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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.

#71

Post by scott_s »

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…

I think people miss this subtle point, which is it's about volunteer's time and effort, not disk space. I want Wikipedia to contain as much information as humanly possible (and by "humanly" I mean across our species), but I recognize that it's a finite number of volunteers managing all of it. For that reason, it's inevitable that some articles will get cut.

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

#72

Post by brazzy »

ggchappell wrote: post #53

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. A…

From what I've read, this kind of thing (an organized movement of people planning to get into Wikipedia and influence votes) would make a lot of editors cream their pants in anticipation of all the bans for "canvassing", "sockpuppetry" and "meatpuppetry" they'd be handing out and how heroic they'd be defending wikipedia against such heinous infiltration.

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

#73

Post by scott_s »

scscsc wrote: post #6
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #5

The pro-deletion side come across as dicks, but I think they're right. Does every piece of software ever written need a Wikipedia page? If you don't like where they're drawing the line, where would you draw it?

What's wrong with every software ever written having a Wikipedia page if someone cares enough to make one?

We need more than one person to maintain a Wikipedia page. Multiple people should be able to vet an article's accuracy. I think the concept of notability sometimes isn't that the topic doesn't deserve an entry, but rather that there aren't enough sources to make the entry obviously accurate.

(Granted, I understand sometimes the argument is that a topic doesn't deserve an entry.)

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

#74

Post by brazzy »

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.

I don't think anyone is arguing that articles need to be deleted because of concerns over disk space (even though if all criteria for inclusion were dropped, the number of useless articles would skyrocket).

The real problem is the danger of relevant articles becoming lost between (and becoming filled with links to) the more numerous irrelevant ones.

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

#75

Post by crux_ »

scscsc wrote: post #6
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #5

The pro-deletion side come across as dicks, but I think they're right. Does every piece of software ever written need a Wikipedia page? If you don't like where they're drawing the line, where would you draw it?

What's wrong with every software ever written having a Wikipedia page if someone cares enough to make one?

In that case, why not just accept a bulk-import of Freshmeat or download.com into Wikipedia? (Rationale: someone cared enough to write the description text on those sites, so it seems a safe assumption that they'd care enough to write the same text into Wikipedia were it allowed.)

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

#76

Post by bradbeattie »

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.

Notability is a bit of a spectrum. On one end you have articles like "World War 2", on the other you have articles like "Sir Chompsalot, the fourth cat of the Doe's in Manchester, Aberdeen Ave." If we can agree that the latter shouldn't be in Wikipedia, then we have to build some sort of guideline for sufficient notability. That's what http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-notable is trying to do. It's likely more productive to try and change that first instead of railing against specific AFDs.

If you think all articles including the absurd example given above should be included, notability isn't the only thing brought into question. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Wikipedia_is_not

Ultimately, the content is yours to fork if you'd like. As mentioned elsewhere in these discussions, it's really the community that's the main workhorse, something which can't be forked (split perhaps, but not forked).

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

#77

Post by OtherMichael »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #69
steveklabnik wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Dare Obasanjo, a Program Manager at Microsoft and son of the former President of Nigeria [1], has run into this same issue on his (ahem, non-notable) blog: " [I]t irritates me that I have a Wikipedia entry with a giant banner that claims I'm lying about my parenthood " [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olusegun_Obasanjo [2] http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2007/03/13/WikipediaWhosYo...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dare_Obasanjo deleted for non-notability....

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

#78

Post by ambulatorybird »

dagw wrote: post #8
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #5

The pro-deletion side come across as dicks, but I think they're right. Does every piece of software ever written need a Wikipedia page? If you don't like where they're drawing the line, where would you draw it?

Personally I think the more obscure something is the more reason to have it on Wikipedia. If I want to find out about Photoshop there are plenty of places I can go to, many of them more authoritative. If I want to find out about some obscure image editor that was briefly popular on the Amiga and then disappeared, then Wikipedia is the perfect place to start looking, since it's not like they still have (or ever had) a…

Exactly! I find Wikipedia most useful for things that are obscure or trivial.

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

#79

Post by Perceval »

smackfu wrote: post #14
goodside wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize WP:N, WP:ATTP, WP:RS, etc. are all links to the policies being referenced, right? You're complaining that they're linking to policy pages to defend their opinions. If lawyers provided hyperlinks to every law they mentioned, I'd be ecstatic.

Lawyers at least have to argue their points in front of a jury of laypersons. On Wikipedia, the only audience for this kind of thing is other wiki fanatics, so it just becomes more and more insular. Also, that is kind of like the ultimate wiki defense: "any obscure terms are linked so my writing doesn't have to be clear".

Lawyers are barred from making legal arguments directly to the jury. Judges hold the prerogative of instructing the jury on the law. Lawyers only make arguments about evidence, motivation, etc. to the jury.

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

#80

Post by Perceval »

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.)

Larry Sanger (co-creator of Nupedia and Wikipedia) forked it into Citizendium in an attempt to re-infuse a healthy respect for elite, specialist, academic, or otherwise expert knowledge. Hasn't really taken off and Larry Sanger is now emeritus.
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