The Battle For Wikipedia's Soul 471
njondet recommends an article at The Economist that sheds light on the identity crisis faced by Wikipedia as it is torn between two alternative futures. "'It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between 'inclusionists,' who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors' enthusiasm for the project, and 'deletionists' who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries."
Very, very old news (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do the deletionists care if there are trivial articles on there? If they consider an article trivial, isn't it fairly easy to just not read it and not contribute to it?
Do they base their stance purely on how "trivial articles" may affect Wikipedia's public image, or do they have some sort of technical concern about having too many articles?
Why can't it be both? (Score:5, Interesting)
WP is probably beyond fixing at this point (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, nobody really understands the point of an encyclopedia anymore. It's to condense and collect information into a generalized mess so that someone can come along, find a snippet or less deep version of the info they need, then follow the source. The "OH MY GOD IT'S THE WEB WE CAN ADD ANYTHING WE WANT LET'S MAKE A BUNCH OF TV SHOWS" mentality snuck in pretty fast. Wikipedia has put way more emphasis on "wiki" and thrown the "pedia" part out the window years before, and *surprise* it's an issue!
Re:Well I guess I'm an inclusionist then... (Score:5, Interesting)
Much of wikipedias usefulness stems from it's inclusivity; if any given subject had to have a related doctorate, we'd have to wait 50 years until academia decides to catch up.
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not based on technical reasons, nor on "trivia" - if Bob's Local Cheese Statue was discussed in the newspaper a bunch of times, and that's cited in the article, that article will definitely stay. It's more based on "can you back this up using a real source, not yourself", to both preserve reliability and make sure that if someone wants to use it for research they can figure out who said what.
Slashdotters are mostly inclusionists? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm all for including every little piece of info as long as it's possible to organize, and right now it seems to stay quite stable having all kinds of "minimalistic" pieces of data.
However, what called my attention upon entering the commentaries is that most people here were "inclusionists". Is it the aversion to censorship? The interest in unpopular areas of human knowledge?
I think a poll about this in Slashdot would be interesting.
They should fix their own (Score:4, Interesting)
One example is the YATE (telephony) article. It got deleted by an editor who is tied with Asterix. On top of that, the user original writing the article had a copy on his own journal - that also got deleted. Now the article might have been substandard, but instead of letting problems being fixed it got downright deleted by someone with a very biased opinion.
I for one have stopped using wikipedia.
Re:Why can't it be both? (Score:1, Interesting)
They could introduce a rating system. That way the now deletists could ensure that high-value articles are recognizable as such, while the inclusionist could include everything.
I like the idea of finding information about everything on Wikipedia, but sometimes it would be really useful if you could see whether an article is the opinion of a single person or accepted general knowledge, without having to look at the discussion pages.
It's the accuracy, stupid! (Score:3, Interesting)
Middle ground (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I think of myself not as a deletionist or an inclusionist but as a AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTDist [wikimedia.org]. For example, I like the articles that outline specific, well known mathematical proofs (like the proof that e is irrational [wikipedia.org], but I think many of the articles like "List of Magical Aliens in [insert random series here]" need to be merged (but not necessarily deleted).
Re:WP is probably beyond fixing at this point (Score:-1, Interesting)
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It seems to be there... (Score:3, Interesting)
What frustrates me lately is the attitude of a large number of editors who follow the mantra "Either facts are sourced or I delete them on sight, and if an article has fewer than x sources, it gets the axe one way or another". To me, that's a destructive attitude and non-condusive to covering the wide spectrum of knowledge.
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect that the main reason is a lot less noble: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and petty power corrupts completely out of proportion to the actual power." Destroying someone else's work is using power, and that is a rewarding activity in itself, so people with nothing to contribute do so to make themselves feel important.
That's why I've made a principal decision to never again contribute to Wikipedia: doing so would mean engaging in petty power games with deletionists and other control freaks, so why bother ?
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's the deletionist justification? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why can't you have both? (Score:3, Interesting)
Everything to everybody. (Score:5, Interesting)
On top of that I'd add paid moderators and experts to enter content and double check that no users cheat the karma/mod system into letting them inappropriately get material miscategorized or misrated.
Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through. If someone wants to see every stupid thing anyone has put in then let them. If someone wants to see only expert content then let them. Isn't that the whole point of allowing every user to customize their own experience? Just make the default something reasonable such as all expert content and all content of a reasonably high karma/mod value.
Re:False dilemma (was Re:Why can't it be both?) (Score:5, Interesting)
To be fair, the problem is with reliability. If I add something that I heard once (in the 'sum of human knowledge'), there's no way for someone to use that for research or even to check it back to someone reliable to make sure I didn't make the whole bloody thing up. Unless I can go to the library, grab the book and say "oh, wow, this is exactly like Wiki said it was! oh and look, hundreds of pages going into depth on the same topic! now I'm off to write a paper!", the information exists in a Schrodinger-like state of verifiable purgatory where citing it is a huge risk if I don't know anything about it in the first place.
There's really a reason that if you go grab a book off a shelf it has a giant bibliography full of references to other books. It's an implicit certification of accuracy.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Everything to everybody. (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's an article you're moderating, what happens to points when an article is updated? I might give negative mod points to an article today, only for someone to update it to an incredible standard tomorrow. The safest thing to do is to discard all prior moderations, every time there's an update. Yet that's throwing away information capital.
I guess a "moderation" could be attached to a given revision of an article, with the points divided among updates, pro-rata per word visible in that revision. Fiddly.
Former editor and inclusionist (Score:4, Interesting)
When I joined in '04 wikipedia was largely inclusionist but since it reached around 750,000 english articles, became increasingly deletionist to the point that it is now largely deletionist.
Also, the "free" part of its motto "the free encyclopedia" also means open-source, so anything with a hint of not being GDFL approved is deleted with prejudice. "Fair use" at some point became "fair game", nevermind that I (and others) spent time sourcing fair use images only to have them all deleted.
Re:Well I guess I'm an inclusionist then... (Score:2, Interesting)
Rating and Filtering (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very, very old news (Score:3, Interesting)
Suppose I wanted to write up an article on some chemical intermediate and the various methods by which it is produced and used industrially, and other useful information. The article might not be of interest outside the chemical industry, but it would be informative to anybody who happens to encounter the topic and wants to quickly learn about it.
Would that be considered non-notable and fodder for deletion?
I can certainly see the reason for debate when regarding detail on works of fiction (although even then I don't see the harm in keeping that stuff - the fanatics who maintain it will likely police it more thoroughly than most editors review articles on even important topics). I'm concerned though that Wikipedia will turn into a repository of common knowledge and not expand beyond this...
Re:Deletionists (Score:-1, Interesting)
What's more, deletion destroys more than just an article (or a possible future article), it also drives away contributors. Having your work deleted because some clown considered it "not important enough" hurts even when you're a long-time contributor; when you're a new user just trying out editing and contributing on Wikipedia for the first time, it's devastating, and most people will just not bother again.
Deletionists are a cancer that needs to be eliminated.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They should fix their own (Score:5, Interesting)
The OpenPBX article went the same way (there was a lot of evidence that the deleting editor was tied to Asterisk and was attempting to delete a lot of articles about Asterisk alternatives). It's one of the reasons I've given up editing Wikipedia - I've seen far too many genuinely useful articles be deleted, even though they cite external sources.
I'm convinced the AfD process is utterly flawed because most of the people who take part are either deletionists (who will vote "delete" no matter what), or already connected with the article (who will defend it and vote "keep", and be immediately discredited by the deletionists as being biassed). Unbiassed people just don't have an interest in taking part in this sort of petty politics, so if an article is entered into the AfD process the chances are it's going to get deleted.
Deletionists are conservative (Score:5, Interesting)
Way too conservative, I'd say. They deleted whole, complete and well researched articles on the Warcraft universe because it wasn't "encyclopedic". Also a lot of Star Wars stuff has been deleted too. Basically deletionists view with bad eyes everything that is fiction related, and dismiss it. Basically anything that is not traditionally accepted as "knowledge" has no place in Wikipedia in their eyes. It is an extremely prejudicial position, not to mention that deletion of articles should be done by consent - but it isn't. Deletionists are like trolls: since destroying content is much easier than creating, they can win over a similar number of inclusionists no matter how hard the latters try.
Based on the difficulties Wikipedia has had to raise money lately, I'd say most people don't like their stand. Fork wikipedia already, I say, and create an all inclusive wiki, before there is only a handfull of articles left which reference Britannica as their only reliable source. Sigh.
Re:They should fix their own (Score:4, Interesting)
A pretty nasty case of either deletionitis or a small Asteriks conspiracy.
Re:Everything to everybody. (Score:4, Interesting)
The real discussion would come from how you'd show an edited chunk that was an edit of one you didn't want to see by someone you did want to see. I'd suggest having the latest edit be the one that counts in that case.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
If you play it right, you might possibly even give Wikipedia deletionists something to recommend to those people disillusioned with their favorite articles getting deleted.
Re:Slashdotters are mostly inclusionists? (Score:1, Interesting)
You'll never be able to verify an article about a TV show, and none of the articles ever really try. For things like TV episodes, this information can be found at IMDB, and there's no need for Wikipedia to repeat it.
Then there are organizations that are so important that the only references the authors found was the organization or its members. An organization like the Boy Scouts can be found mentioned in other media. An organization like a coalition of some churches, on the other hand, can't be verified because the only source in existence is the very people who make up the organization - which can't be called objective.
So, yes, I'm all for deleting articles which are impossible to verify. If the article can't be verified by independent sources, it doesn't belong in the Wikipedia, simple as that.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
* Wikipedia will be quickly filled with balantant advertising, wanabe celebrities and marginal and hardly proved theories (this is alas sadly often already the case)
* Marginal entries are rarely visted, so they don't evelove that much (practice show that the most intersting pages are those which are often visited). Marigina entries are also at risk of being quiclky filled with spam and advertisement, in one word they don't get enough eyballs to be be correctly mainted. One solution to this is to merge marginal entries when this is possible to enhance their audience.
* They tend to lower the signal/noise ratio as if WP is filled with everything and anything important fact don't naturally evolve.
On the contrary allowing more entries tend to attract a larger public, but which public ? as in WP = Community = its language (in the boroader sens of the word), this community maintain it and make it evolve. So at the end of the day the question is : does WP want to be a large source of trivia about anything and everything or rather a more "elitist" society which bring a real added value to your knowledge.
What about advanced stuff? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about we "refactor" it? (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, the Pokemon and World of Warcraft articles, mentioned by others as obviously not appropriate. But to a cultural historian, they are well worth saving. Just not in a general encyclopedia. Instead of deleting the articles that some people put a bunch of time into, why not work closely with the people interested in such things, and move their articles onto another server with another name? Wikipedia itself could have some summary pages on the topics, with links to the other sites.
I've been making a lot of use of one of them that exists: wiktionary.org. Now, it's quite obvious that documenting every obscure word in every obscure language is utterly inappropriate for wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Traditionally, a books that does that is called "dictionary", not "encyclopedia". Wiktionary is an interesting take on this idea, organized as one big interlocking dictionary of all the world's languages.
It's pretty clear that wiktionary is the start of something very useful (though it's rather incomplete and in need of a lot of help from a lot of people). It's also clear that its material doesn't belong in wikipedia, except maybe for a few summary articles. There's also a lot of cross-linking between wikipedia and wiktionary. So I'd list this as a successful case of splitting off a significant chunk of human knowledge, kicking it out of wikipedia, and reorganizing it as a successful wiki in its own right.
As an amusing example of wiktionary's usefulness, a few weeks ago I noticed an apparent anomaly in the use of a 2-char Chinese word that I probably can't include here [wiktionary.org], but it's pronounced ai4ren2 in Mandarin and aijin in Japanese. Using the classical characters, wiktionary has an article giving the Japanese, Mandarin (and Min Nan) meanings of the word. They show two rather different interpretations of the characters whose basic meanings are "love" and "person". This could be a nice example of how a single writing system doesn't always make it possible for people who speak different languages to communicate in writing. In this case, they just might miscommunicate some significant information. You won't often find this problem mentioned in a typical single-language dictionary, but wiktionary's format makes for easy comparison of such borrowings.
Rather than just deleting articles from wikipedia because they're not "notable" (whatever the hell that might mean to the deleter), we could cool down the fuss by saying that they're more information on the topic than is appropriate for wikipedia, and should be moved to wikiX, for some appropriate X.
Of course, sometimes the classification is a bit fuzzy. Consider, for example, the word "truthiness", which has good articles in both wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and wiktionary [wiktionary.org]. Each article is (at least for the present) well written for its site. In particular, the wiktionary article gives 19th-century citations for the word's use, and also goes into its etymology, appropriately for a dictionary site. OTOH, the wikipedia article is nearly as funny as Colbert's introduction of the word, and includes links to related topics such as "big lie", "noble lie", and "consensus reality".
It's a pretty good example of how to handle a borderline case.
Re:The perfect rule is already there, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why can't it be both? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd started writing up a history of our local music scene so naturally I started at the beginning with a couple of obscure bands. Of course some of these people went on to achieve worldwide acclaim (a couple as actors) and I would have chronicled the whole thing.
Sadly the first four articles I wrote were deleted the next day as they were apparently not "noteworthy". Guess this folk knowledge will have to remain in the surviving copies of fading fanzines.
Never contributed anything since, never will again.
What is "Noteworthy?" (Score:3, Interesting)
In 2006 my daughter was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. We had created a non-profit group and memorial fund in her memory and many media outlets had reported on the murder but some editors at Wikipedia did not consider an article on her to be "Wiki-worthy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente [wikipedia.org]
One jackalope, in his successful attempt to delete the article, stated "Wikipedia is not a memorial. Murders of this type are lamentably common. Even the existence of memorial funds/scholarships does not confer notability."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jennifer_Ann_Crecente [wikipedia.org]
I then took a different route and instead created an article about the charity I founded in her memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ann's_Group [wikipedia.org]
This article was also nominated for deletion with the comment: "Blatant promotional page."
Fortunately I was successful in my continued attempts to keep the articles - but only after we had worked to get two pieces of legislation passed, including one named for her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer's_Law [wikipedia.org]
The process that I had to go through in order to convince people halfway around the world that this subject was "notable" was profoundly frustrating. The qualification to be fully-cited is an understandably objective criteria but to then apply a notability test is not only completely subjective but also thoroughly unrealistic.
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:4, Interesting)
---
Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen--and they are rather poorly edited.
---
Basically, it means that the Pokemon franchise has a lot more fervent editors than the Solidarity movement in Poland. Whereas not many people have enough information to speak with authority about the latter, there are a LOT of people that have knowledge of every minute detail of the former. And considering the subjects in question, said people have a LOT of time on their hands.
To me, I think it's less a problem with Wikipedia and more a problem with society, and really, the goal of the Deletionists is laudible, but Wikipedia will never, ever, ever EVER be respected within the academic community, just due to the fact that anyone can edit it; any respected teacher will automatically shun a Wikipedia reference, though not necessarilly the good articles that could be linked from it. But just the example above from TFA, the only articles that will have proper accountability are the ones that a lot of people know about... so for the best information on Lost, Pokemon and Britney Spears, Wikipedia's got it!
Wikipedia vs. Wikia (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone else commented "The solution to this mess would seem to be to trash everything unsourced or transwiki it to a place that doesn't care about reliability, but that's not going to happen."
It's happening. Wikia [wikia.com], which is Jimbo Wales' commercial operation, is the other place that "doesn't care about reliability". Wikia claims to be an encyclopedia and a search engine, but all they are is a hosting service for fancruft. They have the Star [Wars|Trek|Craft|Gate] wikis, the Yu-Gi-Oh wiki, the Marvel Comics wiki, and similar popular culture. They even have fan fiction. They don't have much else. The machinery is the same as Wikipedia, but the standards are far lower. Wikia has ads, but the reader demographic lives in their parents' basement, so the clicks may not be worth much.
There's now a push on Wikia (the "WP:FICT" debate) to move the fancruft to Wikia, where Wales can try to monetize it. Wales is still involved with Wikipedia, so this is a conflict of interest. It's probably good for Wikipedia to have a place to dump the cruft, but it's troubling that the nonprofit and profit-making sides have some of the same management. The IRS may have something to say about that.
Wikipedia was done around 2006. By then, almost all the subjects worth an article had one. New articles now tend to be self promotion (garage bands, mostly), minor historical figures ("member of the Ontario parliament 1936-1938"), atlas information ("State Route 152"), or utter junk ("I rule!!!").
Wikipedia's maintenance process is labor-intensive. It's the encyclopedia anybody can trash, and a sizable, ongoing effort is required to fight the trashing. That effort increases as the number of articles goes up, which is what limits the useful size of Wikipedia. If volunteers don't keep up the maintenance, the thing will turn to mush. The right size for Wikipedia is probably below 500,000 articles.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Deletionists are conservative (Score:2, Interesting)
Then the deletionists could simply set the importance of an article to 0, and then others who think it's important (or it has become important) could simply increase it. And people searching Wikipedia would find the unimportant article, but last in the list.
Re:How about we "refactor" it? (Score:3, Interesting)
It could also make sense to try to divert the admin discussion by saying that the best people to decide such questions are the experts in the topic. Thus, if you have a bunch of overly-detailed World-of-Warcraft pages that you don't think are "encyclopedic", you wouldn't say you want them deleted. You'd go to the keepers of the World_of_Warcraft wiki, and ask them to decide. Chances are that they'd be happy to take control of any pages on their topic, leaving behind only a few top-level pages in wikipedia.
The result, if done right, could be that these detailed pages would about as easy to find as they are now. They would just have a different URL. This is what I often see with wiktionary, for example. I'll get a "not found" page from wikipedia, with the usual list of related pages and relevance estimates, and find that the top entry is to the wiktionary page for the main word that I'd typed. And I often think "Duh; I should have gone straight to wiktionary for that one."
One of the main challenges to the wiki crowd comes from the people who suggest that reference information should be edited by the experts in the topic. This is one way that this could be added to a wiki that has grown too large. Split it up into sub-wikis, each maintained by some gang of experts. (Either that, or by people who want control of the info on a topic. We do have some bugs to work out.)
In any case, I suppose I don't really expect such issues to be worked out any time soon. Human organizations rarely run very well, and assignment of responsibility/power is one of the things they do rather poorly. Even when the issue is assigning control over something that most people consider insignificant.
Re:Wikipedia as Advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a classic example: the band The Protomen. They're very well known for a non-mainstream band, but ask geeks anywhere and they know who they are. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=The_Protomen [wikipedia.org] Yet, The Protomen article keeps being deleted because of one editor/admin who doesn't know who they are, then they set their wikibots who also magically have admin status to go around reverting edits and deleting random pages they don't like. This is a classic example of letting a few narcissistic individuals with an agenda to push have total power over information and content.
The problem is simple: Instead of figuring out what was wrong with the article, you conclude that it's the admins' fault that the article was deleted. There's no massive conspiracy; the articles just should have bare minimum of facts that tell us why we should care.
Let's hit Special:Undelete and see what was in the most recent version. Hmm, "American progressive rock band from Nashville, Tennessee who create music based on the popular video game series from the late 1980s, Mega Man. They have released one (self-titled) album as of yet and are notable for converting the storyline of the Mega Man video game series into a rock opera." List of members. Three external links (Myspace, official home page, interview with The Escapist).
Now, please read your comment again. Then read the article contents, quoted in full above. You may notice it misses one thing - specifically, the claim that they're "very well known" or that any geeks know them. Instead, the article comes across as "We've made one CD. And we have a MySpace." There's bazillion of garage bands that can make the same claim. I'm not a genius of persuasive writing, but I don't think the article quite communicates the greatness of the band (through neutral claims, of course).
Now, let's compare this to what the criteria [wikipedia.org] say.
The article has now been protected against deletion. There are old deletion debates from June 2006 [wikipedia.org] and yet again from June 2006 [wikipedia.org]. Note that our notability criteria have changed a bit since those days and these days and these days the verifiable sources are among the most revered of tools you can use to prove the notability. So, if the band really meets the notability criteria [wikipedia.org], please do bring it up on Deletion review [wikipedia.org].
And I do mean it. Please do bring it up on Deletion review instead of spinning fanciful conspiracy theories about the Admini
lessons from Usenet (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:lessons from Usenet (Score:3, Interesting)