Christopher Monsanto gives up trying to delete PL articles

There have been many criticisms being leveled at your actions, but most of them—some correct, some incorrect—aren't important. Nor do your responses so far reveal any deep reflection of all that has transpired. The important point that people have been trying to articulate is this: Even though you were faced with mixed signals, rather than proceed with caution and try to understand the situation more fully (e.g., by engaging in discussion and building rapport), instead you plowed ahead with your own little project that would alter a common, shared space.

Wisdom and being right are different. It is wise to tread lightly. We will all learn, or re-learn, these things, at some juncture. Meanwhile, best wishes and happy Valentine's.

Sincerely,

A fellow grad student at Princeton

P.S. So, is it awesome working for an advisor who is a fan of Civ?

Who knows? I needed information on Alice ML today, but alas that was not to be. You are not the personal arbitrator of what I need to know any more than Chris Monsanto is of what languages are notable!

For at least the first half of it's life, wikipedia grew at an astonishing rate precisely because it wasn't being moderated by pedantic self-appointed editors. The rise of the editor class in wikipedia may have irreperably broken it as a compendium of knowledge. Imagine, people who know nothing about a subject telling you weather that subject is important to you!

Ridiculous? That's the current state of affairs. One could argue there is even a growing movement of people, like minded with yourself, that it should simply be reduced until it contains no more information than any other run-of-the-mill encyclopedia.

I have news for you, we have plenty of free, scope-limited, hand curated encyclopedias.

Here's what I came up with in 30 seconds. Go entertain yourself with these if you think having articles on obscure, but important topics is simply too much for you to handle.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/ http://www.britannica.com/ http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/ http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Main_Page

The point of Wikipedia is to go far beyond these approaches by crowdsourcing the content. So that people can add what they personally know about obscure subjects. If I happen to be an expert in Korean clam harvesting operations, should I be able to write an article on that? Who the hell cares if you don't personally take an interest in it.

You're right if your response is "well we don't want to just copy what's on the web!" An encyclopedia is supposed to provided a summary of a subject, a launching off point, a confirmation of a subject's existence. It should provide exhaustive breadth. In wikipedia's case, it was even able to provide a bit of depth through external citations, and through hyperlinking to other parts of itself. But the number of subjects should be virtually unlimited. Wikipedia should provide the long-tail. As a pedagogic device, limiting what I'm allowed to look up limits what I can learn about.

To your example, it might be of fantastic importance to me to know what are popular breakfast foods in your country or what kinds of logos kids are wearing these days. A page about Breakfast practices or marketing to children then would be fantastically important to me, but maybe not to you.

I'd like you to let us know what specific examples you have seen, if you would please.

good, then let's just get rid of Wikipedia altogether. Since I can just get whatever information I need by googling there's really not a point to the site anyways. Is that your argument? At this point I'm 50% thinking that you're just trolling.

That's not what is happening - Wikipedia uses a democratic process to determine if something is considered notable by the community. We/They say nothing about whether something is important to you. If something is considered not to be sufficiently notable for Wikipedia that doesn't mean you can't write about it, blog about it, even create your own wiki about it.

That is exactly what happened in this case. One person flagged, one person deleted. The community voted consistently against the deletion. Check the AfD discussions yourself if you don't believe me. There was not a single vote agreeing the the AfD flag. You can carry on all you want about how WP has various procedures and policies and what not, but that is not what happens de facto with shocking regularity.

However, if Korean clam harvesting is no different to Japanese clam harvesting, which is more-or-less the same as Chinese clam harvesting, then they should be noted on a general article about clam harvesting you don't need a separate article for each country (given the imaginary constraints I've set) nor do you need a different article on each company that does clam harvesting, each location, each person working in each location, ...

But I should be able to create a page if any of those things are interesting or notable enough, if there's enough information on it. Korean clam harvesting may be special and unique in the world. It may have hundreds of thousands of adherents, it may have it's own culture, equipment, techniques etc. It may appear prominently in Korean culture, movies, newspapers or other media. In fact, there could be an entire musical genre of clam harvester music.

But you think "woah, wait a minute, I can't handle all this information" and so it gets shoved into a sidenote on a two page summary of "clam digging", and none of that information ends up compiled and summarized in an article like it deserves to be because some overzealous ignoramus decided to flag it as an AfD and the community who could discuss its importance generally doesn't speak English and even if they did and could vote to keep the article, would probably just get ignored by the editors anyways -- just like in this case.

Similarly it's not important to list every programming language and variant ever. If it's important to you then you'll find the information in a relevant place that gives fine esoteric information about this specific field.

I personally think that listing top-40 pop stars is esoteric information about a specific field I could care less about. But since lots of people seem to like it, we end up with countless pages to that dreck. These languages actually are important to computer science in the same way Fra Angelico is important to Renaissance art. Is Fra Angelico considered a notable master of painting in the same way well known artists are. No. But it's important to have his information summarized and presented, with notes regarding his influence and hist works.

Similarly, Alice ML is the Fra Angelico of the functional programming world. To remove a page about Alice ML is exactly the same as marking Fra Angelico's page AfD because you don't personally know about his notability and then a similarly ignorant editor agrees and BAM! it's gone for all time.