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!
"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.
> 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.
"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 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).
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.
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.
I am frequently surprised to find Wikipedia articles about very narrow, highly-specialized technical concepts. For example, there is a Wikipedia page about iso646.h in the C language standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso646.h). If you're wondering why you never heard of iso646.h before, it's because it is only useful if you are programming in C on a system that does not support cutting-edge characters like "&" or "|". This is esoterica that does not have any measurable impact on the world. And this isn't even an article about ISO 646 per se, it's about a header file.
I find such articles extremely useful, so I'm not advocating that they be deleted. But surely the wedding gown worn by a British Monarch who is widely known for her fashion sense is at least as relevant to the world at large.
Wikipedia is an interesting place. I am not sure what classifies articles for deletion, but it feels like only people who live in the Internet industry take part in actively running and editing the articles. I don't think of it as a male dominant community (even though I am female), but it feels like to me that only for people who are only care about stuff they know. It feels more like a closed minded community than having a woman problem.
My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we were never granted a section on Wikipedia.
On the other hand, plenty of internet companies who were around than launch much shorter than that and their names are currently on Wikipedia, for example, Pownce. I am sure that many others are granted a Wikipedia entry for being around less, accomplishing less than what we did. The only difference is that these were Internet startups and ZeroG was not.
Some people simply need to wake up and stop living in their own bubble. Let's hope that one day they can realize that others do care about things that the community doesn't care.
Articles like this make me angry. Wikipedia is one of the most important, if not the most important, example of digital commons, created by an enourmous amount of volunteer work. 91% of those doing this work are male, according to the article. Now a group that has contributed only a small fraction of the work for a decade complains about being underrepresented? This is not the military, which had actual barriers of entry for women, this is Wikipedia, which you could edit without an account only a few years ago. At that time it was a true, anonymous meritocracy, as opposed to a mailing list where your name gives away your gender and may subject you to gender discrimination.
"Meritocracy" doesn't exist as long as human judgement is involved, and organizations that claim to be such actually encourage biased-based behavior: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/65884
The problem is not contribution, it is deletion and some of the strange "we don't care if it's actually right if more sources think it" policies. They make it frustrating for anyone who doesn't think like existing editors to contribute, as your hard work gets erased and ignored. Because these people believe they are operating in a meritocracy, the editors feel no pressure to acknowledge that other people may be interested in things they themselves are not.
Some years ago I cleaned up some random biology article vandalized with lots of not-even-subtle profanity. It was immediately reverted by some editor and I had to insist that he reads my modification to get it approved.
It was the last time I tried to edit anything in WP, as I always had this kind of problem.
I read it a lot like anyone else and donate small money every year but each time I read about the behind the scene, I'm appalled.
I wrote a small article on an obscure piece of software, I even studied the wiki syntax and added an infobox & image.
It got fast track deleted the next day.
Wikipedia has reached an equilibrium point between articles that cannot be deleted and deletionist desires to delete everything. In many cases the deciding factor, or the demand to the deletionists' supply, is public outrage.
Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship.
Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship.
Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship.
There should not be any notion of importance. All knowledge is important. What I find important is as valid as what any one else values as important.
Frankly, and to my shame this is the first time I have given any thought to it, I am disgusted that something which, IMHO, is supposed to be an unbiased information repository actually deletes knowledge. To me, this is the most disturbing case of censorship I have ever thought about. Government censorship is expected, bad news, sure but expected. But this is supposed to be above that. How can they bleat on about SOPA etc, then allow a small number of geeks to tell me I can't see an article about some princesses dress? Wikipedia is NOT Geekpedia. And it should not be censoring knowledge.
Quite sad actually. My Wikipedia love bubble just burst. :(
Censorship is when you try to prevent a class of ideas or knowledge from being communicated in any medium. Dictators try to stop criticism, regardless of whether it's by pamphlet or radio broadcast. That is not the issue we're talking about at all.
We're talking about editing a specific body of work (Wikipedia) to exclude things deemed unfit. In fact, the motto of the NY Times is "all the news that's fit to print". That's editorial control, not censorship, because they don't try to prevent Small Town Weekly from printing a story about a lost dog, they just refuse to print it in the NY Times.
This brings up a very interesting point - can anyone think of topics that Wikipedia has inadvertently omitted thanks to the narrow section of society that contributes significant amounts of new content to the site?
There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how the "initial work" of adding information to Wikipedia is mostly done, and that from here on out, it's going to be mainly about adding new content as it's created (new events, people, companies, etc.). But it seems possible that myopia on the part of editors could be having inadvertent effects.
> the "initial work" of adding information to Wikipedia is mostly done,
I don’t buy this at all. Almost every topic that I’m deeply familiar with has inadequate coverage on Wikipedia. (Examples: color science, latin american history and politics, cities in southern mexico, various mathematical topics (here the articles tend to be overwhelmingly technical and entirely lacking in context, motivation, or history), the history and function of many common household appliances, particular bits of human anatomy, computer user interface design and its history, typography, 17th–19th century political philosophers, various US Supreme Court cases.)
Every once in a while I try to tackle one of these, but writing a good encyclopedia article is still a ton of work.
Most topics have some kind of Wikipedia page, but only a tiny fraction are anywhere close to as comprehensive as they should be. Just consider: there are more than 20 million books in the Library of Congress, whereas if the English Wikipedia has about 2000 articles with “good article” or “featured article” status.
It used to be even worse -- when I started using Wikipedia (dinosaurs walked the earth) they had substantially more written about several comic book characters than on obscure religious cults like e.g. Catholicism.
That said, long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians (who are so screamingly not representative of the population that it almost pains me to have to mention that) than on any objectively awesome target for Wikipedia. Happily, Wikipedian's consensus target for Wikipedia is, even if far from perfect, pretty close to one of the most useful tools on the Internet.
Wikipedia's editors (or, perhaps more accurately, humanity) have a bias in thinking details in the present are more important than details in the past.
Having an article marked for deletion means nothing, it happens all the time, and is one of the ways power flows in Wikipedia's anarchic domain (and I'm not sure this kind of power play is really gendered, it is more of a conservative, restraining, force).
While I highly regard Wikipedia's amazing and quite successful project, and hope there will be more editors that are female (oriented, not necessarily biological), there is still a lot that's not there, perhaps will never be, yet matters for various cultures and localities around the world, Wikipedia English has a built in bias (hint: English), and it's not a gendered one.
There's a bot I think that marks new articles as speedy delete by default. At least I wrote a stub, marked as such, and seconds after completion got a deletion notice.
I see arguments for and against allowing Middleton's dress to be covered. For: it meets the criteria of being a widely covered and notable event, documented by numerous major media entities, and associated with a historical event of the ruling royal party of England. Against: yes it's just ephemeral celebrity gossip chit-chat that gives certain people (most likely, mostly women or perhaps some gay men) a feeling of warm fuzzies when thinking about it or fantasizing about it. So yes that feels wrong for Wikipedia because there are plenty of other websites and mediums for that sort of thing.
In other words, the problem is that it both belongs, and doesn't belong. And they need to resolve that paradox, maybe setting a new precedent or revising their official criteria.
I think the "not enough women" thing is just a side issue. And one that has an easy and blatantly obvious solution: if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it. If enough of you do it, then the gender balance will shift notably. If enough of you are not interested, then it won't. There's nothing inherently wrong with either state of affairs, it would be just the way it is. For example, I don't think it's "wrong" that the overwhelming majority (99.8%+) of hair cut folks at Great Clips over the years, in my direct experience, have been women, because that probably just reflects the natural level of interest of men and women in working in that role. I don't feel oppressed or excluded. If I wanted to work there cutting hair, or have a man cut my hair, I'd make it happen, end of story, and if not, or either way, I'd live with it and move on.
I'm pretty sure those "feelings of warm fuzzies" move a lot of money in the fashion industry. The influence that even details like that have when we're dealing with celebrities shouldn't be disregarded.
if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it.
I think the point is that they did, and their contributions got deleted.
I'm a Wikipedian, with a registered Wikipedia user account and moderate Wikipedia editing experience since 2010. The interesting discussion thread groups together two kinds of issues: issues discused in the submitted article from Slate and issues brought up by Hacker News participants. I'll discuss each in turn.
a professional journalist who edits a project covering technology and society issues, reports from this year's Wikimania meeting that Wikipedia continues to face criticism from readers who think its group of editors ("Wikipedians") skew too heavily to "geeks" and result in underrepresentation of topics of interest to women. Thus far Wikipedia is still working on plans to encourage more women to become Wikipedians and to edit more regularly.
She finishes up by writing, "I’ve never been a Wikipedia editor. The community struck me as uninviting, legalistic." I'll be interested in her experiences if she decides to wade in. Unlike most Wikipedians, Torie Bosch has actual professional editing experience, having had to submit manuscripts to editors who chop out her darling words, and having had to chop out words from the manuscripts of other reporters. Most Wikipedians have not had professional editing or research experience of any kind before joining Wikipedia, and what I find most "uninviting" about Wikipedia is not that it is "legalistic" (although it often is legalistic) but that many Wikipedians are completely clueless about what a good source looks like and how bad many of the current articles have been for how long. I'm not sure yet if Wikipedia is pursuing a successful strategy to improve content quality.
After being very involved in Wikipedia editing just as there was a major Arbitration Committee case on topics that I have researched thoroughly for years,
I have reduced my involvement mostly to "wikignome" editing of random mistakes I encounter as I use Wikipedia as a reader. I still have the SOFIXIT mentality,
of cleaning up problems in Wikipedia as I find them, but to fix big problems on Wikipedia caused by point-of-view-pushing propagandists is even more work than editing a publication as an occupation (something I have done), and yet unpaid. So I really wonder how much time Torie Bosch will devote to Wikipedia when she could be doing editorial work in an actual collegial environment at Slate with pay and professional recognition.
The Hacker News comments before this comment have mostly referred to the issue of "deletionism." For example,
Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. . . .
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.
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.
Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship. Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship.
I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get deleted/flagged for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one question: WHY, if they are not superceeded or and made redundant then personaly I feel they should never be removed.
The one-word reply to comments like these is "Deletionpedia."
I was just browsing random pages of Deletionpedia to see what was posted there before the Deletionpedia project fizzled out (which appears to have been back in 2009). These are by no means the worst examples of material that has been deleted from Wikipedia (I'm not sure if Deletionpedia was ever an exhaustive list of deleted articles, or only a selected sample of those), but the sheer lack of maintenance of Deletionpedia over the last few years calls baloney on the idea that there are lots of readers happy to read stuff that has been deleted from Wikipedia. As bad as Wikipedia often is, EDITING (modifying and deleting) stuff on it so that Wikipedia more closely resembles an encyclopedia makes some Wikipedia pages much better reads than many of the millions of pages would turn up in a keywork search on the same topics.
I don't believe that a lot of readers see value in an online "encyclopedia" with a no-deletion or hardly-any-deletion policy because no one has put up the money to fund one, and I'm not aware of anyone here on Hacker News who is donating programming skill to start one. If you really think articles "should never be removed," build a service to host articles written by anyone about anything and see what happens.
The big problem on Wikipedia is not deletionism. It is insertion of promotional articles (some more subtle than others), propaganda articles (likewise), personal or family vanity articles (very numerous), and fan and hobby articles that are not based on any reliable sources and are written in a manner more suitable for MySpace than for any encyclopedia.
A lot of people who attempt to edit Wikipedia never look up the article about what Wikipedia is not,
and attempt to publish their own thoughts, promote their own causes or businesses, social network in an online encyclopedia, self-report the news, or otherwise post material that has nothing to do with maintaining a free online encyclopedia built from reliable sources.
Wikipedia's stated aim, to make information "freely" available, has no gender bias; it doesn't ask for it before serving its content - in marked contrast to other services (Google? Facebook? certainly the various ad services) which might structure their content according to a user's gender.
However, if Wikipedia has another aim - to make the scope of its content bias-free, then I think it has not thought it thoroughly yet: even structuring information as encyclopedia entries is inherently biased and restrictive (not necessarily bad though). Correlating Wikipedia's contributors' sex to an assumed gender bias in its scope (who gets to decide the articles' 'gender'?), as Wales does, proves how naïve such a project currently is.
I think the problem with the Wedding Gown has more to do with the fact that there is no UK wikipedia, rather than a gender issue. The English wikipedia is an interesting amalgam with lots of peculiarities when seen from an outsider's perspective.
You can get a iPhone app subscription to Britannica for a few $/mo. I have found Britannica to be excruciatingly better written and more comprehensive on their in-depth articles than Wikipedia. Things that aren't in the nerd enclave are covered, and well. I would never donate to Wikipedia as it is today: I happily send money to Britannica.
There are too many structural problems with Wikipedia - documented over the last few years by various angry bloggers - for me to feel OK with Wikipedia. Some of the content - good. The community & rules - blech. c2 is a better wiki. :-)
Why not simply accept that wikipedia has a particular bias, and set up your own wiki - fashionpedia perhaps - if you want to create articles that wikipedia doesn't accept?
Wikipedia has become a success because of its culture. It should be very careful about changing that based on the demands of the entitled multitudes.
[+] [-] kijin|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] matznerd|13 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] antidoh|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ShardPhoenix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabalamat|13 years ago|reply
You're right. I've given up creating new articles on Wikipedia, due to the hassle I've had with deletionists.
[+] [-] jeffdavis|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bus_routes_in_Essex)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bus_routes_in_London)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Buses_route_9)
(The London article has some fascinating facts.)
But these articles have been the target of deletionists.
People, perhaps rightly, get confused that you can have a list of fictional ducks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_ducks) but not lists of Olympic athletes.
[+] [-] MaysonL|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kinleyd|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Heinleinian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billswift|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] overcyn|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ajuc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lsc|13 years ago|reply
Eh, I'm pretty sure that is already prohibited. Or, at the very least, looked down upon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_editing_on...
Hm. So it's not okay to edit your own article, but it /is/ okay to pay someone else to do so?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plain_and_simple_conf...
That... seems really weird. Well, not weird, but disappointing.
[+] [-] batgaijin|13 years ago|reply
He runs Wikia.
What you are proposing is in direct conflict with his personal interests, but you can never win an argument on Wikipedia with that as evidence.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derleth|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vacri|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] haberman|13 years ago|reply
I find such articles extremely useful, so I'm not advocating that they be deleted. But surely the wedding gown worn by a British Monarch who is widely known for her fashion sense is at least as relevant to the world at large.
[+] [-] lien|13 years ago|reply
My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we were never granted a section on Wikipedia.
On the other hand, plenty of internet companies who were around than launch much shorter than that and their names are currently on Wikipedia, for example, Pownce. I am sure that many others are granted a Wikipedia entry for being around less, accomplishing less than what we did. The only difference is that these were Internet startups and ZeroG was not.
Some people simply need to wake up and stop living in their own bubble. Let's hope that one day they can realize that others do care about things that the community doesn't care.
[+] [-] konstruktor|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roguecoder|13 years ago|reply
The problem is not contribution, it is deletion and some of the strange "we don't care if it's actually right if more sources think it" policies. They make it frustrating for anyone who doesn't think like existing editors to contribute, as your hard work gets erased and ignored. Because these people believe they are operating in a meritocracy, the editors feel no pressure to acknowledge that other people may be interested in things they themselves are not.
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conradfr|13 years ago|reply
It was the last time I tried to edit anything in WP, as I always had this kind of problem.
I read it a lot like anyone else and donate small money every year but each time I read about the behind the scene, I'm appalled.
[+] [-] Danieru|13 years ago|reply
It got fast track deleted the next day.
Wikipedia has reached an equilibrium point between articles that cannot be deleted and deletionist desires to delete everything. In many cases the deciding factor, or the demand to the deletionists' supply, is public outrage.
[+] [-] alan_cx|13 years ago|reply
There should not be any notion of importance. All knowledge is important. What I find important is as valid as what any one else values as important.
Frankly, and to my shame this is the first time I have given any thought to it, I am disgusted that something which, IMHO, is supposed to be an unbiased information repository actually deletes knowledge. To me, this is the most disturbing case of censorship I have ever thought about. Government censorship is expected, bad news, sure but expected. But this is supposed to be above that. How can they bleat on about SOPA etc, then allow a small number of geeks to tell me I can't see an article about some princesses dress? Wikipedia is NOT Geekpedia. And it should not be censoring knowledge.
Quite sad actually. My Wikipedia love bubble just burst. :(
[+] [-] jeffdavis|13 years ago|reply
We're talking about editing a specific body of work (Wikipedia) to exclude things deemed unfit. In fact, the motto of the NY Times is "all the news that's fit to print". That's editorial control, not censorship, because they don't try to prevent Small Town Weekly from printing a story about a lost dog, they just refuse to print it in the NY Times.
[+] [-] 21sappers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w1ntermute|13 years ago|reply
There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how the "initial work" of adding information to Wikipedia is mostly done, and that from here on out, it's going to be mainly about adding new content as it's created (new events, people, companies, etc.). But it seems possible that myopia on the part of editors could be having inadvertent effects.
[+] [-] jacobolus|13 years ago|reply
I don’t buy this at all. Almost every topic that I’m deeply familiar with has inadequate coverage on Wikipedia. (Examples: color science, latin american history and politics, cities in southern mexico, various mathematical topics (here the articles tend to be overwhelmingly technical and entirely lacking in context, motivation, or history), the history and function of many common household appliances, particular bits of human anatomy, computer user interface design and its history, typography, 17th–19th century political philosophers, various US Supreme Court cases.)
Every once in a while I try to tackle one of these, but writing a good encyclopedia article is still a ton of work.
Most topics have some kind of Wikipedia page, but only a tiny fraction are anywhere close to as comprehensive as they should be. Just consider: there are more than 20 million books in the Library of Congress, whereas if the English Wikipedia has about 2000 articles with “good article” or “featured article” status.
[+] [-] patio11|13 years ago|reply
That said, long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians (who are so screamingly not representative of the population that it almost pains me to have to mention that) than on any objectively awesome target for Wikipedia. Happily, Wikipedian's consensus target for Wikipedia is, even if far from perfect, pretty close to one of the most useful tools on the Internet.
[+] [-] jmduke|13 years ago|reply
The article for the XBOX 360: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBOX_360
The article for the Republic of Ragusa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Ragusa
Wikipedia's editors (or, perhaps more accurately, humanity) have a bias in thinking details in the present are more important than details in the past.
[+] [-] modarts|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aw3c2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsns|13 years ago|reply
While I highly regard Wikipedia's amazing and quite successful project, and hope there will be more editors that are female (oriented, not necessarily biological), there is still a lot that's not there, perhaps will never be, yet matters for various cultures and localities around the world, Wikipedia English has a built in bias (hint: English), and it's not a gendered one.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wololo|13 years ago|reply
more discussion at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism and http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism
[+] [-] mkramlich|13 years ago|reply
In other words, the problem is that it both belongs, and doesn't belong. And they need to resolve that paradox, maybe setting a new precedent or revising their official criteria.
I think the "not enough women" thing is just a side issue. And one that has an easy and blatantly obvious solution: if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it. If enough of you do it, then the gender balance will shift notably. If enough of you are not interested, then it won't. There's nothing inherently wrong with either state of affairs, it would be just the way it is. For example, I don't think it's "wrong" that the overwhelming majority (99.8%+) of hair cut folks at Great Clips over the years, in my direct experience, have been women, because that probably just reflects the natural level of interest of men and women in working in that role. I don't feel oppressed or excluded. If I wanted to work there cutting hair, or have a man cut my hair, I'd make it happen, end of story, and if not, or either way, I'd live with it and move on.
[+] [-] icebraining|13 years ago|reply
if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it.
I think the point is that they did, and their contributions got deleted.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
The Slate article by Torie Bosch,
http://www.slate.com/authors.torie_bosch.html
a professional journalist who edits a project covering technology and society issues, reports from this year's Wikimania meeting that Wikipedia continues to face criticism from readers who think its group of editors ("Wikipedians") skew too heavily to "geeks" and result in underrepresentation of topics of interest to women. Thus far Wikipedia is still working on plans to encourage more women to become Wikipedians and to edit more regularly.
She finishes up by writing, "I’ve never been a Wikipedia editor. The community struck me as uninviting, legalistic." I'll be interested in her experiences if she decides to wade in. Unlike most Wikipedians, Torie Bosch has actual professional editing experience, having had to submit manuscripts to editors who chop out her darling words, and having had to chop out words from the manuscripts of other reporters. Most Wikipedians have not had professional editing or research experience of any kind before joining Wikipedia, and what I find most "uninviting" about Wikipedia is not that it is "legalistic" (although it often is legalistic) but that many Wikipedians are completely clueless about what a good source looks like and how bad many of the current articles have been for how long. I'm not sure yet if Wikipedia is pursuing a successful strategy to improve content quality.
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...
After being very involved in Wikipedia editing just as there was a major Arbitration Committee case on topics that I have researched thoroughly for years,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
I have reduced my involvement mostly to "wikignome" editing of random mistakes I encounter as I use Wikipedia as a reader. I still have the SOFIXIT mentality,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT
of cleaning up problems in Wikipedia as I find them, but to fix big problems on Wikipedia caused by point-of-view-pushing propagandists is even more work than editing a publication as an occupation (something I have done), and yet unpaid. So I really wonder how much time Torie Bosch will devote to Wikipedia when she could be doing editorial work in an actual collegial environment at Slate with pay and professional recognition.
The Hacker News comments before this comment have mostly referred to the issue of "deletionism." For example,
Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. . . .
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.
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.
Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship. Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship.
I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get deleted/flagged for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one question: WHY, if they are not superceeded or and made redundant then personaly I feel they should never be removed.
The one-word reply to comments like these is "Deletionpedia."
http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
I was just browsing random pages of Deletionpedia to see what was posted there before the Deletionpedia project fizzled out (which appears to have been back in 2009). These are by no means the worst examples of material that has been deleted from Wikipedia (I'm not sure if Deletionpedia was ever an exhaustive list of deleted articles, or only a selected sample of those), but the sheer lack of maintenance of Deletionpedia over the last few years calls baloney on the idea that there are lots of readers happy to read stuff that has been deleted from Wikipedia. As bad as Wikipedia often is, EDITING (modifying and deleting) stuff on it so that Wikipedia more closely resembles an encyclopedia makes some Wikipedia pages much better reads than many of the millions of pages would turn up in a keywork search on the same topics.
I don't believe that a lot of readers see value in an online "encyclopedia" with a no-deletion or hardly-any-deletion policy because no one has put up the money to fund one, and I'm not aware of anyone here on Hacker News who is donating programming skill to start one. If you really think articles "should never be removed," build a service to host articles written by anyone about anything and see what happens.
The big problem on Wikipedia is not deletionism. It is insertion of promotional articles (some more subtle than others), propaganda articles (likewise), personal or family vanity articles (very numerous), and fan and hobby articles that are not based on any reliable sources and are written in a manner more suitable for MySpace than for any encyclopedia.
A lot of people who attempt to edit Wikipedia never look up the article about what Wikipedia is not,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
and attempt to publish their own thoughts, promote their own causes or businesses, social network in an online encyclopedia, self-report the news, or otherwise post material that has nothing to do with maintaining a free online encyclopedia built from reliable sources.
[+] [-] nsns|13 years ago|reply
However, if Wikipedia has another aim - to make the scope of its content bias-free, then I think it has not thought it thoroughly yet: even structuring information as encyclopedia entries is inherently biased and restrictive (not necessarily bad though). Correlating Wikipedia's contributors' sex to an assumed gender bias in its scope (who gets to decide the articles' 'gender'?), as Wales does, proves how naïve such a project currently is.
[+] [-] zerostar07|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnathan|13 years ago|reply
There are too many structural problems with Wikipedia - documented over the last few years by various angry bloggers - for me to feel OK with Wikipedia. Some of the content - good. The community & rules - blech. c2 is a better wiki. :-)
[+] [-] Codhisattva|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbmassey|13 years ago|reply
Wikipedia has become a success because of its culture. It should be very careful about changing that based on the demands of the entitled multitudes.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] naveen99|13 years ago|reply