I can understand why wiki articles get deleted. What I cannot understand is why their edit history is also deleted. If part of an article is deleted, one can still find it in the article history. But if the article is deleted entirely, there is no way to check what used to be there.
I found this remarkable irritating myself. I created a Wikipedia page recently for a former TV host, and current podcaster I really enjoy. He's written several books and is cited by other people. I've certainly seen much less noteworthy people having Wikipedia pages.
I spent several hours gathering sources and put together a decent little Wikipedia page. It was voted as being not-noteworthy and removed. I didn't realize all my citations were going to go with it. Wasn't up long enough even to get picked up by the wayback machine.
Often enough, particularly in "controversial" topics, the information I want is in the Talk pages rather than the heavily guarded article.
This worked great in the past. More recently I discovered some sort of policy must have changed, which allows Talk pages to be archived/deleted, effectively destroying any evidence of a controversy.
A little story some may find amusing and possibly pertinent: many years back one of the Wikipedia editors said something really silly. Silly enough it got reported on. So… I went to see if they had a Wikipedia page. And, of course they did. Despite the fact that they were, objectively, not notable.
So, I did the decent thing and, in a “Haha, only serious” fashion updated the article to include easily the most notable thing they had ever done. Even provided multiple citations and everything.
I mean, everyone here knows what happened next. I didn’t expend any more energy on it.
(For the record, when I say silly I mean it, it was mildly embarrassing, offended no-one and wasn’t problematic in any way.)
I'm so glad to see that this exists. The world needs this. I can't tell you how many times I wished that I had the time and energy to set this up myself. It's such a tragedy for hard work and human knowledge to disappear into the void just because radical deletionists managed to take over Wikipedia.
The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.
Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer.
Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac
Deletion from Wikipedia doesn't mean you don't exist or aren't "a legitimate bank". It means you're not a good subject for the encyclopedia. There are tiny banks all over Chicagoland that don't have Wikipedia pages, and shouldn't.
As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary.
Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
Deletionists claim that only non notable articles get removed, yet a couple months ago I encountered someone wanting to delete the article on DokuWiki.
DOKUWIKI!
Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page.
The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related.
I love Wikipedia to pieces, but I have given up trying to contribute to it, because only about a third of what I contribute survives the Reversion Police. I assume these are many of the same people as the Deletion Police. A pox on all their houses.
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
People say things like this, and I believe them. But can you provide some examples of edits you've made that didn't "survive the Reversion Police"? One very good thing about Wikipedia is that most of what happens on it is logged; Wikipedia Jurisprudence works for the most part the way people HN say real jurisprudence should work: with version control. Let's talk about specific examples! You should have a bunch, given what you just wrote.
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
Good. I have seen editors exclude articles on actual public figures — multiple (credible) books published, academic publications, interviews on mainstream media — as being "irrelevant", "unimportant", etc., etc., all seemingly because, when the editor's chain of edits is examined, that person took a position with with the editor strongly politically or policy-wise disagreed with on the strongest terms. The editor system is one of Wikipedia's greatest weaknesses — people with bones to pick and hills to die on work to exclude even mainstream views with which they disagree, and there is no way to stop them from running amok. Something really needs to be done about this.
>If the article is retained on Wikipedia the article is emptied on Deletionpedia.
That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another.
While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.
Yeah this is a really hard problem. There is stuff that legit should be deleted because it's either BS or spam. I somewhat wish there was a setting like "show dead" that HN has.
Shame they don't seem to have a copy of the Bear versus Lion article. Wikipedia still has Tiger versus Lion and articles for Bear-baiting and Lion-baiting, but the Bear versus Lion article seems to be lost. Archive.org doesn't even have it. I'm quite sure it once existed though.
Thus site really helps to establish one's position on deleteionist vs inclusioninst debate.
Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.
"I don't get why they would do this to so many topics."
Self-promotion and non-notable content.
Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.
Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
Looking at some deleted articles [1], I do get it. There seem to be hundreds of articles of asteroids which consist of only a few sentences. A lot of small or already defunct startup companies, small indie-bands and their albums etc.
Take a look through what is deleted, it's mostly junk. In my experience Wikipedia could stand to be more aggressive with its pruning. Low quality articles waste your time because you have to read them for a bit before you realize it is worthless.
It's worth noting that Wikidata has far more inclusive standards than any Wikipedia, though it still excludes true vanity submissions. Many of these deleted items could get a Wikidata entry if they don't have one already.
The only times I've felt frustration looking up things and finding them deleted was like some minor god from mythology of which there likely wasn't much written as there isn't much known anywhere TBH
Having started to occasionally edit stuff on Wikipedia over the pandemic, I have a newfound understanding of the reasons for deleting stuff.
As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).
Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.
This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.
And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.
The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.
There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.
My first taste of Wikipedia’s controversial policies was on an entry for the song “Regulate” by rapper Warren G. Someone posted a synopsis of the lyrics which various Wikipedia editors found “clinical to the point of parody” (paraphrasing) and thus worthy of reversion. I have never been able to look at Wikipedia the same since.
I remember when a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in articles would have his updates reverted. The common views are not always correct. Such as Canada didn't have troops in Vietnam. Canada had MASH medical units, and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page.
Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc.
I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think.
My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history.
Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported.
This is undoubtedly so, but the point of wikipedia is to record the common view. The criterion for inclusion is acceptance in the mainstream sources, not truth.
Pages are technically technical debt. I understand why unpopular topics are not maintained. I've not seen anything that would suggest something systematic (especially cross language).
Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
Are you sure you're not talking about Red Cross teams from Canada (not exactly Canadian troops).
> and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
Aren't you talking about Canadian recipients of US medals (because they joined the US military)?
There were also those involved with the ICCS during the US withdrawal, various defense companies who sent contractors to work on equipment in Vietnam for their US customers, etc.
The Wikipedia article for Michael Aquino would be a great one to see added here. Lt Colonel in the US Army who wrote a seminal paper on psychological operations, had close ties to the highest levels of NATO command in Europe, performed a ritual with an SS dagger at Wewelsburg Castle in Germany, and was an outspoken Satanist who was credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare scandal. One can see why a lot of people might not mind that his page was deleted and now redirects to "Temple of Set."
Damn, I'm surprised they deleted his page. He was a real nutjob, but a notable nutjob. I have a pdf of one of his books about psyops archived somewhere.
Would be interesting if there was an easy way to find “controversial” pages. If a page has a significant amount of edits or discussions prior to deletion for example.
More and more it feels like the death of Wikipedia is coming and maybe that's a good thing, thus making space for the next "Wikipedia" that could improve on many shortcomings of the current implementation.
It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences...
[+] [-] car_analogy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donatj|3 years ago|reply
I spent several hours gathering sources and put together a decent little Wikipedia page. It was voted as being not-noteworthy and removed. I didn't realize all my citations were going to go with it. Wasn't up long enough even to get picked up by the wayback machine.
[+] [-] tpoacher|3 years ago|reply
Often enough, particularly in "controversial" topics, the information I want is in the Talk pages rather than the heavily guarded article.
This worked great in the past. More recently I discovered some sort of policy must have changed, which allows Talk pages to be archived/deleted, effectively destroying any evidence of a controversy.
[+] [-] moomin|3 years ago|reply
So, I did the decent thing and, in a “Haha, only serious” fashion updated the article to include easily the most notable thing they had ever done. Even provided multiple citations and everything.
I mean, everyone here knows what happened next. I didn’t expend any more energy on it.
(For the record, when I say silly I mean it, it was mildly embarrassing, offended no-one and wasn’t problematic in any way.)
[+] [-] justincormack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwdisswordfish9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|3 years ago|reply
The only thing that would make me happier would be if us Inclusionists could get organized, get our shit together, and kick the Deletionist camp on Wikipedia right in the teeth (metaphorically speaking) and shift the tide.
[+] [-] macintux|3 years ago|reply
After browsing the site and seeing mostly crap, I'm genuinely curious: do you have examples of content erroneously evicted by radical deletionists?
[+] [-] KarlKemp|3 years ago|reply
[0]: https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...
[+] [-] calibas|3 years ago|reply
https://deletionpedia.org/en/ABA_Bank
Appears to be a legitimate bank in Cambodia ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-9E1_1bXE ). Deleted from the English Wikipedia for lacking "notability". I believe the real issue was the people verifying notability didn't speak Khmer.
https://deletionpedia.org/en/3Pac
Actual rapper, deleted twice from Wikipedia apparently because he's "only notable for dying". His YouTube videos have millions of views, he's mentioned in various music magazines and the Washington Post. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/3pac
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
As for 3Pac, he's mentioned in various music magazines for dying. I might have made the opposite call if I'd been AfD'ing when this was deleted, and I preemptively agree that Wikipedia's policies are tuned for a ~2000s conception of what reliable sources establishing notability are --- 2018 Wikipedia was probably overly skeptical of Youtube fame. But the decision here isn't arbitrary.
Again, you have to understand the policies before you can reasonably critique them. You don't have to agree with their rationales, but you do have to demonstrate that you know what they are, or at least not betray that you don't.
[+] [-] Multicomp|3 years ago|reply
DOKUWIKI!
Someone had a spreadsheet full of links talking about DokuWiki that were poo pooed because the articles didn't have someone claiming to have an editor on them, the fact that a 2018 book was written on DokuWiki wasn't enough, nor was the 80 page views per day average usage of the page.
The thing that saved the second most popular wiki software aside from mediawiki itself were additional comments about references to DW in other books, as well as one of the original deletist voters withdrawing in order to avoid some sort of sealioning potential optics, something I can't fully follow but seems only tangentially related.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_delet...
[+] [-] MikeTaylor|3 years ago|reply
What kind of thing have I had reverted? For example, often when I have just watched a film, I like to read its Wikipedia page. Often I spot minor errors in the plot synopsis while the details are fresh in my mind, and make minor edits to fix those errors. Often, they get reverted. So now I don't bother.
Reverters and deleters may achieve what Big Content longed to do but couldn't -- kill Wikipedia.
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
Most of Wikipedia --- probably the most intellectually impressive project on the entire global Internet --- was built during the reign of the deletionists, just in case you're concerned about them "killing" the project.
[+] [-] davidgerard|3 years ago|reply
Could you provide three examples?
[+] [-] flenserboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
That doesn't necessarily seem to always be the case. Though it apparently was on other pages. For the second article that got randomly served to me (Aixa de la Cruz), it was proposed for deletion but kept. Citrine (programming language) is another.
While I'm largely on the inclusionist side of the fence, I have to admit that most of the pages I flipped through were either very thin, probably had legitimate notability issues, and/or were probably self-promotional.
[+] [-] freedomben|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robonerd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|3 years ago|reply
Internet arguments often choose the example of deleted articles to illustrate their point, so one cannot get overall "feel" of the quality of delete pages. But hitting "Random Page" link on that website shows a nice, unbiased random sample.
[+] [-] kvetching|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|3 years ago|reply
Self-promotion and non-notable content.
Pretty early in Wikipedia's existence all sorts of spammers and non-entities realized that they could use Wikipedia as their personal advertising billboard.
Lots of things that (arguably) don't belong in an encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too. For example, you could, arguably, have an article about every one of the 7 billion people on the planet and about what foods each of them like, etc.
Inclusionists might like all such articles to be included, but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on non-notable subjects are deleted.
[+] [-] V__|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages
[+] [-] warning26|3 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced that most of this content was worth including on Wikipedia, but hey, if these people want to host it they should go for it.
[+] [-] greenthrow|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelbrave|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] macintux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jerry2|3 years ago|reply
It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.
[+] [-] KarlKemp|3 years ago|reply
As a casual user, you will, by definition, tend to see the most-trafficked, well-maintained pages. Deleted pages, as a general rule, are not those. Your impression of the level of quality that can be achieved is completely off. This is also true if you read a lot in some specialized subject that has a small, but active and productive community (some pop culture fandoms, for example).
Leave the beaten paths at your own risk, especially if it concerns anything that has small communities with differences of opinion. Like foreign wars.
Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepić&oldid...
This isn't the worst I've seen, but something I remembered because I tried to clean it up recently. It includes a long discussion that has little to do with the subject, is obviously the product of a tug-of-war between opposing POVs and fails to present the subject in a way that would allow the reader to come to any conclusion. Or, at least, I still have no idea if this guy is a war criminal, hero, or both.
And this is the stuff that doesn't get deleted.
The other standard is obviously self-serving content, i. e. articles written by the subject or the subject's employees/PR people etc. There is simply no way to deal with the fundamental problem that an article's subject always has far more interest in an article than any random editor without limiting the scope to subjects that attract at least a few interested editors without a conflict of interest.
[+] [-] nullc|3 years ago|reply
or the subject's enemies...
There are a tremendous amount of defamatory hit pieces that show up too. I wonder in a S230 analysis if deletionpedia itself is the publisher of this material: after all, it wasn't the original author that went and dug it up and published it on their site. I hope they've received good legal advice.
[+] [-] gregsher88|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|3 years ago|reply
Wikipedia tries to keep things consistent, but this has created a whole body of “case law” that only experts know.
I once described a law that had been proposed, but not passed, and had my contribution removed because it was “legal advice.”
I couldn’t even wrap my head around that one.
[+] [-] IronWolve|3 years ago|reply
He finally kept his updates on his personal page, but then wikipedia made it you couldnt find his page.
Then I started finding that was the common idea on Wikipedia, deleting views from wikipedia that didnt meet the popular editors. Pages got deleted with rules that didnt make sense, not popular enough, not reported by main stream news, no articles found, etc.
I'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the popular views, and those events are not even in historical news articles. The re-writing of history has been going on in wikipedia launched, its more common than you think.
My favorite wikpedia fake excuse, they dont have enough space to include non-popular historical events, its history, authors who trended all the talk shows even oprah and made nytimes best seller, etc, are removed from history.
Theres entire mainstream history in 80's that don't match reality, and was deleted. The narrative of groups in charge, are the ones who get reported.
Those who control the history books they say.
[+] [-] babbagecabbage|3 years ago|reply
I would be genuinely fascinated to learn some examples of this.
This is something I've been suspecting for a long time, but I can rarely put my finger on anything specific.
But I'm sure we're all being collectively gaslit.
Lots of things feel disconcerting these days, like reality is being erased and shifted.
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|3 years ago|reply
This is undoubtedly so, but the point of wikipedia is to record the common view. The criterion for inclusion is acceptance in the mainstream sources, not truth.
[+] [-] teddyh|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
The rest of your comment is extremely vague, and gives no links to back anything up.
[+] [-] freemint|3 years ago|reply
Can you elaborate about the active effort you suspect exists? (Rewriting implies authorship)
[+] [-] mlyle|3 years ago|reply
Are you sure you're not talking about Red Cross teams from Canada (not exactly Canadian troops).
> and theres even a canadian webpage listing medals award and names who served in Vietnam.
Aren't you talking about Canadian recipients of US medals (because they joined the US military)?
There were also those involved with the ICCS during the US withdrawal, various defense companies who sent contractors to work on equipment in Vietnam for their US customers, etc.
[+] [-] IdEntities|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|3 years ago|reply
Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was memory holed.
[+] [-] robonerd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] programmarchy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LoveMortuus|3 years ago|reply
It happens so often on the internet that people who lack competency to be a just moderator, end up being moderators and then abusing the power that was entrusted to them, without any consequences...
It's just sad...
[+] [-] highspeedbus|3 years ago|reply
https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...
[+] [-] leonry|3 years ago|reply