inclined to agree that they are not "generally notable" The entire HN entry is 4 sentences long. All of the footnotes are sourced from either blogs or YC itself. If HN must be included in Wikipedia, it's probably more appropriate as a mention in the YC page. The individuals are in the same boat. All the references about Trevor are either from his own site or his company site. The footnotes for Jessica are largely sourced from blogs and videos. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of general information. The fact that they are involved with YC or have a company that builds robots is not inherently notable or of general interest.
- rottencupcakes 17y ago
  So, the question remains, how is the fact that those articles are on wikipedia harming you in any way? Even before this article came up, I've searched for and read those articles, and found them helpful. It provides a succinct overview of the individuals, with links if you want to pursue futher. What difference does it make where the links are sourced from? And who determines what 'general interest' is? It's of general interest to me!
  - joez 17y ago
    There is the possibility of analysis paralysis. In the extreme case where everyone had a Wiki page, an individual's name might return 100+ different results. I would have to say I am in the inclusionists camp though. If someone took the time to create an article for some obscure topic, then they find it worthy enough to share meaning that most likely someone else out there would also be interested in the topic.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Spend some time patrolling AfD, and I bet you will lose that opinion quickly. You may not become a deletionist, but you will stop believing topics are worthwhile simply because "someone took the time to create an article". The sheer volume of dross people pump into WP every day is staggering.
  - halo 17y ago
    If there's no reliable sources, what happens when somebody adds lies (whether intentionally or not)?
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    Well you see paper is expensive and shelf space is even more expensive. How does this matter to wikipedia you ask? Well imagine a website trying very hard to be like a book, I don't mean the ideas therein, I mean the physical limitations - Wikipedia!
  - LargeWu 17y ago
    Well, Wikipedia determines this by setting their notability guidelines. At the end of the day, it's up to each individual community to determine what is and is not appropriate. It wouldn't hurt you if somebody started posting celebrity gossip articles on HN, but HN would probably downvote them into oblivion because it has decided those types of articles are not relevant to this community. I can say with a high degree of certainty that you would not object to this practice. With Wikipedia it's the same principle.
    - 17y ago
ErrantX 17y ago
Bio's of people have always been contentious on Wikipedia - especially in the realms of what is or is not notable. I think the current accepted theory is that you ask the question: if I googled their name could I get all of the information I want from one pre-existing (non WP) link. If the answer is yes then in most cases there is no need for the article.
- rms 17y ago
  What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media? My problem with the current notability theory is that it isn't flexible enough for what should. For now, deletionists versus inclusionists isn't going to end, but the current notability policy could explicitly allow for the inclusion of articles with no mainstream media sources. For example, I think every professor that has ever had an article published in Nature should have their own Wikipedia page. More professors than just that, but I don't think there is any argument against a scientist that is extremely respected in his field, even if no one in the mainstream media has decided he is worth mentioning left. It is bad to depend on the mainstream media for what is notable because Wikipedia is already beyond that. I used the SFGate to establish notability on an article. Techcrunch has a better Alexa rank than the SF Gate, but Techcrunch doesn't count for some reason.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    > What if it takes 2 or 3 places to get all the information? Or 300 places that aren't the mainstream media? Exactly. In that case a Wikipedia article would be appropriate (I thought that was clear in my post, sorry) In the example of Jessica Livingston this page: http://ycombinator.com/people.html http://ycombinator.com/people.html provides all of the information found on wikipedia.
rms 17y ago
I flipped Hacker News back, notability is already established by the included references, as per Wikipedia rules. I've already had this argument on Wikipedia, but Wikipedia pages tend to unravel if you don't check them continuously. For Trevor and Jessica: shouldn't any of the feature length magazine articles that name them as founders of Y Combinator be enough to establish notability?
- rms 17y ago
  I fixed the articles of Trevor and Jessica.
GavinB 17y ago
Web reach should be enough to trigger notability. Any website in the top 100,000 in terms of traffic for a year is important enough to merit Wikipedia attention. Notability should be determined by how useful the knowledge is, not whether or not the mainstream press bothers to pay attention. The level of notability should be set by Wikipedia's ability to reliably incorporate information, not by some arbitrary standard. As the number and expertise of editors increases, the notability standard should decrease. The goal of wikipedia is the "sum of human knowledge," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech) not to "the sum of human knowledge that has been covered in the mainstream press."
- rms 17y ago
  I had the Alexa rankings for Hacker News in there the last time I edited it, but a Wikipedia editor has deleted that reference in his or her infinite wisdom.
  - GavinB 17y ago
    Sadly, I was talking more about the wikipedia I would like to see than about the wikipedia that currently exists. Personally, number of people using something is a lot more meaningful to me than number of journalists writing about it. Of course, as a very occasional anonymous editor, I suppose I don't have much right to complain.
tptacek 17y ago
The rules for notability are straightforward. Subjects are notable "by dint of being written about". The notability tag is very easy to dispel: provide references to credible reliable sources. They clearly exist for Blackwell. The misconception you're fostering here is that the {{Notability}} tag is somehow a black mark on the article. It isn't. The entire encyclopedia is under constant construction. The tags are there to direct the attention of editors. Your complaint is particularly misleading because the Blackwell article is, in fact, badly sourced; it has "External links", but its "References" all point to Blackwell's own sites. The {{Notability}} tag is correct, not because Blackwell isn't notable (he again clearly is), but because the article doesn't properly establish why. The rest of your critique may or may not be valid (I have misgivings about WP, too), but the main thrust of your comment here is bogus, and you should acknowledge that.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  I don't think your argument holds up here, though. As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, there are already Wikipedia policies in place which cover verifiability of information and citations to reliable sources (in fact, these criteria form part of one of Wikipedia's "Five Pillars"). And there are already perfectly useful procedures in place for dealing with articles which fail these criteria: there are tags for indicating that particular articles, sections or individual statements are in need of citation, and there's a process for evaluating sources referenced by articles. Given this, the notability guideline seems at best to duplicate matters already covered by full-fledged policies. And in real-world situations, its main function seems to be turning Wikipedia into a popularity contest -- prove that your topic has enough Google juice, and it stays!
  - tptacek 17y ago
    If your whole argument is that {{Notability}} should instead be {{refimprove}} (or whatever that tag was), then, fine, but I think my point holds.
    - ubernostrum 17y ago
      My argument is really that the notability guideline in general serves no constructive purpose on Wikipedia; everything useful that it purports to do is covered by other policies or guidelines, which leaves only the non-useful things it does, like cause flamewars.
uhgtyrfgv 17y ago
physicsforums.com the largest science question and answer site, a partner of Scientific American and sited as a source for a number of wiki entries has been repeatedly rejected as not significant enough. It seems wiki won't let you create an article about another web site.

TrevorJ 17y ago

You have to first quantify whether or not the deletions make the information that is there more or less accurate. That's not an easy issue to decipher, as is evidenced. There's also the fact that we, as humans have a finite amount of knowledge and it appears likely that much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the sense that all the 'easy' articles have been written.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

silentOpen 17y ago

Hooray for subcultures of internet sites and factionalization! Computers have created a bunch of strange new semi-political beliefs. "We believe that storage is essentially free and more information is almost always better." "We believe that maintaining quality SnR is most important in group editing situations." "We believe that fair use extends to sampling and remixing but copyright holders maintain most other control."

tptacek 17y ago
"We believe that it's possible for a group of unrelated uncompensated volunteers, acting together, accepting all comers, and embracing anonymity, to create an enyclopedia that will not only rival but possibly exceed the work of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and that it's possible to do that without creating at the same time a galactically monstrous hairball of cruft, misinformation, advertising, and vanity pages." Some "factionalizations" are more interesting than others.

coffeeaddicted 17y ago

I think it could be replaced by a page building upon wikipedia. For example - same core-articles, but instead of just article+history versions +discussion page it would have more alternative versions of the same article. Maybe with some voting-system. And yeah - it would have to be inclusive - the amount of discussions and trouble caused by deletionists is just not worth it in a time of ever-increasing diskspace. Every single time I stumble upon a page recommended for deletion something in me dies a little. And why must all the articles be central anyway? Only thing that needs to be central seems to be the index. And some common layout, semantic information and the ability to allow everyone to change pages. Has anyone already tried building a de-central wikipedia which works by voting?

icefox 17y ago
Because experts are the type of people who can hang out all day voting?
- coffeeaddicted 17y ago
  The writing is by experts but not for experts. So each reader is actually qualified to vote. And I think it would help experts to write better for their target audience.
joez 17y ago
My team and I are exploring that possibility right now. We have come across a few interesting tidbits considering the model: A concern is that without a way to direct your crowd sourcing (centralized articles) people will be all over the place and the knowledgebase suffers. (kind of along the lines of http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unboxed.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/technology/internet/19unbo...) A clear plus would be ability to include more view points. A less subtle plus (but a big one) would be that with a voting system, it would elevate some credibility concerns. Edit: In answering your question directly, there is Knol.google.com which is very similar to what you are suggesting.
joeyo 17y ago
Or how about a wikipedia mirror that doesn't propagate deletions? That way when an article on wikipedia is deleted, the mirror simply displays the last available version.

tjic 17y ago

The sad thing is that the Inclusionist / Deletionist war does not need to be fought at the data level - they could coexist at the view level. There could easily be two views into the db: * en.more.wikipedia.org * en.less.wikipedia.org Let the deletionists tag articles with a "less" bit all the want. Each article thus tagged is invisible from en.more.wikipedia.org. People are still fighting as if it's the 19th century and space is physical and rival.

tome 17y ago
It's about mindshare. It may or may not be physical, but it certainly is rival.
- dkarl 17y ago
  Yes -- the general public, who don't have strong feelings about the matter, will all end up on one or the other anyway. The other side, the one visited only by people who care about the difference, would become an irrelevant backwater. One side is going to win, and the other is going to lose.
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
both sides want to declare "regular" wikipedia their lawn though.
- tjic 17y ago
  I don't think the inclusionists care that much - they just want the information to be out there. The deletionists, though - yes, they do seem to care about the "right" version. IMO.
  - greendestiny 17y ago
    Seems like the simplest compromise is to leave wikipedia as is but change deletion into relegation to another tier.

inimino 17y ago

For more data and less journalistic hype, don't miss the ASC's own blog: http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/ http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/

stabbed 17y ago

baker talked a bit about the deletionists in his (great) article about wikipedia from last year http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21131

donaldc 17y ago

What is "notable" is rather subjective and context-dependant. There ought to be somewhere for all these "non-notable" articles to go. The wikipedia approach to some such articles would be useful even if wikipedia itself doesn't find them notable.

jeroen 17y ago

"Its first million articles took five years to put together, but the second was achieved just 12 months later." "... helped the site reach the 2m article milestone just 17 months after breaking the 1m barrier ..." From the other numbers in the article 17 months seems right.

sielskr 17y ago

Suppose you started volunteering on Wikipedia years ago and for one reason or another you've acquired "insider status" in the form of admin priviledges or alliances with other insiders. Well, there is a natural human tendency to hoard power, that is, to navigate yourself in a position where your decisions matter. Sometimes this is called making your mark on the world or "working for change". Suppose further that it occurs to you to ask yourself whether you support the deletionists or the inclusionists. Well, it is difficult for a human being to make that choice without being influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by the knowledge that under a deletionist policy, insiders such as yourself and your allies make more decisions that matter (and consequently are in a position to earn the indebtedness of people with a stake in those decisions, e.g., over whether the 'pedia includes a bio of themselves or one of their allies).

tptacek 17y ago

My take is that half of this Guardian article makes an important observation about Wikipedia, and the other half tries to relitigate the whole idea of Wikipedia. The important half: the WP I immersed myself into in 2007 was decidedly less hospitable than the image WP tries to craft for itself. There are two forces I saw that were dragging the project down: editing-as-sport (which, guilty as charged, yes) and status seeking. pg, I think, got a faceful of the editing-as-sport problem when he looked at the articles on HN/YC topics. WP editors are encouraged to tag first and ask questions later; there's volumes and reams and bookcases and crap-tons of policy and process designed to handle those tags. However, a very vocal subset of WP users will both tag-first, and also take a personal interest in the outcome of those discussions. So if an article is AfD'd (put up for deletion) for notability concerns, and the article's a "Keep", you can bet the {{Notability}} tag is staying and every edit is going to be contested until some face-saving reorganization of the topic emerges (for instance, an omnibus "Y Combinator" article with subsections for pg and Blackwell). The supposed nurturing atmosphere of the all-volunteer encyclopedia is meanwhile torpedoed by the status-seeking quest for adminship, in which clued-in editors are all too aware that every dispute they engage in is a contest to win or lose credibility in a future WP debate over whether they can put the gold star of adminship on their pages. There are rationales for both these phenomenon, which I don't want to go into (rms apparently already thinks I'm a total message board geek for WP), but I'll just say that that part of the controversy over WP I think is real and valid. The second half of the debate here is over deletionism vs. inclusionism. Here I'm less concerned. There is obviously a pervasive misunderstanding about the concept of "notability" and the overall goal of the Wikipedia project. Wikipedia is not the Hitchhiker's Guide. A decision was made long before the Guardian ever noticed WP that, in order to keep the project focussed, topics would be included or excluded based on an acid test of "Notability". "Notability" in the WP sense isn't subjective. You're notable if reliable sources have written about you. You're not notable if they haven't. The definition of "reliable source" is pretty expansive; my impression is that it goes up to and including "blogs lots of people have heard of". It certainly includes the entire mainstream media. You can argue that, because WP isn't paper, you should be able to include anything in it, including a "who's who" of everyone who's ever posted code to Freshmeat. You can argue that, but it's pointless to do so. That argument came and went many years ago, and it's settled. The who's-who will have to live under some other domain.

eli 17y ago

What a lame argument. I thought there was a rule on HN against wading into Holy Wars anyway

BrentRitterbeck 17y ago
I upvoted because I have to agree. With that said, if I were really concerned about information, or the quality of the information, I would go to a legitimate source rather than some place that allows people with huge egos to decide what is and is not worthy of a quick internet search. But perhaps that point of view breaks the tradition of the Internet.

tokenadult 17y ago

"Chi has identified one model that Wikipedia's growth pattern matches. 'In my experience, the only thing we've seen these growth patterns [in] before is in population growth studies--where there's some sort of resource constraint that results in this model.' The site, he suggests, is becoming like a community where resources have started to run out." That's an interesting observation. The other time I have seen a growth curve like that is observing the growth of homeschooling in the United States from the 1980s through the 1990s http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html http://learninfreedom.org/homeschool_growth.html to the present. The scarce resource is parents who feel they have enough time to homeschool their children. That resource is not completely exhausted, but the growth of homeschooling in the United States follows the resource-constrained S-shaped curve model much better than an exponential, bigger-is-always-better model. It appears that the resource constraint now on Wikipedia is new editors willing to work with the existing editors. That resource isn't exhausted yet either, but it is scarce and limited, and thus Wikipedia's growth rate has slowed.

chrischen 17y ago

I put myself as one of the persons born in my home town on wikipedia, and they had the nerve to delete it... jk It seems the inclusionists built Wikipedia into what it is today. It also seems what the deletionists are trying to do: gain Wikipedia more credibility, is a futile effort given the nature of Wikipedia's volatility and inability to be used as a credible secondary source. The whole idea of a wiki that anyone can edit is so that the best final result always comes through. And this is based on the assumption that there are more reasonable people out there than unreasonable, so that the better article can come out on top through reason. But if some exclusive group does take over Wikipedia like this then this idea of an open wiki of information where the best content comes out on top is dead. However theoretically wikipedia is still open to everyone right? So to take back wikipedia we wouldn't have to make an alternative. All we have to do is to organize a counter group that's more powerful in numbers and out click those deletionists right? Correct me if I'm wrong I don't edit wikipedia. But if we can't do that then Wikipedia is no longer really open.

teeja 17y ago

There's another force acting in WP besides deletion: consolidation. In the early days it was harder to know about pre-existing articles on a subject. Multiple pages on the same topic and closely related topics were common. For example, I discovered the other day a separate page for Reagan's NPR joke about Russia, "We start bombing in 5 minutes". Another example is subject timelines that are broken out into separate articles for each year. "Notability" is an unfortunate choice for a criterion since it has a large component of subjectivity. There are many people who are only temporarily famous; many who should be (more) famous are nearly unknown - on Wikipedia, for example, technical people before the 20th century whose discoveries still positively impact our lives. Warriors of all ages, on the other hand, get more than enough attention.

tptacek 17y ago
The subjectivity of notability is, I think, a canard, and it's been tackled upthread from here. One thing I think you can't accuse WP of is of being vague about what "Notability" means.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jongraehl 17y ago

I'm not sure how it's a bad thing that 25% of casual edits are reverted. Perhaps some of the habitual editors are nasty people, but 25% doesn't scare me.