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Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

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Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#51

Post by noarchy »

acg wrote: post #42
noarchy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deletion isn't about improving articles. It is about removing them. If an article covers an obscure topic or person, what of it, so long as the article is properly referenced? There are many topics out there that are definitely arcane and of little interest to most people. Does this mean that Wikipedia ought to be a knowledge base for nothing but pop culture? I sure hope not.

Have you read the article? It reads like a blog entry rather than an entry to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has been criticized before for not being well researched and factual. The problem with the article is it may as well be someone's opinion on the WM. I'm all for more pages but this does not read well. My point is if you care, make it read like it belongs in there. Wikipedia is not supposed to be an internet archiv…

I am all for cleaning up bad content. But I think we have to make a distinction between a Wikipedia entry with poor structure or citations, and this notion of an "unworthy topic"

As for this entry, specifically, I have read it. And I'd go back to what I mentioned about cleaning up bad content. The article can be fixed. It does not need to be eliminated.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#52

Post by aw3c2 »

gchucky wrote: post #27
aw3c2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the drawback?

I think at some point it would turn Wikipedia into a huge advertisement. You'd have every person who ever came up with a product create an article about how theirs does all these great things and is better than the others. If you've ever taken a look at the recently created articles list ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:NewPages ) you can see examples of this. People copy-paste text from press releases (which v…

Wikipedia tries to have "no personal point of view" and neutral articles. Advertising would still not be ok. That is a different issue.

I myself would be fine with articles about This-andthat Inc's latest gadget if there are facts and information inside.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#53

Post by ggchappell »

Yes, deletionism is getting ridiculous on WP. And it's only going to get worse, due to evaporative cooling of group beliefs.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lr/evaporative_cooling_of_group_beli...

But what to do about it? Various people have mentioned the idea of a WP fork. This has been tried before, a number of times. These tend not to go anywhere. The problem seems to be getting a critical mass of people to work on it.

Another idea I've been wondering about: start a movement to get inclusionists back into WP. It should have its own website, discussion area (inside or outside WP?), etc. Someone should write up ideas on how WP can be changed (e.g., vote NO on all deletion polls, not as a statement that any particular article should not be deleted, but rather simply to set a higher standard for deletion).

Thoughts? (Or has this also been done already?)

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#54

Post by steveklabnik »

acdha wrote: post #28
chaosmachine wrote: post #4

Wikipedia should disable "non-notable" article deletion for a year and see what happens. The rampant deletionist problem really hurts editor morale. People spend hours working on articles only to have them deleted, often for arbitrary reasons. For a site that lives and dies by its ability to attract new volunteers, they sure do their best to scare people off.

Definitely: I stopped contributing (content and money) to Wikipedia after non-notable deletions ~2006 took out most of my contributions. At the time it was noted that it was easier to list a porn star (anything with a major distributor was automatically considered notable) than an academic who hadn't managed to get a real dead-tree newspaper article written about them (journals, awards, etc. didn't count as much as 2…

The biggest problem is that blogs aren't considered a notable source:

> Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources#Self...

This makes it really hard to defend open source software against WP:N allegations, since most of your coverage is from these kinds of sources...

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#55

Post by ig1 »

chaosmachine wrote: post #4

Wikipedia should disable "non-notable" article deletion for a year and see what happens. The rampant deletionist problem really hurts editor morale. People spend hours working on articles only to have them deleted, often for arbitrary reasons. For a site that lives and dies by its ability to attract new volunteers, they sure do their best to scare people off.

Wikipedia also lives and dies by it's reputation. People have tried forking Wikipedia with more inclusive policies numerous times (the code base and articles are open source), and they've all ended up filled with junk.

I was involved with Wikipedia very heavily for it's first three years (not been involved for the last 5 years), and there have been periods when it went through more liberal stages of allowing a broader range of content. The policies they have now aren't something that've just been made up. They're policies that have evolved over a decade of seeing what works and what doesn't.

Non-notable articles often end up abandoned and vandalized for long period. Sure the precise criteria for notability and verifiability might be debatable, but there's absolutely no question that those criteria help make Wikipedia a reliable source of data.

Think about the reason you want something in Wikipedia (rather than just say on a Google Sites page or Mahalo, etc). You want it on Wikipedia precisely because of the reputation it has, and that reputation is in a large part down to the criteria of notability and verifiability.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#56

Post by nopassrecover »

acg wrote: post #42
noarchy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deletion isn't about improving articles. It is about removing them. If an article covers an obscure topic or person, what of it, so long as the article is properly referenced? There are many topics out there that are definitely arcane and of little interest to most people. Does this mean that Wikipedia ought to be a knowledge base for nothing but pop culture? I sure hope not.

Have you read the article? It reads like a blog entry rather than an entry to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has been criticized before for not being well researched and factual. The problem with the article is it may as well be someone's opinion on the WM. I'm all for more pages but this does not read well. My point is if you care, make it read like it belongs in there. Wikipedia is not supposed to be an internet archiv…

There are flags that can note the article is poorly written so that noone mistakes it as authoritative in its current state. Indeed in this manner people interested in the subject can be attracted to improve it.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#57

Post by nopassrecover »

deutronium wrote: post #31

I personally can't see why any article should be deleted unless it's obviously erroneous, its not like they're short of disk space. Obscure articles will likely remain as such, due to lack of references to them; deletion seems rather draconian. As an aside I wonder if Wikipedia will ever be forked due to this apparent increasing bureaucracy.

Indeed the disk space argument is frivolous given the amount of discussion generated around deleting articles, besides which I wouldn't even be sure that articles are permanently deleted. This ignores the cost in time and morale to contributors.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#58

Post by jonursenbach »

eru wrote: post #48
theli0nheart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also interesting how Miami33139 uses Ubuntu.

How does he? (I feel a bit creepy stalking him like this on the internet.)

It says on that on that page.

{{User :OS:Ubuntu Netbook Remix}}

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#59

Post by cabalamat »

maurycy wrote: post #11
shabda wrote: post #3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... This page is a lovely example of why I don't contribute to wikipedia anymore. All the arguments are along the lines of, we should delete/keep this, because (WP:A, WP:B, WP:NO, WP:YES, meatpuppets, sockpuppets, random wikipedia lingo, inuslt to people who do not know wikiepda lingo) I agree shared vocabulary helps communication, but on wikipedia it has be…

Out of curiosity, are there any Wikipedia forks? *BSD guys had a lot of similar arguments and they ended up with many flavors of BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD etc.)

I started an inclusionist fork called includipedia -- http://www.includipedia.com/ -- though I've not developed it fully.

Re: Father of the moderm tiling WMs proposed for deletion in Wikipedia.

#60

Post by [deleted] »

ig1 wrote: post #55
chaosmachine wrote: post #4

Wikipedia should disable "non-notable" article deletion for a year and see what happens. The rampant deletionist problem really hurts editor morale. People spend hours working on articles only to have them deleted, often for arbitrary reasons. For a site that lives and dies by its ability to attract new volunteers, they sure do their best to scare people off.

Wikipedia also lives and dies by it's reputation. People have tried forking Wikipedia with more inclusive policies numerous times (the code base and articles are open source), and they've all ended up filled with junk. I was involved with Wikipedia very heavily for it's first three years (not been involved for the last 5 years), and there have been periods when it went through more liberal stages of allowing a broade…

[deleted]
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