Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. Gender imbalance might be a problem, but it's not a problem to the same extent as notability-based deletionism is. Notability is an extremely vague standard, a perfect recipe for abuse and selective enforcement. A fair and efficient editorial process should strive to replace vague rules with clearer counterparts whenever possible.
Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity. All of these standards can be applied fairly strictly, and with much less vagueness than notability.
- It's not like Wikipedia is short of disk space to store a few million extra text articles.
- The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.
- No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat. That's just alarmism. Besides, if something like that ever becomes a problem, a better response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.
- If these deletionists are just being OCD and wanting everything to be tidy and clean and under their editorial control, I would say that they need to take a break. In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship. But the kind of intolerance and self-centered narrow-mindedness that overzealous deletionists exhibit doesn't suit the spirit of a collaborative online project. Keep your OCD to your own home/office and away from public spaces, thank you very much.
Right now, I get the impression that it's too easy to flag something for deletion and too difficult to counter the deletionist argument, especially since the deletionists are so familiar with editorial procedures. This inequality needs to change. The burden of proof should be on people who want to remove information from the Web, not on those who want to keep it. Isn't that the same principle that we fought tooth and nail to uphold against the onslaught of SOPA, ACTA, etc?
I completely agree! I updated something on my father's wikipedia page (he founded a city and was a mayor), and even though the article was 5 years old, the change brought the article under review and it was cited for deletion due to notability! I countered everyone of their arguments with sourced articles directly that met the guidelines for notability and they just deleted the messages from their talk pages. They eventually stopped responding and left the article for deletion. Luckily a compassionate editor came along (who happened to be female) and completely defended it and me.
edit: I just searched for the page and it is deleted! I am going to get to the bottom of this, this is ridiculous, who do these people think they are?
edit 2: When the editor apologized to me, she told me to notify her if the page was ever deleted "If the article gets deleted, please let me know. -- Uzma Gamal". I've sent her a message and will update...This is crazy!
It's pretty ridiculous that people will go this far out of their way to delete an article that is obviously not spam or anything like that. Seriously, I got pretty emotional having to defend my father's notability to a stranger on the internet who is on a power-trip. At least the woman standing up for me (and my Dad) proves there are at least some good people on there...
The fact that you are so emotionally invested in the subject is a good reason why you shouldn't be the one writing or creating the article in the first place.
There are different, less self-interested kinds of emotional investment, though. Many article authors are intellectually interested in their subjects, but not personally connected to them. For example, there's a difference between writing a Wikipedia article on a mathematical theorem you consider beautiful and important; and writing a Wikipedia article on a mathematical theorem that you personally discovered and published. In both cases you care a lot about the subject, but in the second case it may be better to let a third party who's less personally close to it write the article.
(Interestingly, this almost never comes up in the mathematics articles. There are quite a few mathematicians who edit Wikipedia, and they tend to be quite scrupulous about that kind of thing.)
It also tends to lead to distorted understandings of the problems in these kinds of discussions, imo. There are a lot of things that can be improved on Wikipedia, but they are not most clearly seen if your only interaction with Wikipedia is writing articles where you have a strong conflict of interest. You get a better idea of what's good and bad if you put in a good-faith effort to contribute to articles that don't relate to your own business/self/family/books first, and see how that goes. It's not even strictly prohibited to work on articles where you have a conflict of interest, but it's not a good place to start. I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute. I chatted at a conference with a professor who had very strong opinions on Wikipedia and appeared to be positioning himself as very knowledgeable about it... based on his one and only effort to edit it, creating an article about himself.
> I find that many people who dismiss Wikipedia entirely didn't ever make that good-faith effort to understand and contribute.
I find many people people who dismiss wikipedia entirely did make that good faith effort to understand and contribute.
They gave up after
- writing articles (with sources) about early 20th C Olympic athletes which were bulk deleted as not notable
- making small changes to articles to fix spelling, grammar, or style. Each change required extensive reading of the MoS to get right. Almost every change was reverted within minutes to the previous version by someone using twinkle, or some auto revert tool, or someone with an image of a police-officer style "vandal patrol". (Some of the fixes were clearly fixes from something incorrect to correct. A few of them were matters of style, bringing things into compliance with the MoS, or making something consistent with the rest of the page.) Worse than having the changes reverted was to sometimes have a warning templated to their talk page.
- the hatred for people who edit without making accounts.
- a bizarre process of user name review after the username was deemed "confusing". (Note the software has hard coded limits on what can become a username; further there are a bunch of filters to prevent certain words being used). The username was not similar to any wikipedian username, nor to any function or process of wikipedia, nor to any kid of role account (real or otherwise.) What could the name be confused with? This, coupled with hatred for IP editing, lead to death.
So, now, we both have our anecdotes about people who've had poor experiences with wikipedia.
Yours is interesting. Creating an article about yourself is clearly a bad idea. But how did his experience end up with him hating wikipedia, and not being pleased that wikipedia has strong process in place to prevent odd biases? Why is it acceptable to chase off expert users just because they've made a mistake? Why do you assume he made no good faith effort to contribute, and not that he made a mistake, and tried to contribute, and got chased off by over vigorous editors.
On the latter point, because I chatted with him over dinner, and as far as I could tell the only thing he really cared about was that he "should" have a Wikipedia article and they wouldn't "let" him have one. I've had quite a few experiences with academics (I'm also an academic) who seem to be primarily interested in how they can get Wikipedia to cover them or their work, i.e. their main goal is to use it to get their work more well known or highly cited. Not as much interest in how Wikipedia is as a quality encyclopedia in general.
When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs, for example start with important classic theorems in theoretical CS, and that kind of thing, the response was a less direct version of: I have more important things to do than write random articles for free, and anyway there are already good textbooks that cover those theorems.
(Not all my experiences with academics are bad in that regard, but I've found that, partly due to academic incentives, most just don't have the time/interest to write something that doesn't contribute to their career advancement. There are definite exceptions, though, especially among profs with the luxury of already being tenured.)
One thing that is really good is the much better way that WP tries to engage with college projects.
Sometimes a lecturer will have an idea to get students to edit WP. This used to end badly for all concerned. WP now has much nicer ways to meet new editors, and encourage them into better ways of editing.
"" When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs ""
Every hair on Buffy Summer's head has an article on Wikipedia. The above is not going to create a better encyclopedia, it is going to create an elitist, insular clique.
I wonder how far Linux would have gotten without people contributing to "scratch their own itch".
Self-interest is something to be harnessed and channeled to promote a greater good (better kernel code, more article contributions), not something to be chased away.
They've gone and deleted the page on Atomic Dielectric Resonance Scanning as well, seemingly on the basis that the page was made by the son of the guy who invented the technology.
That is a very good reason not to donate. I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy.
"No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat."
And if we did? It think it would be rather cool for everyone, living or dead, to have his own Wikipedia page. In fact these might have special status as non-deletable.
If your family ran a web site about its family, would you deny any member a page, especially if some members already had pages?
Now consider our larger family, all us humans that have ever been and ever will be. Besides the many topics about our "family" covered by Wikipedia, some of us have pages specifically about us. Why shouldn't all of us have our own pages?
Well before Wikipedia came along, I've wished that each person on Earth could have some way of being recorded for posterity. Some peoples' record will of course be more interesting than others'. But we're all family, even the boring and embarrassing ones.
I think this would be a great idea, to have articles on "non-notable" subjects.
The underlying motivation for "notable" is a potential bug in Wikipedia, not a problem with "notability" per se. The notability requirement is epiphenomenal, a kind of code smell for the Wikipedia guidelines.
The underlying issue is whether the Wikipedia attribution and citation guidelines are strong enough to indicate when an article contains content that is possibly fallacious. Non-notable topics are more likely to have fewer references, and hence the information about a non-notable subject are more subject to manipulation.
It would be an interesting acid test for Wikipedia (perhaps a sub-Wikipedia, like http://everything-en.wikipedia.org/) to open the floodgates on "non-notable" entries. Articles would start out by default with a banner that says "No editor has reviewed whether this article contains credible sources." Another editor could swoop in, read the citations, and remove the banner, or change it to: "The sources cited in this article are easily manipulated, and lack independent review."
Iterating over http://everything-en.wikipedia.org editor guidelines, Wikipedia could evolve a strong set of guidelines for remaining authoritative over the long-tail of information.
I wish this would happen, but I don't know if/how it would.
If there are good references, Wikipedia has been moving in this direction. But as an encyclopedia, and one that claims no authority for itself based on any kind of expertise of the authors, articles really need to be referenced to good sources in the published literature.
If you do have good sources for something, e.g. there is even a relatively small biographical section on someone in a published book, or a journal article, or something similar, the separate "notability" requirement has been increasingly going away, so that "but I've got sources" trumps it. I wrote a bit on that last year: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability... (I also discuss some of the history around these requirements, some of which were motivated by trying to do something about Usenet physics cranks who found Wikipedia and decided it'd be a great place for articles on all their pet theories.)
I've been systematically going through several references and adding articles on everything in them, and haven't run into people objecting to my articles or trying to delete them for several years, since the end of the more "notability" focused era. Now as long as my articles include some references, they seem fine. One of my projects is marching through the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie adding articles on random people who were mayors of Prussian towns in 1850, and that kind of thing. There's even a Wikiproject trying to organize efforts to cover everything in that particular reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_e...
I do think it's also valuable for there to be other projects, which catalog information that can't be referenced well. For example, Know Your Meme does a pretty decent job of doing original research in history-of-memes. There are several genealogy projects that attempt to catalog people more exhaustively as well. But those are pretty different projects from Wikipedia's goal of summarizing stuff that's published in the existing literature, with references. Wikipedia doesn't have to be the only wiki on the internet, so I don't see why those original-research projects can't develop in parallel.
I have not seen Wikipedia "moving in this directon." I had some editors delete a 5 year old page with multiple published sources and 10+ inbound wikipedia links on it. I am getting it reviewed now. There are some bad apple editors on Wikipedia who are high up on their horses.
I'm not arguing it never happens, but that it's been "moving in this direction", i.e. that notability plays an increasingly small role relative to verifiability. That's my observation over about 8 years of writing articles now and then, but I would be interested in a more quantitative test of that claim if someone knows of a way to do it. Nobody has given me any grief since around 2008 for new articles, even ones on quite "minor" subjects, whereas the question of "does this belong in an encyclopedia?" used to be a more common discussion in Wikipedia's early days, as everyone was trying to figure out what "a wiki encyclopedia" really meant. (In particular, people coming from a more academic background, like Larry Sanger, were advocating for a much smaller, more traditional encyclopedia, certainly not one with millions of articles.)
I do think there are specific areas that remain more controversial, mainly around recent pop culture and business. If people suspect you're self-promoting, then they may try to get an article deleted (there was a recent rash of hotels hiring PR firms to add articles on them, which wouldn't be so bad in itself if the articles didn't read like ad copy). Same if you write an article on a recent internet meme, or a website.
In the areas I've been working in, which are mainly geography, history, science, mathematics, and literature, "notability" as a separate requirement seems basically completely dead in practice. I used to have to argue against deletion of my articles on minor 19th-century Prussians. But nobody even thinks of deleting those these days, as long as they have solid citations.
edit: Looking elsewhere in the thread, it looks like your views of Wikipedia are generalized from one very self-interested example: an article about your dad. May I suggest that isn't the most unbiased way of forming an opinion on a complex subject?
A side note, how do you go through a reference and lift all the information from it while avoiding simply paraphrasing it? Or are you using it as a starting point then finding more sources on these mayors?
In the case of the ADB, it's public domain (published in the late 19th century), so could be used directly, like the 1911 Britannica is. Except it's in German, so some translation is necessary. :) I sometimes translate fairly directly, but I usually look for whether there are any more recent sources to expand on the bio, or correct any info that might now be obsolete.
With copyrighted encyclopedias, my preference is to use at least 2-3 sources for a bio. For example, with a physicist, I'd use a biographical dictionary / encyclopedia as a reference for basic biographical facts (dates, locations, awards, etc.), and then flesh out information about scientific importance from something like a textbook or survey paper commenting on his/her work.
If the main source is a non-encyclopedia, it's usually less of a problem, because the original text doesn't really read like an encyclopedia article anyway. For example, when writing articles on Greek archaeological sites, my source material is usually a discussion in a monograph or history book, which is sometimes scattered (it may be mentioned for a few pages in Chapter 2, then again in Ch. 8, sometimes as a main topic, other times in passing when discussing an event or person, that kind of thing). So it's a matter of going through, noting down salient facts and page numbers they came from, and then assembling the results into an article.
Methinks there already is a website with more or less the same function. It's called Facebook, and from what I've heard, people don't seem to be particularly enthusiastic about recording their lives to be displayed in public in perpetuity.
Not really. Facebook is geared towards logging your whole life (with more or less detail), not having a small profile page.
See Rob Pike's[1] Wiki page, for example; it's just a couple of paragraphs describing where he was born and what he did and does professionally. From his personal life, there's only 8 words.
I'm someone who likes to remain pseudo-anonymous, but I'd be OK with a page like that.
While I think a lot of people would get used to it (as proven by the amount of people who have all their lives and conversations in public on Facebook), there definitely will still be some who are aware of the consequences.
The whole "overshare your whole life publicly on the internet" situation is starting to get out of hand. I don't need to tell HN'ers, but once something is put online, it's there forever, available to any of the 7 billion people alive right now, and it will be available to anybody else that ever lives in the future. Yet still people continue to post content that is immature, embarrassing, risqué, illegal/incriminating, etc. using their full names and identities for the world to see.
But a full Wikipedia article for every person? Do you really want anybody on the planet to have your full DOB, birthplace, educational history, employment history, place of residence, pictures, etc. AND then have all of that information for your spouses, parents, children?
This is getting too crazy.
A ban on self promotion, if overzealous, has the problem that it can be used to remove articles by the people who have the most expertise in a given subject.
> Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. Gender imbalance might be a problem, but it's not a problem to the same extent as notability-based deletionism is.
You're right. I've given up creating new articles on Wikipedia, due to the hassle I've had with deletionists.
It's hard to argue against trying to make the policies more objective and consistent.
But the reasoning you are using to get there seems to be pushing wikipedia to be more like google (keep pretty much all of the content and let pagerank sort it out) and less like wikipedia. There's nothing wrong with google, but it already exists, and we don't need another one.
Wikipedia is fundamentally based on editing. Deleting pages is just one aspect -- what about removing paragraphs? I think my paragraph is important, so I add it near the top of a page. You think the paragraph is completely useless and want to remove it entirely. What do we do? Remove the paragraph, keep it, or move it down the page?
You also don't address a lot of obvious problems, like namespace issues. If the policy is not to delete anything, then there will be more articles and greater ambiguity. I like the fact that, when I use wikipedia, it usually goes to the right place immediately or offers a short list of ways to disambiguate.
Some people have personalities that help them create excellently researched, extremely detailed articles. Train spotters, bus spotters, etc, will have articles with a wealth of detail, all of which can be traced back to authoritative real world documentation.
Interesting point in the article that there are many, many Linux distributions with their own articles (reading one of the articles which listed them, it looked like over 200 of them). Are there really 200 notable Linux distros?
Edit: Re the wedding dress, my mother was an expert maker of lace, among other accomplishments, and I've seen a fair amount of lace.The lace on Kate Middleton's dress is definitely notable.
As someone not familiar with lace or wedding dresses, it's far from obvious why it would be notable. If you wrote up a response explaining, I'd bet that a lot of readers here would find it informative.
"In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship."
I'd say this is more often the case than not. The few times I've interacted with wikipedia editors I've found our differences to revolve around differences in opinion rather than quantifiable standards. Of course, the opinion of the wiki-nazi carries the day. I agree wikipedia would be better served if it focused its editing on clear cases of unacceptability ("obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity") plus in improving the language and grammar of the contributions.
>Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent...
I find this opinion extremely ironic. The whole point of wikipedia was to be an encyclopedia, including all of the baggage that word carries. We don't need another raw dump of information--that's what the internet is for. Wikipedia has a special place in the mind of the world; having an article there gives your cause an air of legitimacy that simply being on the internet doesn't have anymore. And this is exactly why people want their pet causes plastered all over it.
If Wikipedia were just another dump of information, no one would care to have their information on it. That is what is ironic about this argument. The only reason people care to be on wikipedia is precisely because of the "deletionists" and editors who work to keep articles on the site notable. Without them, wikipedia simply wouldn't matter.
Seems to me like they are often not actually out to delete the article, instead they're using the threat of deletion to try and spur the author to clean up an article to wikipedia's standards. Otherwise they'd have to do it themselves. In those cases I think it's actually a pretty reasonable strategy. There's a lot of crap and vanity articles that are thrown up there on any given day.
One big problem with Wikipedia, and the big cause of the ongoing deletionism controversy, is the divergent purposes of outside content creators and wikipedian editors.
Most of the outside creators contribute out of direct interest in the subject matter. Too much editing is done for ego-boos and a sense of enpowerment. This isn't always true, of course, but it is true often enough to generate the problem and keep it going.
> A better response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.
Its easy to say "some other clear guideline" but I think your going to run into the exact same problem wikipedia currently has. Can I create a page for my cat? for my friend's cat? the neighborhood cat? a stranger's cat?
Or to take one of the historical examples that actually led to the "verifiability" and "no original research" policies: if I'm a prolific physics crank from Usenet who discovered Wikipedia, can I create hundreds of articles on my alternative physics theories, which cite my own website as a source?
There's an obvious namespacing issue. How many people do you think have cats named "Fluffy," for instance? Beyond a certain point, it starts becoming difficult to find the information you want, except, perhaps by using a search function. Once you're at that point, you might as well be search Google for the info instead.
Edit: Wikipedia solves this problem currently with disambiguation pages. Those would become useless once they hit a certain size.
The number of people wanting to create pages about everything is lass than the number of people willing to maintain pages about everything.
Thus, assuming no vandals or spammers ever create pages, you have very many pages created, and not so many people available to check and maintain those pages. Over the years spammers and vandals insert some changes. Or the information just becomes out of date.
So, now someone has to pay to store and host this stuff, which is not ever used by anyone, and which is out of date or full of links to handbags and shoes and medication, or with "BOB IS GAY LOLOLOLOL".
It loses its "authoritative" nature. It becomes just a list of facts that have citations. Which has its uses of course but I think is much less interesting.
Would you trust wikipedia as much if it had a page for your neighbor's dog?
Because theres no way anyone spent more than 10 minutes fact checking and verifying the page on your neighbor's dog. And if it has your neighbor's dog it has other people's neighbor's dogs. So now every page you have to distinguish between actual curated, "trusted" content and some guy posting about his friend.
> Plus, as long as they maintain the "no original research" rule and the citation requirement, this isn't even a potential problem.
Thousands of articles are published everyday. Its not difficult to get in one. So and so got an honorable mention at the town's local pet show.
You already have to distinguish between curated and non-curated content. It's not like Wikipedia requires an editor before publishing the content, and a whole lot of pages have never been revised, or have been editing since, etc.
Or just assign notability number to each article, and allow users to filter by it (perhaps even by default only show articles with notability greater than some bias).
Notwithstanding my other response advocating "pages for everyone!" this would make the random page function less interesting, and a notability filter would be good there. A tag filter (positive and negative) would be cool too.
I agree. I bet that dress got more page views across the net than the combined lifetime page views of anything regarding Linux distros. I'd say the dress was notable even though I personally couldn't care less about it.
Now, watch people 'delete' my comment by downvoting, without giving me any counterargument.
> Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity.
None of these are objective, though, meaning this argument will never end. In particular, there is no 'widely accepted definition of obscenity' even within any particular country, let alone the entire English-speaking world (assuming you only care about the English-language Wikipedia).
> The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.
There's the danger of the more out-of-the-way articles becoming spam-traps. The technical solutions would stifle article creation and modification, which seems directly counter to your goals.
> No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat.
Why not? How is not having a page for every John Doe and his cat not simply deletionism?
> In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship.
Non sequitur based on psychological projection or other such nonsense. You have no real basis for this statement.
That's a very broad definition of deletionism, and I'm not interested in arguing about terminology. (Hey, I don't want any wedding gown photos on my hard drive. Am I a deletionist too?) Besides, distinguishing between private desire/preference and public editorial behavior is exactly what I'm trying to advocate here.
> None of these are objective, though, meaning this argument will never end.
Objectivity is not black and white. Some rules are easier to enforce fairly than others, and some rules are more subjective than others. I'm not saying that Wikipedia should officially adopt any of the rules that I listed off the top of my head, but they were meant as examples that may be less subjective than "notability". The less room a rule for deletion leaves for subjective interpretation, the better.
> There's the danger of the more out-of-the-way articles becoming spam-traps.
An article that is over 50% spam might be a good candidate for deletion. Compare this rule with "notability". Which one is more objective? Deletionists are patrolling every out-of-the-way article anyway. If they really want to contribute to Wikipedia, they should devote more energy to deleting obvious spam instead of arguing pointlessly about "notability".
> Why not? How is not having a page for every John Doe and his cat not simply deletionism?
Because not everyone gives a fuck about having his or her own Wikipedia page. Just like not everyone wants to have a public Facebook wall. Lack of interest is a powerful resource that modern societies should learn to leverage to the benefit of all. If the page doesn't get created in the first place, there is nothing to delete. You can call this deletionism too, but then we're back to arguing about terminology.
> Non sequitur based on psychological projection or other such nonsense.
Maybe it is, but so is your so-called criticism. (Yes, that's tu quoque.)
Wikipedia has long adopted those of your rules that are workable and discussed all of them at great length. None of the rules you propose is any use as an alternative to notability criteria. None of the rules you propose is simple to apply in the real world.
Notability is a technical term on Wikipedia. It's a mistake to interpret it as the common English word or concept. It's also not all that subjective: When defined for all possible articles, notability is necessarily extremely abstract. However, notability is being refined and re-interpreted for specific areas in a community process. I'm not always happy about this process, and I certainly don't agree with its results in all cases, but that's a different issue.
It's this process that matters. There has to be some process to determine whether an article gets included (though extreme inclusionists may disagree). For this process, Wikipedia:Notability is the constitutional law, the individual Wikiprojects' notability criteria are the law derived from the constitution, both of which are applied to specific instances, in a system with a rich body of case law and with various bodies for arbitration.
In a way, it's more useful to think about notability not as an attribute of an entity, but simply as a short verdict of the current process. In other words, a thing is not notable enough to get its own Wikipedia article, but rather the fact that it got included and remained included makes it notable according to the technical meaning of Wikipedia.
Of course this is complicated and of course there are horrible downsides of having such a complicated system. Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse. However I doubt that people would herald the new inclusionist Wikipedia where everyone's dad can get an article, instead they'd mercilessly pounce on the new Wikipedia full of spam, self-advertising, non-referenced, non-verified, non-sensical and attack articles.
I understand that notability is not a simple rule but the result of countless debates and arbitrations that resemble a system of common law. Still, I think it is very unfortunate that a new contributor often needs to win an argument with a deletionist as soon as he writes a new article for the first time. That's like requiring every new business to win a nasty lawsuit (or jump through similarly onerous hoops) before they can actually sell anything. The result of the former is a precipitous drop in the number of new contributors and the further consolidation of editorial power in the hands of existing contributors. The result of the latter, which we often see in markets with government-approved quasi-monopolies like health-care supplies and payment processing, is stifled innovation.
> Maybe we should just opt for a simpler system and resign to the fact that the end result will be worse.
How do you know that the result will be worse? What do you even mean by worse? One of the symptoms of an unhealthy monopoly is that the established powers refuse to experiment, lest they lose their dominant position. Attempts to depart from the status quo are met with alarmism and doomsday scenarios, and existing rules and procedures get romanticized to absurd ends. When a community is ailing, its cherished processes should be the first to be questioned. Deletionists might have had a noble purpose when they began their crusade a few years ago, but now that they wield an enormous amount of power over other contributors, I cannot think of them except as part of a self-perpetuating unhealthy monopoly over editorial power.
Rules like "Thou shalt not put up ads here" and "Thou shalt use proper citations", even if no less complicated to apply in the real world, at least articulate clear ideals that people can understand, and provide concrete guidelines that new contributors can follow. The less abstract the rules are, the less room there is for abuse.
Sorry, I guess that was badly put. I wasn't discussing any specific change/simplification of the system and saying that this would make things worse. Without some specific changes at hand it's difficult/meaningless to make such predictions. I certainly don't think that the current process is optimal and any change is a change for the worse. Personally, I'd be happier with drastically relaxed notability criteria.
I meant that if there was a change that involved a trade-off between process complexity and article quality[0], we shouldn't tend towards article quality at all costs. I meant that maybe a lower article quality is worth it if it means being less byzantine, less harsh towards the newbies, more flexible, etc.
Of course if you can avoid that trade-off, if Wikipedia can be any or all of these things without a drop in quality -- and I'm sure it can be although I don't know how -- that's even better and we should implement that first.
[0] You're 100% correct that "worse" isn't well defined here, and "high article quality" is not much better.
This is frustrating. I can't tell if you're making a joke, in which case I understand fine and I was going to make a joke about tautologies myself but then changed my mind. But if you're not making a joke and you think this involves circular reasoning, then you completely missed my point:
Notability, the Wikipedia term, is not an input to the article inclusion/exclusion process, it is the output of this process. The process itself depends on the topic and relies on various proxy metrics because notability (the English word) relates to an abstract concept which you can not meaningfully discuss directly.
As far as whether I was making a joke or not, it is a bit of both. I understand that the wikipedia definition of the term notable means something that has been decided to be included in the encyclopedia, however in discussions over whether articles should be deleted, I have noticed that it seems very common for wikipedia members to give notability as the reason for deletion, which if notability merely means whether something has been decided to be suitable for the encylopedia, is then circular reasoning.
They use it as a proxy for the notability criteria laid out in [0] and the various more concrete notability criteria for various genres. I think that's all right. But it often comes down to people subjectively feeling one way or another about an article's notability and then applying the rules in a way that delivers the desired outcome.
Excellent post. I have no idea why you were downvoted. As usual, people discussing Wikipedia policy are doomed to rehash arguments long made on Wikipedia meta pages... poorly.
I'm a moderate inclusionist (or I was, years ago when I was active on Wikipedia), but the quality of the inclusionist arguments outside of Wikipedia itself is pathetic. I think this is because there are almost no deletionists outside of Wikipedia which elevate the discussion with good counter-arguments.
> the quality of the inclusionist arguments outside of Wikipedia itself is pathetic.
I'd be interested in reading some of the "good" deletionist & inclusionist arguments inside Wikipedia that you mention. These pages [1][2][3] seem to summarize most of the well-known arguments from both sides, but each of the points listed there are too schematic for a casual reader to make sense of what's actually going on within the community. Besides, some of the arguments there actually look even more pathetic than anything I've read outside of Wikipedia. (What the hell does Roe v. Wade have to do with this?)
> people discussing Wikipedia policy are doomed to rehash arguments long made on Wikipedia meta pages... poorly.
Members of some communities seem to think that outsiders are not fully qualified to participate in debates about their beloved policies. But often a detached outsider's perspective is exactly what is needed to fix a broken status quo.
For example, both the deletionist and inclusionist "Associations" are made up of experienced editors with strong commitments pro and con. These folks might not be in the best position to talk about the many hurdles that new contributors face every day, which has more to do with maldistributed burdens of proof and the lack of clearly articulated standards.
Well-intentioned new contributors don't care whether Wikipedia should be paper or toilet paper. They care when some editor on a power trip spends 30 minutes arguing to delete a little article when he could have spent a much more productive 3 minutes looking up a couple of references that the newbie didn't know how to include.
Sorry, I don't have any good links for you. It's been a while since I've been active, and most of what I'm thinking of is spread around hundreds of AfD (deletion review), article talk pages and policy pages. Much of the discussion within Wikipedia isn't all that great, either, with a very low SNR. I'm not sure that there's a single page which only covers the really good arguments of either side.
The quotes & arguments in the articles you reference are cringe-worthy, but then again I don't think they're very serious. I think the "Rationale for deletionism" section in your [1] is pretty okay, and something every inclusionist had better keep in mind when making a policy suggestion. As usual, it pays to know the opposing side's arguments very well.
I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
Newbies are good judges on the difficulty of entry into Wikipedia, but that's an orthogonal issue: it may be possible to be nicer to newbies AND have sensible notability criteria/high quality articles, but then again, maybe not. If not, as I said earlier, having less sensible notability criteria and worse quality articles may be worth it if it resulted in a less hostile environment/image.
> I'm not sure that a detached outsider is in a better position to come up with what's needed to fix the system, being ignorant of both what the system is and why it was set up in this way. At least the latter is required before coming up with a new, improved system.
I guess I didn't express my "detached outsider" argument very clearly. I wasn't trying to suggest that outsiders should dictate specific policies of Wikipedia's editorial process. That task should be left to those who actually know the community well. But formulating specific policies is not all there is to policy-making. Policy-making also involves philosophizing about general principles, such as "What kind of website do we want/need Wikipedia to be?" This is the area where deletionists and inclusionists seem to disagree the most sharply, and since debates in this area seem to have been in a stalemate for quite a while, this is the area where I think fresh perspectives are needed the most. It is also the area where one can make valuable points without having to have been a Wikipedia contributor for 5+ years.
If you interpret pg's suggestion as "You have plenty of space," then of course he's just rehashing the paper vs. toilet paper debate. But IMO the core of his suggestion is "There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica," i.e. radically more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible, etc. This is a matter of general principles and ideals, not specific policies. pg didn't suggest specific policies as an alternative to the current way that deletions are handled. Rather, he invited Wikipedians to step beyond internal politics and think more deeply about what role they want Wikipedia to play in the context of broader social changes. To call his argument "pathetic" merely on the basis of the "You have plenty of space" interpretation is to see the tree but miss the forest. Sometimes, forests contain dead trees. But that doesn't mean that the forest itself is worthless. To take pg's suggestion as a simple rehashing of old arguments among Wikipedians is to drag him down to the level of myopic nitpicking that much of the debate surrounding deletionism seems to have become of late.
The suggestions I made in my original comment do lend themselves too easily to the "You have plenty of space" interpretation, and I'm sorry that I couldn't express myself more effectively. I also learned a lot from the replies I got. I can't edit that comment anymore, but if I could, I might remove all those specific arguments and just focus on the maldistribution of burdens of proof. Because that's the kind of philosophical principle that seems to be lacking in all the nitpicking about unverifiable predictions pro and con. If Wikipedians can't bring themselves to stop obsessing about internal politics and reconsider what their philosophical commitments imply, at least I hope they're humble enough to admit that an outsider might have more interesting things to say about matters of general principle. A community that is all too ready to discount outsider perspectives is a sure sign of an ailing community that is trying to insulate its existing power relations even more from rational scrutiny.
> more inclusive, more dynamic, more egalitarian, more accessible
more spammy, more full of nonsense written by homeopaths and similar nutballs, more full of hateful crap written by Neo-Nazis and their ilk, etc. etc.
If you opt for the radically inclusionist policy, you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum. It's wrong, sure, but deleting it would be a tad... deletionist.
> you no longer have much of a justification for deleting that page that says cancer can be cured by chugging bleach and shoving silver up your rectum.
So what? Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer. (Believe it or not, Wikipedia actually has a rule requiring balanced coverage.)
You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own. (Does that also count as deletionism in your dictionary? What about article-splittism?)
Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved, compared to starting a heated and confrontational debate about deleting an entire article.
"If there be time to expose through discussion falsehood and fallacies, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." -- Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927)
> Just add another paragraph to that page explaining the scientific consensus that anally penetrating yourself with silver won't cure cancer.
So you have multiple articles on the subject of cancer treatment, all repeating the same information and all needing to be updated one by one? Because my point was what Wikipedia now calls a 'POV Fork', or a new article explicitly created to push a specific POV as opposed to being NPOV.
Also, you're hitting up against something that inclusionists also complain about: Their pet POV Forks, the articles they demand to be allowed to own, keep getting deleted because Wikipedia already has NPOV coverage of that topic! Shame and infamy! Shame! And! Infamy!
> You might even vote to move that entire section to a page of its own.
I think that's pretty much the definition of a POV Fork, unless I misunderstand you.
> Either response will take a lot less time and effort for everyone involved
Not if you want all the articles on a given subject to be intelligent, factual, and balanced. Then you have to turn each and every (attempted) POV Fork into an NPOV article that's a clone of the article it forked off from.
You may recognize gwern from comments here at hackernews, and after reading it I didn't feel that I'd wasted my time (which should be read as mild praise relative to a typical submission to hackernews).
While I don't agree with the extent of deletion taht wikipedia sees, I do see a point in avoiding pollution of the search space. There are a lot of celebrity weddings. And frankly, 'affect on fashion industry' really isn't going to be large in the grand scheme of things, just like having an article just for the linux kernel 2.6.29 isn't going to be huge.
Make a page called 'notable wedding dresses' and stick it in there. Would any geek but the most insanely hardcore really want a separate page for each minor version of Perl? No, of course not. And that's what the effect of celebrity wedding dresses is like in the world of fashion: a minor dot-point revision of one tool.
Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity. All of these standards can be applied fairly strictly, and with much less vagueness than notability.
- It's not like Wikipedia is short of disk space to store a few million extra text articles.
- The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.
- No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat. That's just alarmism. Besides, if something like that ever becomes a problem, a better response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.
- If these deletionists are just being OCD and wanting everything to be tidy and clean and under their editorial control, I would say that they need to take a break. In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship. But the kind of intolerance and self-centered narrow-mindedness that overzealous deletionists exhibit doesn't suit the spirit of a collaborative online project. Keep your OCD to your own home/office and away from public spaces, thank you very much.
Right now, I get the impression that it's too easy to flag something for deletion and too difficult to counter the deletionist argument, especially since the deletionists are so familiar with editorial procedures. This inequality needs to change. The burden of proof should be on people who want to remove information from the Web, not on those who want to keep it. Isn't that the same principle that we fought tooth and nail to uphold against the onslaught of SOPA, ACTA, etc?