[HN Gopher] Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's de...
___________________________________________________________________
Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism
Author : DerekBickerton
Score : 182 points
Date : 2022-05-07 18:15 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (deletionpedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (deletionpedia.org)
| londgine wrote:
| Recently it was Israel's Independence Day. I was looking for
| something about Israel's War of Independence and I saw these
| Wikipedia articles
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_Wa...
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947%E2%80%931949_Palestine_... .
| Imagine if the article on the American Revolutionary War was
| renames to the First British American War. I've come to simply
| expect that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for anything
| somewhat political.
| noobermin wrote:
| No offense, as long as the titles match what is used in English
| media (for English wikipedia) and even lists other common names
| in the lede, then that's fine. Also redirect from other known
| names. Being offended by lack of content is one thing, being
| offended by a different title than you expect is a bit much.
| Gare wrote:
| English Wikipedia is written from PoV of English sources (and
| therefore English-speaking countries). It should use a name
| that is most common in those countries.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| A quick search for "1948 Arab Israeli War" shows several links
| from US and pro-Israel sources using the term, which seems to
| be a relatively neutral way to refer to it:
|
| https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-...
| https://israeled.org/the-arab-israeli-war-of-1948-a-short-hi...
|
| While the term British-American War is not in active use, I
| don't think either side would have any problem with it. It's
| not like there is any secret the Americans were fighting
| against the British.
| assttoasstmgr wrote:
| My favorite example of this is when Apple renamed Mac OS X to
| "macOS", someone went around and retroactively renamed nearly
| every mention of "OS X" on Wikipedia to "macOS" even in
| situations where it makes absolutely no sense, as "macOS" did
| not exist during the topic/time period which the article
| references.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| These are mostly vanity pages for people. Now if I add myself to
| wikipedia, it will at least end up somewhere!
| dorfsmay wrote:
| No. I try to add wikipedia for Open Source Software that are
| used in many places but that aren't giant and not well known
| outside of tech circles, and they get deleted, typically for
| lack of noteriety or not enough external references, sometimes
| 5 or 6 years later.
|
| It is very discouraging.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _It is very discouraging._
|
| Exactly. What the Deletionists seem to miss is the extent to
| which their entire position is based on negativity, and how
| that negativity poisons the well for everybody. Imagine
| spending hours, or days, or weeks writing a detailed, well-
| documented, heavily-interlinked, high-quality page only to
| have it shot in the head in a Deletionist Driveby. Would you
| ever edit another Wikipedia page again after an experience
| like that?
| VLM wrote:
| If someone were literally being paid to push an agenda
| online as a day job, they would want to eliminate all
| organic desire to produce content leaving only the somewhat
| more influential paid content.
|
| Just because site X is not paying for user generated
| content, does not mean no people are being paid to generate
| content on site X.
|
| Always follow the money.
| throwanem wrote:
| Okay, so, who by you is paying Wikipedia to peddle which
| agenda?
| tptacek wrote:
| What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an
| encyclopedia isn't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire, and
| that every page on the site incurs ongoing volunteer time
| to patrol for vandalism and corrections. Also, the idea
| that maybe it's OK if everyone doesn't edit Wikipedia
| pages; maybe some people should write secondary sources
| rather than tertiary ones.
| grumple wrote:
| Wikipedia is not limited by the number of pages that
| exist in a volume. A given page existing doesn't
| generally make it harder to find another entry. The
| notability criterion is more applicable to an
| encyclopedia limited by disc or paper space.
| tptacek wrote:
| Space has nothing to do with the limitation.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
| mindcrime wrote:
| _What the Inclusionists seem to miss is the fact that an
| encyclopedia isn 't The Hitchhiker's Guide or Angelfire,_
|
| No, we're all quite aware of that.
| VLM wrote:
| That was not my experience when clicking on "random page" a
| couple dozen times for fun.
|
| Store chains that went out of business. Airliner crashes with
| substantial property loss and injury but no fatalities.
| Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the past.
| Hardware that's no longer manufactured and someone wants to
| memory hole it. Schools that nobody "cool enough" graduated
| from, but obviously a lot of regular people graduated from. I
| hit exactly one individual out of perhaps 25 articles and he
| was a minor league professional soccer athlete, actually kind
| of surprised he got deleted, you would think superfans of the
| team would rally to keep that kind of info.
|
| It was all the kind of stuff where someone with a reason to
| research would be painfully inconvenienced by its removal or
| someone with a personal connection would feel bad if it were
| deleted. The work of the usual people on the internet whom get
| off on making people feel bad. None of it was literally useless
| in the sense of lists of serial numbers of dollar bills by year
| number or similar. Actually if an article like that, if it
| existed, would be a gold mine for someone trying to research
| anti-counterfeiting technologies or someone being paid to write
| anti-counterfeiting software or a coin collector trying to
| verify authenticity of a collectible, so I'm sure people whom
| get off on causing others pain would push HARD to delete an
| article like that and would enjoy the resulting feeling of
| having caused pain.
| tptacek wrote:
| Here are yesterday's AfD's on actual Wikipedia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio.
| ..
|
| These are the borderline calls; Deletionpedia is a subset of
| this stuff, as it apparently captures the speedy deletes,
| which are much worse.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _Abandoned software that was moderately influential in the
| past. Hardware that 's no longer manufactured and someone
| wants to memory hole it._
|
| This one is a bit surprising to me. From my perspective,
| wikipedia seems to have a strong computer nerd bias. There
| are articles about obscure text editors that have probably
| only been used by a few dozen people in the last 30 years,
| but if you try looking up information about
| industrial/construction hardware (blue collar stuff..) the
| articles are often very short (when they exist at all) and
| often don't have history sections.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a lot of issues around notability, not least of all
| the availability of third party sources which varies by a ton
| of things including pre-and post- internet notability. But
| also the nature of their or its notability. On the one hand,
| you likely have articles on fairly minor actors and pro
| athletes and you probably don't have articles on many tenured
| professors at major universities even though they're pretty
| much by definition notable in their fields--but there may not
| have been much written about them as a person.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Nim had to face the deletion nazis for a while for not being
| "notable" enough:
|
| https://deletionpedia.org/en/Nim_(programming_language)
|
| Meanwhile Wikipedia's own policies are violated with the
| comprehensive detailed list of Pokemon and sub-articles that
| really belongs on a dedicated wiki.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pok%C3%A9mon
| tptacek wrote:
| Most programming languages start out non-notable. I've built
| 3 of them. None of them belong in the encyclopedia!
| IdEntities wrote:
| 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."
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > credibly accused of child abuse in the Presidio daycare
| scandal
|
| Man, I thought everything to do with the Satanic Panic was
| memory holed.
| robonerd wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| Are all deleted articles weighed equally? If a bio page is
| deleted because it's self-promoting does it still appear
| regardless?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Would be weird if they didn't include those pages on a "radical
| inclusionist" wiki.
| theamk wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Deleted articles aren't THAT big an issue, since most articles
| that get deleted are crap (there are exceptions). Maybe more
| important is idiots reverting good edits or otherwise removing
| info from articles, without the articles themselves getting
| deleted. The info is thus retained in the edit history, but it's
| harder to programatically recover, because: the context changes
| in later editing; it's hard to distinguish information removal
| from ordinary editing/rewriting; there are tons of automated
| edits that are just plain noise with no clear way to distinguish
| them from human edits, etc. I've been wanting to spend some time
| on this some day.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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.
| pvaldes wrote:
| There is not point currently in trying to fix an error when you
| read an article in Wikipedia. In the 99% of the cases is reverted
| automatically when you quit the page to keep the wrong statement.
| The momentum when it was cool to help there has passed.
| flenserboy wrote:
| 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.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I read through wikipedia AfD occasionally for fun (yeah, I
| know, I'm a weirdo). I'm not going to say it's never happened
| ever, but I've never noticed an AfD that ended up with a delete
| consensus that was obviously started due to an editor's
| political bias.
|
| Can you provide examples to substantiate this claim?
| flenserboy wrote:
| Sure.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio.
| ..
|
| https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/female-scientists-
| pages-...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wikipedia-bias-1.6129073
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on how those examples prove your claim?
| None of those examples seem to show a political bias.
| wwwwy wrote:
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > (I would go into more detail, but I'll be flagged to
| oblivion, as this is also the prevailing opinion on this site
| too.)
|
| You're on a throwaway account. That's not a valid excuse.
| donio wrote:
| > (I would go into more detail, but I'll be flagged to
| oblivion, as this is also the prevailing opinion on this site
| too.)
|
| It's the opposite, not supporting your claim with evidence
| when it should be straightforward to do so is what's going to
| get you flagged into oblivion.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Difflinks or it didn't happen.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I'm kinda wondering about future. I can well imagine that some
| current minor minister of a country is notable enough for now,
| but what about 10 or 20 years in future? Will their articles
| just end up deleted? Even if they were perfectly good and
| factual?
| robonerd wrote:
| 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.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| I'd like something similar for flagged articles and comments here
| on HN.
| IronWolve wrote:
| 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.
|
| Those who control the history books they say.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _a historian who wanted to correct common misceptions in
| articles_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
|
| The rest of your comment is extremely vague, and gives no links
| to back anything up.
| IronWolve wrote:
| So? I commented on deleted entries 20+ years ago I saw, about
| a new site that shows deleted entries.
|
| Even the historical comments are deleted, why would they want
| to ban the debates.
|
| Yeah, no agenda anywhere. /s
| [deleted]
| freemint wrote:
| 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)
| babbagecabbage wrote:
| > _I 'm old enough to remember news and events that counter the
| popular views, and those events are not even in historical news
| articles._
|
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Canada had MASH medical units
|
| 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.
| IronWolve wrote:
| No, this was 20+ years ago, he had links and to canadian
| military websites. It wasnt the canadians who joined the US
| military or Red Cross.
|
| If only his page still existed.
| mlyle wrote:
| I don't think that this is actually true-- other than the
| ICRC, the small number of Canadian advisors at the
| beginning of the war, the small number of Canadian
| peacekeepers at the end, the extensive number of Canadian
| volunteers for US military service, and the employees of
| Canadian defense companies that travelled to Vietnam to
| support US equipment. There were also some humanitarian
| civilian missions.
|
| There's tons of newspapers, etc, online from this period.
| It's hard to believe that no primary nor secondary source
| would have survived of what you're describing.
| IronWolve wrote:
| Too bad the wikipedia article comments are deleted.
| mindcrime wrote:
| 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.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| This has existed since 2013[0]. If you haven't noticed it in
| nine years, how much did the world really _need this_?
|
| [0]:
| https://deletionpedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&offset...
| yucky wrote:
| I'm always amazed at how quickly we became a pro-censorship
| society. I always assumed it would take several generations.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Most people are pro-censorship. What people generally
| disagree on is what should be censored. Some find nudity
| offensive, for others it's ideas.
|
| This is always been the case. Eg TV networks have
| guidelines on what they can and cannot air.
|
| If anything, the internet brought about an unprecedented
| lack of censorship. But that was only when it was a smaller
| community of individuals. The moment it snowballed,
| moderation was needed (whether that was on IRC, BBS or
| wherever).
| BirAdam wrote:
| Umm... Yeah. I initially wanted to disagree, but then I
| think about obscenity laws in the USA, and it makes
| sense. This is similar to people not truly believing in
| Democracy. They only believe in it when they're winning.
| smaudet wrote:
| "truly believing in Democracy"
|
| Right, the reason Democracy degenerates is due inherent
| disagreement, and the fact a democracy can still vote to
| stop being a democracy.
|
| It only has one goal, namely not to let a small group of
| individuals take control. If a small group of individuals
| then influences the many, the point is rather moot.
|
| But anyways, yeah. Don't censor anything. Instead let
| people do their own censorship, by which I don't mean
| censor themselves but censor other for themselves.
|
| Everyone has things they dont want to or can't hear but
| nothing is unworthy of being said, not even blatantly
| false or disruptive things.
| yucky wrote:
| >What people generally disagree on is what should be
| censored.
|
| Say for instance, a story about emails on Hunter Biden's
| laptop that implicated Joe Biden in a money laundering
| scheme out of Ukraine?
|
| See, anybody that makes the case that "we always have
| censorship" and brings up CP or frontal nudity or nuclear
| weapon schematics or whatever - they're being
| intellectually dishonest. There is a huge difference, so
| please stop pretending this level of censorship is
| nothing new. Everybody sees this comparison as absurd, so
| I'm not sure what the goal of it is.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's all kinds of things that I've wanted that I've not
| known where to find them. So telling people that something's
| been available really has no import on how much they
| want/need something.
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't think that this being around 9 years and not being
| noticed has any bearing on whether the world _needs_ this.
| There are plenty of things that you and I have no idea exist
| but nonetheless serve important functions.
| selfhifive wrote:
| LSTMs were around for about 17 years before they
| revolutionised NLP.
| macintux wrote:
| > 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.
|
| After browsing the site and seeing mostly crap, I'm genuinely
| curious: do you have examples of content erroneously evicted by
| radical deletionists?
| yasp wrote:
| https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/political-deletionism-
| at-w...
| car_analogy wrote:
| Wow, in one of the cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.
| php?title=Wikipedia:Article...), they actually deleted the
| page entirely, then re-created it, so that any prior edit
| history was lost. Talk about deceptive.
|
| Good thing no-one printed the page out, or we might have to
| hear one of those "Where they have burned books, they will
| end up burning people" lectures. But this is "on a
| computer", so entirely different.
| macintux wrote:
| Every topic referenced there is related to racial
| superiority, at least from a quick skim. I can see why
| Wikipedia might be gunshy on that front.
| ptsneves wrote:
| Also felt that everything in the article is racially
| connected. If there was a fundamentally wrong thing with
| Wikipedia i would expect more topics to be touched.
|
| Furthermore some of the justifications seemed fine, with
| the only thing I could get behind being that except for
| unlawful content the history of edits should never be
| removed. That would be the proverbial rewriting of
| history, which I find wrong. A pity the author got too
| caught up calling woke and revealing personal details of
| supposed conflicts of interest.
|
| Finally calling woke is as much a cannary denominator for
| ideological activism as reactionary or capitalist. It
| reeks miles away. If you are anti censorship focus on
| that.
| striking wrote:
| I've read through the section of this article which
| discusses the "Jewish Intelligence" page, and find the
| reasoning behind why we should be mad about the deletion to
| be extraordinarily weak compared to the explanation given
| by the editor (the editor that is then ad hominem attacked
| by the author of the article).
|
| Do you really expect anyone to believe this?
| cryoz wrote:
| FYI: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| In general, it's a bad idea to bring up an unrelated
| controversy as an example when you're trying to argue for
| anything, because you're going to lose a good chunk of your
| audience who might otherwise be open to your point of view.
| daedalus_f wrote:
| The author of this article wants me to believe wikipedia
| has been taken over by the "super woke" but frankly they
| just come across as having an unhealthy obsession with IQ
| as a heritable trait and desperately want to use this to
| tie race to IQ.
|
| They describe themselves as a "contrarian scientist". At
| the end the author complains that their wikipedia page has
| been deleted twice, my heart bleeds.
| mindcrime wrote:
| There's been quite a lot of techie related content - pages
| for programming languages, OSS projects, etc. that were
| deleted as a result of the overly aggressive deletion
| policies, IMO. No, I'm not going to give you a list though,
| because I'm not interested in spending my time here arguing
| over the minutia of whether or not a given page is "really
| notable". Not wanting to waste my time on that crap is one
| reason I rarely edit WP anymore, and I'm not going to re-
| engage in that here. You can find your own examples, or
| simply disregard my blathering, it's all the same to me
| either way.
| calibas wrote:
| Here's some examples:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| My70thaccount wrote:
| This probably wasn't your intention but everything you just
| said has the consequence of being super racist.
| calibas wrote:
| ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia according to a quick
| Google search. Comparing it to "tiny banks all over
| Chicagoland" is unfair. One of a countries top banks should
| be covered by Wikipedia.
|
| And I have participated in AfDs on Wikipedia before, so I do
| know something about the policies. That's why I chose these
| two in particular. Could you show me the policy that says
| 3Pac isn't notable because the news coverage was based upon
| his death? He was also mentioned in the Washington Post
| before his death, albeit very briefly.
| tptacek wrote:
| The notability criteria specifically exclude mention-in-
| passing; there needs to be substantial coverage. That's not
| a goalpost move I just came up with; as always, these
| things are documented relentlessly on the project pages.
|
| I'm not making a case against an article for "3Pac". Like I
| said, I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD. I'm
| just saying it's not the borderline case you make it out to
| be.
|
| If ABA is one of the top banks in Cambodia, you should have
| no trouble finding a reliable source that says that, and
| then rescue the page. There is a whole class of article
| that fails at AfD not because the subject isn't truly non-
| notable, but because the people who wrote the article did a
| poor job. That's a fixable problem; just go fix it, if you
| care.
| calibas wrote:
| > I probably would have been a "keep" on that AfD
|
| Probably keep, so it sounds like you thinks it's a
| borderline case.
|
| > I'm just saying it's not the borderline case you make
| it out to be.
|
| Wait, what?
|
| I stopped fighting for articles like these years ago
| because I grew to despise arguing over Wikipedia's
| policies. There's power users who seem to delight in
| bureaucracy, but for me it just sucks all the enjoyment
| out of participating in Wikipedia.
|
| That being said, I still make edits to articles
| sometimes.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yeah, the second "borderline" is a typo, and should read
| "open-and-shut" or something. Sorry, message board
| comments are the log(1.1)th draft of history.
|
| I also stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The places I
| would have written in are all related to my work, and I
| found it intensely frustrating to be edited and
| incorrected by people who knew less about my field but
| more about Wikipedia's rules. I can see why it's so off-
| putting! But it later occurred to me that that's as it
| should be: it's what the project is getting at when it
| talks about "No Original Research". Wikipedia is a
| tertiary source; it's a directory of other sources, a map
| of the available literature. I can't just go into
| Wikipedia and write how macOS Seatbelt works, because I
| am not myself a reliable source; I'd be a guidemark on
| the map pointing to nowhere.
|
| Instead, what I should be doing (to the extent I care
| about improving the encyclopedia) is writing secondary
| sources that the encyclopedia can eventually cite. I'm
| not supposed to be writing on Wikipedia (at least, not in
| my areas of expertise); I'm supposed to be writing
| elsewhere.
| calibas wrote:
| I've seen that happen a few times, an expert in a field
| will greatly improve an article, only to have their
| additions removed or butchered by someone who's far less
| educated on the subject. The resulting edit war is "won"
| by the person better versed in Wikipedia's policies, and
| that's usually not the expert.
|
| The bureaucrat wins, the article gets neutered, and the
| expert gets so frustrated they never participate in
| Wikipedia again. To me, it seems like Wikipedia loses
| more than it gains in this.
| tonguez wrote:
| "coverage"
|
| do you mean like on TV or something? no one watches that
| car_analogy wrote:
| 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.
| donatj wrote:
| 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.
| twam wrote:
| For future reference, you can instantly archive a page via:
| https://web.archive.org/save.
|
| If you create an account and log in, it will also give you an
| option to archive any page linked to by that page, as well.
| eezurr wrote:
| Interesting that you've had problems with someone with that
| many sources/public image.
|
| My project has stalled, but there was a point when I was
| putting together a Wikipedia page for notable composers of
| the 20th and 21st century. I came up with some criteria that
| would filter out most of the composers listed on their
| respective "list of 20th century composers" and "list of 21st
| century composers". If you haven't seen these lists, they are
| HUGE and thus pretty useless IMO.
|
| I started going through each composer and so many of them
| were unknown, barely sourced/dead sources, no website, no
| music online, recently graduated college, etc.
|
| I flagged a handful of pages and all of them were rejected
| for deletion. Sometimes the page creators popped out of the
| blue and fought me on it (and got to vote on the page
| remaining). I think someone of them had direct connections
| with the composer.
|
| There are so many tiny pages dedicated to forever-invisible
| composers, it's awful.
|
| You can see my progress here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:List_of_20th-
| _and_21st-c...
| tptacek wrote:
| I did this for about 4 months for my own field (information
| security) and I was astonished by how much energy people
| would put in to keeping their vanity pages. There was a
| whole cluster of articles about a non-notable IT security
| person, their podcast, and their "hacking group",
| membership in which extended notability to all sorts of
| other random people. Somebody in the clique was friends
| with a particularly aggressive admin, which made it
| especially difficult to roll any of it back.
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm sure there's a whole marketplace around "thought
| leader" promotion on Wikipedia.
| bpeebles wrote:
| As my sibling comments say, you can ask for it. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REFUND
|
| Also it being deleted once doesn't mean it can't ever be
| made. May be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TOOSOON for it.
| Working on it in your draft space and maybe using the
| articles for creation process if you want more help.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AFC
| crdrost wrote:
| The "notability" criterion on Wikipedia is remarkably
| slippery.
|
| In theory, it is objective. There should be no real question
| about it. It is a synonym for something like "evidenceable,"
| "researchable," or "verifiable." Something is 'notable'
| according not to subjective perception but rather whether you
| can find third party sources to corroborate basic details.
| Notability is about the problem of, "You said this
| podcaster's real name was X Quasimodo Mogadishu, the X is not
| short for anything, his literal first name is the letter X...
| That looks a lot like vandalism to me, is there a third party
| source that I can consult to confirm if this was vandalism or
| reality?" If such details are unverifiable, we filethe
| subject of the article as "not notable" and delete the page
| until that changes.
|
| In practice, the word is so pliable that it is bent into
| whatever shape the moderators desire. I have heard "well,
| this guy is notable _in the such-and-so community_ , just not
| on the world stage." my response, "What?! What on earth does
| that have to do with me finding third party sources to
| confirm what facts I am seeing in this article? Like, are you
| saying that the third party sources are encoded in hopeless
| amounts of jargon such that it is no longer English?" met
| silence, because of course that's not the point, the point is
| that the admins can reinvent the definition of notability as
| they see fit.
|
| Don't feel bad that you got burned. The basic problem is that
| Wikipedia is a democracy, and democratic governance requires
| politics, and you came into the situation as a political
| outsider. Of course it didn't go your way, it only goes your
| way if you are lucky.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| > The basic problem is that Wikipedia is a democracy
|
| No, that is not the basic problem with Wikipedia. Had it
| been a democracy there would have been ways for Wikipedia
| readers and writers to influence what Wikipedia editors do.
| The 'talk' page gives the illusion of allowing such
| influence but in reality the decisions are made by an in-
| group which is mostly ideologically homogeneous. This in-
| group is not the same for all areas of interest but it is
| stable within interest areas.
|
| Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of
| oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella
| organisation which give them the semblance of being
| democratic. This problem is inherent in the way Wikipedia
| is organised, there is no neutral arbiter to appeal to when
| confronted with an ideologically homogeneous and censorious
| group of editors. The (only?) way out of this conundrum is
| the same as that for free software projects, namely to fork
| the project in the hope of creating a better version. While
| forking the content is easy - there are regular dumps which
| can be used for this purpose - it is another thing to
| actually host a successful fork. The Wikimedia foundation
| is sitting on a pile of donations and can afford the
| significant resources which go into hosting one of the most
| popular sites on the 'net. A fork could be hosted on IPFS
| or in some other way utilise peer-to-peer strategies to
| offload the burden of hosting popular content in a similar
| fashion to the way Peertube solves this problem. As far as
| I'm concerned the ultimate goal of any fork should be to
| eventually re-join the original project when the 'unbiased'
| version has shown to be the more popular one. While I do
| not doubt that an unbiased Wikipedia would be more popular
| than the current version it is questionable as to whether
| the Wikimedia foundation would agree on allowing such a re-
| merger to occur - time will tell.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Mergers like you mention have happened early on, and they
| worked.
|
| Last I looked the decisions were not per-se arrived at by
| an in-group ("The Cabal"). Instead, a lot of it functions
| by applying smart-mob behavior.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob
|
| Note that -at times (and/or at particularly small
| scales)- it can be really hard to distinguish a smart mob
| from a cabal, so I can see where the impression comes
| from.
| noizejoy wrote:
| > Wikipedia is not a democracy, it is a collection of
| oligarchies - small fiefdoms united under an umbrella
| organisation which give them the semblance of being
| democratic.
|
| The argument could be made, that any human
| grouping/organization of sufficiently large size ceases
| to be a democracy and devolves into what you describe.
|
| And in my own experience the tipping point is in the
| hundreds of individuals, not thousands or millions.
| bombcar wrote:
| The only true democracy is just everyone deciding to
| ignore you. Everything else is just window dressing on
| some form of authority.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Any human grouping/organization of sufficiently large
| size does not start out as a democracy, this is not the
| natural organisation form for our species. Traditionally
| groups are hierarchical with a 'strong' leader who leads
| in times of strife, often combined with a small group of
| 'wise' men/women who make more strategic/long-term
| decisions. The idea of democracy is relatively new,
| originating in the city-state of Athens some 500 years
| BC. This Athenian democracy was not a full democracy
| since only citizens had a voice. While that sounds good
| it should be noted that women, slaves, foreigners and
| youths below the age of military service were not
| eligible for citizenship and as such did not have a
| voice.
|
| A true democracy is hard to achieve at larger scale but
| modern technology could maybe possibly eventually - yes,
| there is that much uncertainty - be used to attain it.
| Then again, even in a true democracy the individual vote
| can still be controlled by manipulating the voter towards
| whatever ideological goals desired by the individual or
| group in control of the information which reaches those
| voters.
|
| Wikipedia _could_ allow a more democratic form of content
| moderation by allowing readers to 'score' editorial
| decisions, a bit like e.g. the Slashdot meta-moderation
| system works. This would at least make it possible to
| weed out activist (groups of) editors who use their
| 'power' to turn the encyclopedia into their propaganda
| platform.
| tonguez wrote:
| "Wikipedia is a democracy"
|
| i'm going to need a reliable source for that. meaning: it
| can only be true if a multi billion dollar corporation says
| that it's true
| amelius wrote:
| > "Wikipedia is a democracy"
|
| Given that the majority is not an expert on any
| particular topic, I suppose that is not a good thing, so
| I would be surprised if it were true.
| [deleted]
| kens wrote:
| > Something is 'notable' according not to subjective
| perception but rather whether you can find third party
| sources to corroborate basic details.
|
| Don't confuse notability and verifiability. Notability
| requires verifiable evidence, but also that the topic has
| received "significant coverage" that addresses the topic
| directly and in detail. (Lots of things are verifiable but
| trivial.) There are specific, detailed notability policies
| for everything from academics to music to astronomical
| objects, and even which individual numbers are notable.
|
| For more:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_notability_...
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_n
| o...
|
| Wikipedia is not a democracy, or at least it isn't supposed
| to be. Democracies can do things like decide that
| pi=3[citation needed]. Some bits look superficially like
| democratic procedures though. This can catch people by
| surprise and the outcome of diverse processes can be
| different to what one might expect.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I do agree with CDrost that some politics is involved. I
| also traditionally did not agree with the way
| "Notability" has grown. Originally IIRC it was an
| eventualist criterion to rescue articles without sources
| (or bad sources) from deletion... because if things are
| (obviously) notable, one will definitely be able to find
| sources _eventually_.
|
| Now somehow the way notability works has been inverted,
| even allowing deletion of sourced articles.
|
| There is a parable here about processes getting
| misread/worn down over time, but I don't quite have all
| the bits together to write it out in full.
|
| Finally note that most wikipedia processes can be
| initiated by non-admins, and often are.
| cesarb wrote:
| If all you want is to have a copy of what you wrote, you can
| ask a Wikipedia admin to temporarily undelete the page
| (perhaps moving it to your user space). If the reason for
| deletion was just that the subject was not notable enough, I
| see no reason for not doing that.
| mormegil wrote:
| I think you could ask an admin for a copy of the deleted
| article. On my small home wiki, such a request would be
| fulfilled without any trouble.
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with Wikipedia policy specifically, but
| most likely, if you start out by creating the article in your
| user space (User:$yourUsername/whatever or
| Special:MyPage/whatever, Special:MyPage will redirect you to
| User:$yourUsername, including subpages) then that version
| won't get touched, user sandboxes on most wikis are exactly
| that and kinda your own space.
| tptacek wrote:
| What was the article title?
| dqpb wrote:
| There will always be self righteous gatekeepers.
|
| This is the inevitable result of centralized control.
| tptacek wrote:
| I liked Metallica better before the Black album and think
| they're kind of a caricature of themselves now, but to each
| their own.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Simple: keeping deleted stuff actually deleted / invisibled
| keeps Wikipedia from _a bunch_ of lawsuits - in particular,
| DMCA and libel /defamation laws.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Because otherwise there's no point in removing anything.
| justincormack wrote:
| The history isn't removed, but its only visible to Wikipedia
| admins.
| kens wrote:
| The motivation for hiding the history of deleted Wikipedia
| articles is to minimize legal complaints. E.g. if something
| is libelous or a copyright violation, they want to remove it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Viewing_deleted_cont.
| ..
| andrew_ wrote:
| Factually accurate, but not any better for the public.
| Snowworm wrote:
| Do you think an admin, with some programming knowledge, could
| write a program to scrape all of the deleted pages on
| Wikipedia and store them in some public archive for people to
| view?
|
| I'm sure it goes against their terms of service, but it would
| be really great for getting rid of censorship.
| lelandfe wrote:
| The trickiness comes from the deleted articles that really
| ought to stay dead - things like copyright infringement,
| doxxing, etc. Were I an admin, I'd be loath to cast the net
| too wide when resurfacing those removed pages.
|
| That's the reason, I'm sure, even Deletionpedia has a
| removal process: https://deletionpedia.org/en/Deletionpedia
| .org:Removal_reque...
| Snowworm wrote:
| Btw. I was asking this in case deletionpedia hadn't managed
| to copy all of the articles.
| car_analogy wrote:
| That is even more damning - it does not even allow the
| "saving storage space" excuse.
| mlyle wrote:
| Do note that there's backups/dumps at approximately monthly
| intervals, too, that could have helped.
| tptacek wrote:
| "Saving storage space" has literally nothing to do with any
| of Wikipedia's policies. If you thought that's why articles
| got deleted, you don't understand the policy, and
| Chesterton's Fence controls.
| hollerith wrote:
| I know what Chesterton's Fence means, but wish you would
| elaborate a little on how it relates to the policy.
| tptacek wrote:
| The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has
| nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said.
| Your comment implies that they do; in fact, you
| essentially argue that losing the "save space" excuse is
| fatal to the policy. You need to understand those
| policies before you can plausibly critique them. You
| evidently don't, and your critique is consequently
| implausible.
| car_analogy wrote:
| > The rationale for deleting articles on Wikipedia has
| nothing to do with saving storage space, as I just said.
| Your comment implies that they do;
|
| I assume by "your comment", you mean mine. If so, it does
| not imply that that was the rationale - in fact, by
| calling it an _excuse_ , and not a rationale, it implies
| the opposite - that the real reason is different, and
| storage space just a (possible) cover.
|
| Because once you remove the storage space excuse, all
| that remains (besides doxing, copyright, and various
| legal reasons, which Deletionpedia shows are a small
| minority of all deleted articles) are various
| rationalizations on why readers should be kept in the
| dark.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I read their comment differently. I think they were
| saying the admins can't even use the excuse that any
| specific deletions or deletions generally are necessary
| to save space, because deleted items are not erased
| completely, but are still available to admins.
| Veen wrote:
| So why don't you explain what they do mean instead of
| these mysterious repetitions of "you don't understand"
| and references to concepts (Chesterton's Fence) that
| aren't obviously applicable to what's being discussed.
| mindcrime wrote:
| So why don't you contribute something meaningful to the
| conversation then, instead of vague-hn'ing?
| moomin wrote:
| 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.)
| manholio wrote:
| This story is elliptical to the point of unintelligibility.
| Nobody knows what happened next. We can guess a page was
| deleted from the context of this thread, but we have no idea
| why.
| repsilat wrote:
| > _We can guess a page was deleted_
|
| My interpretation was "the edits were quickly reverted and
| the editor's page remained flattering and devoid of
| evidence of notability."
| noobermin wrote:
| This is being downvoted, but I too want to know more
| explicitly what happened. Even link said page because I am
| now curious.
| [deleted]
| programmarchy wrote:
| 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.
| mherdeg wrote:
| Whatever happened to the critics who ran a protest site called
| Wikitruth? Did it go offline? Was there some controversy? I'd
| check their Wikipedia page but they really don't have one.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| 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.
|
| Example: this page about some soldier in the Balkan wars:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milan_Tepic&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.
| fareesh wrote:
| Wikipedia deleted the entry for a company called Rosemont Seneca
| Partners which was the financial firm of the younger son of Joe
| Biden, i.e. Hunter Biden.
|
| The stated reasoning behind the deletion was that it is not a
| notable company.
|
| This company is discussed extensively in the emails recovered
| from the laptop of Hunter Biden. News of these emails was
| censored by Twitter and Facebook just before the 2020 election.
| It is widely believed by millions (including the new owner of
| Twitter) that this was a partisan move. Jack Dorsey has remarked
| that this was a mistake that he rectified as soon as he came to
| learn of it, which was several weeks after the censorship.
|
| At the time of the news story, Facebook announced that they were
| "reducing the spread" of this story. The move was announced by
| Andy Stone, who is and was the erstwhile head of communications
| at Meta, and also by total coincidence, was previously a staff
| member for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
| (DCCC), Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, and "House Majority
| PAC", a political action group whose stated mission is to ensure
| the majority of the Democratic Party in the US House of
| Representatives.
|
| One of the people in the emails was Tony Bobulinski - a former US
| Navy Seal Lieutenant. He clarified the context in one of the
| emails which referenced a "10%" cut for the "big guy". This was a
| reference to current President Joe Biden, per Bobulinski.
|
| Over a year after the election, the Washington Post confirmed the
| authenticity of the emails from the laptop. Facebook's
| aforementioned Andy Stone announced at the time that stories
| about the contents of the email were "eligible for checking by
| third party fact-checkers" and that the spread of the story would
| be reduced until they returned a verdict. Stone has announced no
| verdict thus far.
|
| Many are quick to point to the Streisand effect when discussing
| this topic, which while relevant, does not address the apparent
| coordinated nature of the censorship behind this story, wherein
| the same incorrect conclusion was drawn by multiple parties on
| the basis of no evidence.
|
| This is the type of thing we see happening in third world
| countries quite often, where the government and the ruling party
| have an iron grip over the media. Just this week we have seen
| governments cut off internet access entirely as an effort to curb
| the spread of disinformation. To see first world countries
| engaging in similar behavior leaves one with little hope for the
| future of democratic rule.
| gregsher88 wrote:
| 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.
| theobeers wrote:
| This is a famous case. I can almost understand why they got rid
| of the extended synopsis. For anyone who wants to read it,
| here's a copy on Reddit:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/4z3u55/wikipedias_ex...
| striking wrote:
| What's wrong with reverting content that isn't relevant for the
| encyclopedic format of Wikipedia? A decent example of this
| might be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempted_(Squeeze_song)
| #Backg..., which goes into the background of the song without
| analyzing every lyric. Save that for Genius.
| teddyh wrote:
| Any relation to this other Deletionpedia?
| http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
| Ivoirians wrote:
| I've noticed that one article which was marked for deletion on
| Wikipedia is marked as "hooray survived deletionism" on
| deletionpedia, but only got changed to a redirect after a lot of
| data was deleted.
|
| https://deletionpedia.org/en/Jeopardy!_College_Championship
| highspeedbus wrote:
| It's nice to have once again a authoritative link to this page
| [1]. A shame that wikipedia think this is irrelevant information.
|
| https://deletionpedia.org/en/List_of_PlayStation_2_games_wit...
| kvetching wrote:
| Thank you. There is almost 100,000 deleted articles. I don't get
| why they would do this to so many topics.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| > _I don 't get why they would do this to so many topics._
|
| It's a form of censorship, hence a form of thought control.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Sure, in the sense that literally any text is thought
| control.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| It's mostly a form of spam-control.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| > _spam-control_
|
| Can you explain what was so spammy about this one?
| https://nypost.com/2022/04/23/wikipedia-deletes-entry-for-
| hu...
| striking wrote:
| First off, it's now a redirect https://en.m.wikipedia.org
| /w/index.php?title=Rosemont_Seneca...
|
| Second, the article links to the archived comments about
| the deletion (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:A
| rticles_for_delet...), wherein an editor explains
|
| > This organization is only mentioned in connection with
| its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz,
| from whom it cannot inherit notability per WP:NORG. Every
| single source is a trivial mention in an article about
| the founders; that means it fails WP:GNG as well. Keeping
| it around additionally risks WP:BLPVIO, as this is a
| magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden.
|
| Seems pretty clear cut to me. Write the parts that
| deserve to be in the Hunter Biden page in the Hunter
| Biden page. Don't make a stub article just so you can
| mention an otherwise unnotable company.
| practice9 wrote:
| well, isn't most of free speech just de-facto spam?
| macintux wrote:
| Sure, which is why no one is legally obligated to host
| it.
| pavlov wrote:
| It's crazy how people feel entitled to have somebody else
| host their "thoughts" on the Internet.
|
| As the project at hand shows, if Wikipedia doesn't want to
| host your page, you can simply publish elsewhere.
| xigoi wrote:
| Nobody is posting their "thoughts" on Wikipedia, it's for
| encyclopedic articles. By controlling the content of those,
| you control what many people consider the truth.
| pavlov wrote:
| An encyclopedia is by definition curated and controlled.
| The brilliance of the Internet and open content licensing
| is that you can fork Wikipedia if you don't like their
| editorial choices. This wasn't possible with a thirty-
| volume print edition of Britannica.
|
| Of course if you want to make people look to your version
| instead of the one at wikipedia.org, you probably need to
| invest in marketing. In theory nothing stops you from
| becoming the new source of authority -- after all
| Wikipedia has only held this role for less than twenty
| years, and nobody remembers what was the #1 result site
| for these search queries then.
| warning26 wrote:
| Eh, I think that paring down excess content is important for
| just about any organizational effort.
|
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| Why? It's not like a printed encyclopedia; there really
| aren't space limitations in any meaningful way.
| macintux wrote:
| Too much noise often makes it hard to find the signal. It's
| also difficult to sustain any quality/accuracy, especially
| if the topics are too obscure.
| ghaff wrote:
| This is like a discussion the other day on streaming
| service quality. Even if the "crap" isn't completely
| without value to anyone, dump 100,000 low quality/value
| pieces of content into anything and it's that much harder
| to find (and trust) the good content.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Apart from too much noise a lot of it is duplicated effort
| as well. E.g. Cherry RC is indeed deleted but so it can be
| a redirect to RC Cola which already talks about it. Letting
| those exists just serves to dilute the quality of the
| articles on the topic even though the overall article count
| is higher.
| pvg wrote:
| Because a digital encyclopedia is still an encyclopedia
| rather than an archive of everything (which is a different
| and useful thing as well and also happens to exist in
| various forms).
| notahacker wrote:
| There really are limitations to the amount of time the core
| editors and administration have to devote to it though.
| Even if they could keep on top of the blatant spamming and
| self promotion and nutty theories and articles created
| purely to harass, if you have an order of magnitude more
| pages you have an order of magnitude more pages that can
| get out of date, be vandalised, be total bullshit etc.
| macintux wrote:
| Quite a few were not actually deleted; not sure how to tally
| those that were.
| greenthrow wrote:
| 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.
| V__ wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://deletionpedia.org/en/Special:AllPages
| lelandfe wrote:
| Yep, exactly. For the curious, and without casting aspersions
| on the individual (be nice!), here is an example of a non-
| notable page created for self-promotion: https://en.wikipedia
| .org/w/index.php?title=Damith_Madhusanka...
|
| It's currently up for speedy deletion, and will probably be
| removed soon.
| saghm wrote:
| Just tried looking at it, and it's already deleted
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" 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.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Lots of things that (arguably) don 't belong in an
| encyclopedia have been added to Wikipedia too._
|
| Wikipedia _isn 't_ an encyclopedia though, not in any
| traditional sense. Just because they use that word in the
| byline doesn't mean that it makes sense to pretend that
| Wikipedia is a 1980's door-to-door-salesperson bound edition
| of Encyclopedia Britannica. And in the same sense, it makes
| no sense to try and apply the same standards and policies
| from an outdated legacy media format to an entirely new media
| format.
|
| _but to the extent deletionists are effective, articles on
| non-notable subjects are deleted._
|
| The problem with this mind-set is the idea that there is some
| objective, universally applicable idea of what it means to be
| "non notable". There isn't.
| tptacek wrote:
| Wikipedia _is_ an encyclopedia, and the fact that you think
| it could or should be something else doesn 't change that.
|
| Wikipedia doesn't claim that there is a universal objective
| definition for "notability". "Notability" is a term of art
| on Wikipedia. You can't win this argument with a
| dictionary.
|
| There may be nothing in the world a true Wikipedian would
| rather do than explain the project's definition of a word
| like "Notability", at ponderous, relentless, unceasing
| length. So ignorance is no excuse! There's more
| documentation for this concept than there is for Postgres.
| RTFM, friend.
|
| If you don't like Wikipedia's rules or think it could be
| something more, you are welcome to fork it.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _You can 't win this argument with a dictionary._
|
| I'm not trying to win any argument. _shrug_
|
| _RTFM_
|
| Been there, done that. Thanks for playing though.
| ghaff wrote:
| Google Knol pretty much let anyone write their own article on
| anything. It was not a success.
| [deleted]
| michaelbrave wrote:
| 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
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| MikeTaylor wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| eecc wrote:
| Personally I don't understand this "notability" deletion process.
| It's text, even the most unremarkable article weighs less than
| ephemeral logs.
|
| Additive metadata is more than as effective for filtering and
| boosting what's relevant.
|
| It's a really asinine policy, I'm glad this project exists
| jl6 wrote:
| What are some examples of really great deleted articles that we
| now have the opportunity to read thanks to this site?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Hence why it's nice to have your own copies of things. They won't
| get altered or disappeared.
| noodles_nomore wrote:
| Unfortunately deletionpedia only grabs pages that are previously
| marked on Wikipedia in some way. The disappearing tech-related
| articles I've been looking for (smaller programming languages,
| "Quote notation") can't be found there.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-07 23:00 UTC)