[HN Gopher] In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       In Defense of Inclusionism (2009-18)
        
       Author : luu
       Score  : 71 points
       Date   : 2020-05-05 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.gwern.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.gwern.net)
        
       | andrewla wrote:
       | As an inclusionist who has basically given up on editing
       | wikipedia because of deletionist forces, I read this article and
       | see nothing but points I agree with.
       | 
       | What I would like to see, however, is a good defense of
       | deletionism. I have a lot of trouble even understanding the point
       | of view.
       | 
       | If there's some higher-level motivation about storage costs or
       | something, then I can buy it, but I don't think anyone is making
       | that argument. Does it hurt wikipedia to have low-quality
       | articles? I think only insofar as the articles are about subjects
       | that are important, so the effect seems to be self-balancing. Can
       | wikipedia be used by people to glorify themselves with personal
       | wikipedia pages? Sure, but who cares -- unless someone does care
       | in a particular instance (i.e. a person named Albert Einstein
       | tries to take over the main article -- people will fight it
       | because they want the article to point to the right person).
        
         | scott_s wrote:
         | I see two problems. One, as the qualifications loosen,
         | Wikipedia will tend to have not just more articles, but more
         | lesser quality articles. At a certain point, Wikipedia would
         | become _mostly_ poor quality.
         | 
         | Two, _managing_ the articles has a cost for the editors
         | involved. As the number of articles increases, their ability to
         | do a good job will decrease.
        
         | umanwizard wrote:
         | > Does it hurt wikipedia to have low-quality articles? I think
         | only insofar as the articles are about subjects that are
         | important, so the effect seems to be self-balancing.
         | 
         | Here is where I disagree. I think Wikipedia is hurt by _any_
         | low-quality articles. If I see some information on Wikipedia,
         | there is a moderate positive signal that that information is
         | correct. (Not as strong as a signal as I 'd like, but oh well).
         | Reducing the strength of that signal would make Wikipedia less
         | useful.
        
         | astine wrote:
         | I think that the main argument that isn't simply a matter of
         | storage costs (which probably does kick in at some point) is
         | simply a matter of brand-management. If the average Wikipedia
         | article is a discussion an incomplete and poorly sourced
         | article about Pokemon then Wikipedia gets a reputation as poor
         | source of information. It actually had the reputation pretty
         | strongly early on, but it's reputation for reliabity has
         | actually improved over the years.
         | 
         | I suppose that there is also the inverse problem where poor
         | articles can use Wikipedia's relatively good reputation to give
         | visibility to some pseudoscience or conspiracy theory. If it's
         | really obscure, the only people who will be writing articles
         | about are will be proponents who will then link to the article
         | from their closed Facebook groups. It won't necessarily be
         | obvious to non-experts what's going on so deleting certain
         | kinds of articles could be a protection against that as well.
         | 
         | (I'm not any kind of Wikipedian btw; just speculating off of
         | the top of my head.)
        
           | domador wrote:
           | If that's the case, I'd prefer a two-tiered Wikipedia over a
           | deletionist Wikipedia. In such a Wikipedia, each page could
           | be clearly-labeled as either an encyclopedia-quality entry or
           | as a "wannabe" encyclopedia entry. (A better term would be
           | needed for the lower tier.) Such labeling should be very
           | noticeable and visible when you open an entry, at least for
           | the lower-tier entries.
        
             | astine wrote:
             | They used to use the term "Stub" for brief pages that
             | weren't full articles yet and they do put warnings on
             | articles that don't meet certain quality standards, though
             | I think that's different that what you're talking about
             | here.
        
               | domador wrote:
               | There's some overlap, though not full equivalency. Stubs
               | presumably fall in line with Wikipedia's editorial
               | vision, even if they haven't been fleshed out into full
               | entries. The entries I'm referring to are mostly ones
               | which would run afoul of Wikipedia's notability
               | criterion.
               | 
               | Going back to the brand management issue, I'd be OK with
               | deleted articles and their history being moved to another
               | wiki with a different URL, with a name that is not
               | "Wikipedia". Cookies or some other mechanism could be
               | used to manage user/session preferences so that users who
               | want to to be redirected to this other, questionable-page
               | wiki can be redirected when they try to access pages that
               | don't fall in line with Wikipedia's editorial vision. I'd
               | be fine with having huge in-your face warnings about the
               | likely lack of quality or veracity of such entries...
               | just as long as I can access that content.
        
       | Permit wrote:
       | As a purely end-user of Wikipedia I just want to chip in only to
       | say that I have not seen any observable decline in Wikipedia over
       | the last 15 years. I am generally very happy with the results I
       | get when I use it.
       | 
       | > The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia's
       | increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and
       | to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a
       | narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where
       | academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other
       | factors.
       | 
       | I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on each
       | chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his own
       | page. Presumably, though, you agree there should be SOME criteria
       | for what is notable enough to deserve a Wikipedia article? For
       | example, in order of increasing mundanity these topics probably
       | don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me, my cat, my cat's water
       | bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5, 2020 etc.
       | 
       | Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an
       | article and what is does not. We can argue about where to draw
       | that line but I'm actually pretty happy with how Wikipedia has
       | done it.
        
         | andrewla wrote:
         | > these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article: Me,
         | my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May 5,
         | 2020 etc.
         | 
         | Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having them?
         | If they confuse an issue, like if your cat shares a name with a
         | more notable animal, then yours can just be renamed to
         | "Fluffers (Permit's cat)". Who does it hurt to have that page
         | on there, even in the reductio ad absurdum? Even,
         | hypothetically, storage costs -- in the current deletionist
         | world, the initial article and its deletion will be preserved
         | in history forever, so we don't save anything.
         | 
         | If we need to provide the capability to flag pages as
         | "deletionists don't like this" and present a deletionist view
         | of wikipedia to those who don't wish to be exposed to that
         | content, then go for it.
         | 
         | I don't mean to try to throw rhetorical exclamation points
         | everywhere; I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a
         | page about your cat's water bowl.
        
           | scott_s wrote:
           | > But what is the cost of having them?
           | 
           | The time and effort of the Wikipedia editors; the reputation
           | of Wikipedia in general.
        
           | _jal wrote:
           | > I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about
           | your cat's water bowl.
           | 
           | Several billion cat-water bowl pages are probably just an
           | annoyance for someone.
           | 
           | But what would you think of a page explaining, say, all the
           | healthy virtues of drinking diluted bleach for fighting C19
           | being hosted on wikipedia.org?
           | 
           | How do you think that's going to work out, in the first
           | instance, when panicking people read it, and in the second,
           | when people start treating wikipedia.org as trustworthy as
           | their spam folder?
        
           | Barrin92 wrote:
           | > I'm genuinely curious about the cost of having a page about
           | your cat's water bowl.
           | 
           | The fact that it's at some point impossible to disambiguate
           | information. If you have 50.000 pages of everyone's cat it'd
           | be borderline impossible to find general information that is
           | relevant to a public audience. It's the same reason I can't
           | go to the public library and put random writings of me on a
           | shelf, there needs to be a level of curation so that the
           | content isn't being bogged down by what is mostly going to be
           | noise.
           | 
           | The article brings up a page for each pokemon say, and if you
           | have countless of pokemon all with similar names to other
           | real-world stuff everyone who doesn't care about the pokemon
           | will have to wade through links and pages of irrelevant
           | content, it'd quickly turn into a huge digital garbage dump.
           | 
           | Also not to mention that Wikipedia wants to provide a
           | reasonable level of accuracy and factfulness, and nobody can
           | independently verify personal content or topics so niche that
           | only one person knows what's going on.
           | 
           | I don't know why someone really would want wikipedia to turn
           | into a website for in-universe fiction or people's personal
           | content. That stuff is more suited for a self-hosted wiki.
        
           | yorwba wrote:
           | > If we need to provide the capability to flag pages as
           | "deletionists don't like this" and present a deletionist view
           | of wikipedia to those who don't wish to be exposed to that
           | content, then go for it.
           | 
           | That flag exists. It's set by deleting the article. As you
           | note:
           | 
           | > in the current deletionist world, the initial article and
           | its deletion will be preserved in history forever
           | 
           | So if someone wanted to present an inclusionist view of
           | Wikipedia to those who find that content valuable, they could
           | do so.
        
             | dooglius wrote:
             | No, you can't edit pages that have been deleted, so that's
             | more than a flag.
        
           | a1369209993 wrote:
           | In the reductio ad absurdum, storage costs do become a
           | problem, and deletionism discourages many useless pages from
           | being created in the first place. OTOH, deletionism
           | discourages many useful pages from being created in the first
           | place, which is a much more serious problem.
        
           | Permit wrote:
           | > Yes, they probably don't. But what is the cost of having
           | them?
           | 
           | I like the idea that the articles on Wikipedia are generally
           | on "notable" topics or people. When I am reading an article I
           | know that it has probably been eyed up and down by
           | deletionists, hunting for any excuse to delete it, but they
           | walked away unable to do so. That's a very useful signal to
           | me!
           | 
           | For example, right now I can look someone up and use "has a
           | Wikipedia page" as a rough proxy for "is well known". If
           | everyone had Wikipedia pages, I could no longer do this.
        
             | TigeriusKirk wrote:
             | As gp says, though, a deletionist flag and deletionist
             | viewport would accomplish that just as well, while
             | preserving more obscure and niche topics.
        
           | teraflop wrote:
           | Wikipedians have been arguing over these positions for many
           | years, so if you want to see the arguments in favor of
           | deletionism, there are plenty of places to look.
           | 
           | For example, here are IMO the most salient points from
           | https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism:
           | 
           | > Some believe that the presence of uninformative articles
           | damage the project's usefulness and credibility, particularly
           | when casual visitors encounter them through Internet search
           | engines or Wikipedia's "random page" or "recent changes."
           | 
           | > Articles on obscure topics, even if they are in principle
           | verifiable, tend to be very difficult to verify. Usually, the
           | more obscure, the harder to verify. Actually verifying such
           | articles, or sorting out verifiable facts from exaggeration
           | and fiction, takes a great deal of time. Not verifying them
           | opens the door to fiction and advertising. This also leads to
           | a de facto collapse of the "no original research policy",
           | which is one of the fundamental Wikipedia policies.
           | Empirically, there have been a number of hoax articles which
           | were difficult to prove to be hoaxes but which could have
           | easily been deleted by a sufficiently strict notability
           | policy.
           | 
           | > Poorly-sourced articles can result in Citogenesis, as
           | incorrect or unsourced information on Wiki (e.g., information
           | that is the product of original research) is then repeated
           | outside Wiki and eventually works its way into a publication
           | that is normally regarded as a reliable source.
        
           | fnl wrote:
           | Isn't what you are describing exactly the Internet plus a
           | search engine you trust will pick up the article type you are
           | interested in? In fact, you'd still need to trust that open
           | WPv2 thing just like that search engine.
        
           | ardy42 wrote:
           | >> these topics probably don't deserve a Wikipedia article:
           | Me, my cat, my cat's water bowl, the water in the bowl on May
           | 5, 2020 etc.
           | 
           | > But what is the cost of having them?
           | 
           | 0. Volunteer time may be cheap, but it's not infinite.
           | Without standards, the volume of articles could become so
           | large it will be an impossible task to fact check and edit
           | them all.
           | 
           | 1. Malicious, unscrupulous, or misguided actors co-opting
           | Wikipedia's reputation for their own purposes (e.g. Jack's
           | snake oil has been scientifically proven to cure all
           | disease).
           | 
           | 2. Useless garbage in search results that you have to wade
           | through. If I put up a page about my vanity music act,
           | literally no one will want to read about it but me, yet it
           | will still show up in your search results.
        
         | SpicyLemonZest wrote:
         | It's worth noting that the Bulbasaur fans won and he does have
         | his own page.
        
           | Permit wrote:
           | That's great! And I think it shows that no matter where you
           | draw the line you're going to end up with compelling topics
           | on either side of it. I see it as a strength of Wikipedia
           | that these things are fluid and there is an ongoing tension
           | between inclusionists and deletionists. I'm very happy where
           | they've ended up at the moment.
        
         | musicale wrote:
         | > I guess it sucks for people who wanted to write articles on
         | each chapter of Atlas Shrugged or thought Bulbasaur needed his
         | own page
         | 
         | Bulbasaur is a pop culture icon; he may very well be the second
         | most recognizable Pokemon after Pikachu (though as noted
         | Charmander and Squirtle are up there too.) In any case, he
         | definitely earned his own page:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbasaur
        
         | nitwit005 wrote:
         | I'm in essentially the same camp. When I've tried to look
         | things up, it's always already been there. I've made edits to
         | wikipedia, but it's always been undoing vandalism.
        
         | duskwuff wrote:
         | > Like, there must be some line that separates what deserves an
         | article and what is does not.
         | 
         | That line is simply:
         | 
         | > If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable
         | sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to
         | be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.
         | 
         | -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
         | 
         | This _instantly_ weeds out a lot of obviously trivial topics.
         | There 's arguments about how exactly "significant coverage",
         | "reliable sources" and "independent of the subject" should be
         | defined, and refinements of this policy for specific subject
         | areas, but that's the core of Wikipedia's notability policies.
         | I've never heard any solid arguments for including a topic
         | which doesn't meet this criterion.
        
       | markwkw wrote:
       | Is it easy to tell what technology gwern uses for his website?
       | I'm not web-savvy, but it looks html looks like it's not
       | generated, but hand crafted. Is is a static website?
        
         | juped wrote:
         | You can find this information on the site
        
         | astine wrote:
         | As Juped said, there is actually an in depth discussion of the
         | tool used to generate the website on the about page:
         | https://www.gwern.net/About#tools It looks like static
         | generated website is about correct.
        
       | miblon wrote:
       | I noticed the decline. About a year ago, during a hackathon, we
       | tried to get an article online. It took us 3 deletes and retries.
       | Then I reached out to a national official at Wikipedia and
       | finally the article got accepted. That's not good...
        
       | eitland wrote:
       | Same goes for stackoverflow.
       | 
       | Since the stackoverflow database is freely available I cannot see
       | a single good reason why they haven't been outcompeted years ago.
        
         | the_af wrote:
         | So I have my own beefs with stackoverflow and the stackexchange
         | network at large, but...
         | 
         | ...at some point you have to ask yourself, _why_ haven 't they
         | been outcompeted? For every post complaining about
         | stackoverflow moderation or policies, there are probably
         | thousands of people using it every day to do their jobs, and
         | _it hasn 't been outcompeted_!
         | 
         | So if we're honest, we cannot rule out the possibility they are
         | doing something right. They set out to replace closed sites
         | like "Expert Sex Change" -- ok, sorry for the joke,
         | expertsexchange -- and also reduce low quality noise. They
         | succeeded and they are now the gold standard. So why hasn't
         | anyone simply taken their data and forked it?
         | 
         | A great example: softwareengineering.stackexchange -- formerly
         | programmers.stackexchange -- has a troubled history. At times
         | it has decided _everything_ was off-topic there (I 'm not
         | joking, there were times where every question on the home page
         | was closed as off-topic), and some long time "inclusionist" and
         | well-intentioned contributors declared they would fork it, and
         | their fork would include everything even tangentially related
         | to programmers and people wouldn't be censored for asking
         | questions about anything.
         | 
         | Where are those forks now?
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | Most of the important topics were covered years ago.
       | Encyclopedias are not high-maintenance; the maintenance team for
       | Britannica wasn't all that big.
       | 
       | I used to edit Wikipedia quite a bit, but got into other things.
        
       | narag wrote:
       | No comments yet? I guess others are still reading TFA...
       | 
       | There are a number of issues that seem to be eternal. Even if
       | there's an obvious right answer, I see year after year, decade
       | after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points
       | being made over and over again. Is there a name for these?
       | 
       | I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of unspeakable
       | reason that trumps any sound rationale.
        
         | CarVac wrote:
         | I would attribute it to an inadequate equilibrium, a local
         | minimum that's simply too hard to escape at this point.
        
         | pdonis wrote:
         | _> I guess that for each of them, there is some kind of
         | unspeakable reason that trumps any sound rationale._
         | 
         | I think the general unspeakable reason is pretty simple: once
         | you give people power, some of them will misuse it. And since
         | it takes more effort to correct a misuse of power than to
         | commit the misuse in the first place, any institution that
         | gives people power becomes more and more corrupt over time as
         | misuses of power outweigh valid uses of power.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | While I'm mostly in Camp Inclusion, I appreciate the issues
           | that tend to come up as you loosen criteria for articles more
           | and more--you probably inevitably get articles that are
           | "notable" to a narrower and narrower set of people and a lot
           | of verification depends on shakier and harder to access
           | sources.
           | 
           | That said, it's pretty clear that there are more than a few
           | Wikipedia admins who seem to have embraced deletionism for
           | topics that aren't near and dear to them personally and/or
           | which poke at whatever their particular political hot buttons
           | are.
        
           | kragen wrote:
           | The nice thing about Wikis in general is that it's usually
           | easier to correct a misuse of the power to edit a page than
           | it is to commit the misuse in the first place. That's why
           | Wikis work at all.
        
             | narag wrote:
             | That works for the power to edit, not for the power to
             | delete. So it makes sense, yes.
        
           | ooobit2 wrote:
           | Not just _some_ people, _nearly all_ will abuse it. But we
           | 've seen this more-so in people who are less familiar with
           | these institutions. Baltimore, MD, for example, has had now
           | _two_ black, female mayors convicted of corruption and
           | removed from office. We 've seen the current mayor of Chicago
           | attempt authoritarianism to enforce the stay-at-home order.
           | Michigan's mayor has reached far beyond CDC and NHS
           | recommendations, and now faces possible corruption charges
           | over abuse of power. Maine's governor is also in the
           | spotlight for circumventing checks and balances by the
           | legislature on the executive office.
           | 
           | People love AOC, and I too believe she means well, but even
           | she has warped into an anarcho-syndicalist, going so far as
           | to make absurd statements that "incremental change isn't
           | working", when everyone knows governance is a complex,
           | incremental series of processes, necessary to maintain a free
           | republic and limit opportunities for tyranny. Omar has had a
           | sexual affair with a senior member of her staff. Tlaib has
           | been censured for collaborating with anti-semitic
           | organizations on official business.
           | 
           | Biden, himself, has now managed over a year of avoiding
           | investigations into how his son secured a chair on a
           | Ukrainian energy board and was on that board during
           | negotiations between the Obama-Biden administration and
           | Ukraine related to that company's finances.
           | 
           | It's cute that people like John Oliver continue to say that
           | the rise of fascism isn't obvious, that it happens slow,
           | subtle. But abuses of power and position are everywhere right
           | now, especially among anti-Trump activists in the media and
           | Congress. You might agree that Trump is a racist, but taking
           | that very position is complicit with the anarcho-syndicalism
           | among a growing number of leftist politicians now.
           | 
           | Keep an air of skepticism about you for your own safety. Just
           | because 75% of us think a hate speech law is a reasonable
           | circumvention of free speech guarantees doesn't mean we
           | aren't also enabling scope creep. As we've seen thus far,
           | "slippery slope" is a fallacy in everything _but_ governance.
        
         | lidHanteyk wrote:
         | As a former Wikipedian, what's there to say? The evidence is
         | still there, and was there for years and years. Deletionism
         | was, and remains, a wrong-headed attitude that does not
         | understand what makes WP qualitatively different from standard
         | encyclopedic offerings.
         | 
         | There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and indeed
         | that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary and
         | Wikidata to their own TLDs. The main problem with WP is that it
         | is far easier to be wrong than to be right, and the effort
         | required to be right is linear in the number of words written.
         | In short, the number of editors per page required for
         | acceptable quality does not roll off with large numbers of
         | pages, but stays relatively high, at around 1-2 editors/page.
         | 
         | Worse, the number of moderators per editor does not roll off
         | either. The number of bureaucrats required therefore keeps
         | growing, logarithmically but steadily, and the demands on
         | arbitration committees keep growing. The committees themselves
         | have long ago failed basic principles of legal legibility,
         | leading to sprawling bureaucracy.
         | 
         | One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we store.
         | Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we could use
         | Wikidata to automatically generate articles. We already have
         | factboxes which could be largely automatically populated, and
         | many people only care about the factboxes. Prose would be
         | limited to commentary and explication, but would not be the
         | main bodies of articles. This is not just a pipe dream; LMFDB
         | [0] exists and is worth examining as an example of how code and
         | data can automatically generate the bulk of an encyclopedia.
         | 
         | But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when
         | Esperanza [1] was dissolved. We are now somewhere between
         | Bureaucracy and The Aftermath.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.lmfdb.org/
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Esperanza
        
           | zozbot234 wrote:
           | > One possible solution is to fundamentally alter what we
           | store. Rather than writing thousands of words of prose, we
           | could use Wikidata to automatically generate articles.
           | 
           | This is in fact being proposed at https://meta.wikimedia.org/
           | wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Proposal_tow... by a prominent
           | Wikidatan. (Edit: follow up at
           | https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilambda and
           | https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikilambda .) However
           | generating sensible articles would require expanding the
           | current Wikidata model, and this is something that should
           | happen gradually and be managed by the WD community itself,
           | not at a separate project. The whole pretty-printing-in-
           | natural-language part is the most speculative by far, and
           | incubating it separately makes more sense.
           | 
           | It's worth noting that Wikidata itself is not "deletionist"
           | other than as implied by verifiability- and sourcing-
           | requirements. Its model is far more general and far more
           | "inclusionist" than even the most permissive visions for
           | Wikipedia.
        
           | narag wrote:
           | Wow, the death of hope...
        
           | duskwuff wrote:
           | > There is not a motivating need to limit WP's scope, and
           | indeed that is why WMF forked off projects like Wiktionary
           | and Wikidata to their own TLDs.
           | 
           | This feels like a gross misreading of the facts.
           | 
           | Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia because its work
           | product is fundamentally different -- it's a dictionary, not
           | an encylopedia. Wikipedia has a lot of articles about things
           | that aren't words, and Wiktionary has a lot of pages for
           | words that wouldn't make sense to write an encyclopedia
           | article about.
           | 
           | Wikidata, meanwhile, is _only_ about raw data. Which is a
           | part of an encyclopedia, but far from all of it. (How would
           | you write an article about the history of Rome using only
           | data?)
           | 
           | > But, let's be honest, the writing was on the wall when
           | Esperanza [1] was dissolved.
           | 
           | This, too, is a gross misstatement of the facts.
           | 
           | Esperanza was dissolved because it was becoming a cabal. It
           | was becoming its own organization, with its own decision-
           | making process and elected officials, a significant part of
           | which happened off-wiki. There was widespread agreement,
           | _even from Esperanza 's founder_, that the organization was
           | no longer fulfilling its purpose, and an effort to reform it
           | before it was shut down.
           | 
           | There's a decent summary at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi
           | kipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
        
         | som33 wrote:
         | > I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep
         | being discussed, with the same points being made over and over
         | again. Is there a name for these?
         | 
         | Because human beings don't see reality accurately, see the
         | science:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
        
       | netcan wrote:
       | This sort of problem (or its opposite) is inevitable with our
       | internet circa 2020.
       | 
       | Maybe wikipedia _is_ too narrow. Maybe it 's too broad. These
       | things don't have singular, indisputable answers...
       | 
       | The problem is that we have an internet of bottlenecks. Wikipedia
       | choices about what is encyclopedic or notable is the only
       | definition of encyclopedic that matters. Youtube's interpretation
       | of fair use, twitter's definition of offensive or facebook's
       | definition of obscene... they're the working definitions.
       | 
       | The internet needs to be less centralised... Even wikipedia.
        
       | severine wrote:
       | Does anyone here remember Seth Finkelstein?
       | 
       | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/jul/31/wikipedia
       | 
       | I miss his writing!
       | 
       | edit: His blog is still up:
       | http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/cat_wikipedia.htm...
       | but unfortunately, no new entries since 2013 :(
        
       | dang wrote:
       | A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13152255
       | 
       | Thread from 2014 - interesting top comment there:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791791
       | 
       | (Reposts are ok after about a year:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
       | 
       | I've made the year in the title a gwernian range.
        
       | domador wrote:
       | If Wikipedia is to retain a deletionist editorial cultural, I'd
       | at least like to be able to access the history for deleted
       | entries and read old versions of such entries. As it stands,
       | those entries seem to be permanently removed from public access
       | (and maybe even on the back end.) I don't like that 1984-style
       | versioning, which gives the message that certain entries never
       | existed in the first place.
       | 
       | (I'd understand a small exception for copyright infringing
       | content--that such content should remain unavailable when
       | deleted.)
        
       | Stierlitz wrote:
       | "The fundamental cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia's
       | increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and
       | .. what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage
       | trumps any consideration of other factors."
       | 
       | .. as well as self-serving corporate and political interests. As
       | in they sit on an article 24/7 making sure nothing controversial
       | get in.
       | 
       | "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is
       | given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
       | 
       | Except for those that contradict the inner party. Go to the Talk
       | Page and discuss it they say. Do that and your account gets
       | disabled for violating some obscure WP rule.
        
       | qu4ku wrote:
       | Gwern's website starts to be next level.
        
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       (page generated 2020-05-05 23:00 UTC)