It never ceases to amaze how little Wikipedia understands Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia to the end user (at least from my own personal experience and how I've seen other people use it) is to be able look up anything of any importance and get a quick overview of it.
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.
Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.
It appears to amaze you that Wikipedia doesn't understand how you understand Wikipedia. There are many hundreds of thousands of words of discussion about the WP notability criteria, which you'll never bother to read, but which fairly convincingly refute the notion that WP is just making a casual mistake here.
The difference is that it's easy to look primary source material for obscure cities, animals and flowers. But not for some random guy who blogs.
While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.
People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.
It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.
I've said this before, but if Wikipedia ever fails, it will be because of their tendency to delete articles that other people find relevant; a competitor that doesn't insult its users by deleting their articles capriciously (and that includes a decent search function) would actually have a chance at the throne.
It's a question of whether you want a well manicured arboretum or a wild forest filled with it's share of beautiful trees but also lots of brambles and poison oak. Wikipedia is a garden. If you want the forest, there is Google. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia might not increase its value. Someone has to maintain those new pages, keep them updated, and remove the dated and biased crap that can accumulate in Wikipedia's less visited corners.
Honestly, who is Steve Yegge? I've only heard of him because articles from his blog are occasionally posted here. His blog doesn't give any biographical details as far as I can tell, and I tried to look him up on wikipedia to see what he's actually done, but he doesn't have an article.
Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
As far as I can tell, he isn't notable outside of blogging (I had no idea who he was either). I can understand why his wikipedia page got deleted.
On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).
Oddly, I was just thinking this morning about how people here on this site think Steve Yegge is extremely famous, while I don't really know who he is. His own description is that he was programmer at Amazon who wrote a blog in the evenings while drinking, and the blog became popular.
Hey I can't speak for anyone else, but Yegge made me a MUCH better programmer.
His article on "Java is the kingdom of nouns" and various writings explaining why lisp matters and the virtues and pitfalls of static typing/dynamic typing really made me question a lot of implicit assumptions I did not realize I had.
You have to understand that Wikipedia is what would happen if your liberal arts faculty committee meeting had a fling with StackOverflow: it is both a community with implicit status/karma, it has a (contentiously) consensus policy where academic papers and newspapers matter and the rest of the world is a bunch of pajama-wearing amateurs of minor significance, and it totally fetishizes adherence to the defined Wiki process.
If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.
I think if you were to order topics by importance for inclusion in an encyclopedia, Degrassi: The Next Generation is much higher than Steve Yegge, though there's certainly an argument for including both. Certainly it's had more cultural impact on a much larger scale than Yegge. Encyclopedia coverage isn't a judgment of quality; it's not like the criteria for covering a novel or a film is the reviews they get from literary critics or film critics.
Why does wikipedia even care if someone is notable or not? If someone went to the trouble to create a page about someone else, aren't they "notable" enough to have a page? This reeks of editorial bias.
I think it makes perfect sense. If one allows articles that have little interest, you'll pretty soon end up with a massive amount of articles that very few people are interested in reading, and even worse: articles that nobody is interested in maintaining.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.
I used to love editing Wikipedia to the point of obsession, but after going through a grueling process of defending an article from deletion I decided I had better things to do with my life. The subject of the article in question was the author of at least half a dozen highly influential books in his field, the subject of a biography published by a mainstream publisher, cited in publications by his peers probably hundreds if not thousands of times over the past thirty years, interviewed and quoted in mainstream media around the world etc etc etc. Unfortunately there was a clique of editors who didn't like his ideas. Essentially they thought he was a quack and therefore couldn't stand the idea that he'd be given exposure in Wikipedia. I have no opinion on whether he's a quack and it really has nothing whatsoever to do with his notability. Eventually I was able to establish that the guy is influential and the article is still there, but the stupidity of having to endlessly argue the point made me say to hell with it and I haven't edited anything since.
Page says "Even though I'm quite aware of who he is as a programmer, he doesn't meet our standards for inclusion." I'm just curious about their standards for inclusion, any ideas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people) I guess programmers are counted under "creative professionals". (There may be a meta-lesson here that there are specific notability guidelines for porn stars but not for programmers.)
My big problem with Wikipedia's notability guidelines is that they're too general. I don't accept that "notability" has to mean "known worldwide" or "known by a large number of people regardless of their domain." I believe that notability within a given domain (say, programming) should be enough. And I don't think there's much - if any - question that Steve is "notable" within programming circles.
Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time" versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."
Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and everybodY is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people expect and want to use Wikipedia.
Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC, Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."
And he's back. Right after I re-created the page, somebody tagged it - again - for "speedy delete" but the admin rejected the speedy delete request. Thankfully. With the citations and references I included, I hope that particular article will be safe from deletion now. But if anybody else feels like working on it a bit, have at it.
[+] [-] DanielStraight|15 years ago|reply
Wikipedia will happily include every obscure city, animal and flower species on Earth (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizothorax_yunnanensis_yunnan...), but will try to delete articles on bloggers and singers that are very well known within their niche.
I don't get it. Adding additional pages to Wikipedia does very little to reduce its value and plenty to increase its value (always coming up first in Google to give a basic overview). No one is going to read or print the whole thing anyway. Whether it's 3.3 million or 13.3 million articles doesn't seem to make a difference.
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
The standards for articles on bloggers and singers have to be high, because there's a huge number of bloggers and singers out there trying to promote themselves by writing on wikipedia about how awesome they are. Since nobody has the time or the inclination to police the article on Joe Blogg's Blog when it claims that "this is the awesomest blog on Earth", wikipedia tries to limit the number of articles on subjects where the article's editors are likely to have a strongly vested interest in the subject of the article.
Another reason: every obscure animal and flower species on Earth has been around for millions of years, and most of them will (I hope) be around in another million years. Towns usually have lives measured in centuries. The average blog will be forgotten (even by its author) in a few years.
[+] [-] tptacek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avar|15 years ago|reply
While I don't agree with some of the policies on the English Wikipedia, you also have to consider that having articles about anything incurs a long-term maintenance cost on the project. This especially true when the articles are about living persons or controversial subjects.
People are always complaining about Wikipedia because some obscure subject they personally care about didn't make the cut. Meanwhile there are literally millions of very useful encyclopedia articles on topics that unquestionably belong in an encyclopedia.
It's that sort of content that Wikipedia mainly caters to.
[+] [-] SomeCallMeTim|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reynolds|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whyenot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stonemetal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TotlolRon|15 years ago|reply
Gatekeepers focus on the gate. The garden it keeps? Not so interesting.
[+] [-] snprbob86|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hugh3|15 years ago|reply
Can anyone explain why he's notable (apart from the old "I've heard of him therefore..." argument)? Not being combative, just curious.
[+] [-] btmorex|15 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I have no problem with wikipedia including pages on famous bloggers who happen to be programmers. I think wikipedia's biggest strength is having something on just about everything. If I googled "Steve Yegge", it would be nice to have a wikipedia page there with a short blurb on why people know him (blogging about programming presumably).
[+] [-] code_duck|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMrF|15 years ago|reply
Other than that, I've heard he writes great blog posts on programming and works at Google.
[+] [-] dusklight|15 years ago|reply
His article on "Java is the kingdom of nouns" and various writings explaining why lisp matters and the virtues and pitfalls of static typing/dynamic typing really made me question a lot of implicit assumptions I did not realize I had.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
If you really feel strongly that Yegge should be included, the effective way to do it is either get someone at the NYT to sneeze about him in print or hone your rules-lawyer skills, learn all their policies/acronyms, and outlast the other guys.
[+] [-] phrotoma|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Steve+Yeg...
[+] [-] shod|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kqr2|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers
Discussion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AList_of_programmers
[+] [-] growt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illumin8|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt|15 years ago|reply
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and should as such have relatively high standards as opposed to the rest of the web.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|15 years ago|reply
For varying definitions of consensus and neutral point of view, of course.
[+] [-] GiraffeNecktie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplegeek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|15 years ago|reply
Same with open-source projects... when the Wikipedia page for a F/OSS project is afd'd, the argument is always "it hasn't been covered in the NY Time" versus "but every geek knows about it, uses it, considers it notable, etc."
Ok, to be fair, there's some grey area here... make the domain small enough and everybodY is notable. (To themselves, for example). But I still think the WP policy needs adjusting... it's just not working for the way people expect and want to use Wikipedia.
[+] [-] mindcrime|15 years ago|reply
Anyway, I just created a new Steve Yegge page with a number of links from reputable sources, including links from where he has presented at UIUC, Stanford and OSCON, an infoq.com article, and ajaxian.com article and an interview with Steve by the StackExchange guys. How anyone can contend that that isn't enough to establish notability is beyond me. You don't get invited to speak at Stanford, UIUC and to talk at OSCON if you're not "somebody."
[+] [-] mindcrime|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bena|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astine|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ax0n|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motters|15 years ago|reply