It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that "anyone can edit" Wikipedia - obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica, but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#12While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure.
MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling the process of creating wiki pages.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#13Just the latest victim of the deletionist forces. This is the reason I, and many many other people have given up on contributing to Wikipedia altogether.
Jason Scott has a very eloquent description of the problem [1],[2], and Wikipedia's failure in addressing it several years ago; nothing has changed since then, and I doubt it will any time soon, since the Wikipedia administration sees no problem with the status quo. It's sad.
[1] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808
[2] http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#14While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality, everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure. MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes are wiki pages that try to use other wi…
Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#15First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…
He pointed out exactly why he posted in a "wrong" place and presented how frustrating it is to get to the right information. He's saying that the process is broken and you're saying he did nor follow the process... I think your response doesn't make much sense.
He did quite a lot (i.e. Tried to follow instructions) but was effectively sent to /dev/null. Regardless of whether the original article should be restored or not, I think this points out some interesting facts about how wikipedia works.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#16First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…
I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work.
There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontroversial reasons.
Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.
If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that the lack of an agreement is a consensus.
When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.
That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure, that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.
If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.
I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.
But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having studied the bureaucracy better.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#17I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.
That's because 1) There is a policy against Americanizing British spellings for no reason (this is probably a good thing); 2) frequently experienced editors are much too harsh with new contributors and don't explain why (this is definitely a bad thing).
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#18I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk page. That's when I stopped contributing.
[deleted]
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#19First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…
> If the author had just been willing to |
Many many many people have had these types of problems with Wikipedia. This isn't an "everybody else" problem, this is a Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia is a success, but it does have serious flaws in the bureaucracies of how it deals with contributors and new content.
> If this person had been allowed to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia failure.
Ok, I'll bite. Why would Wikipedia have failed?
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#20First of all, the author is wrong. Someone saying "Hey, I know that person, they're an expert on X," does not mean they belong in an encyclopedia. Furthermore, a sizeable group of people already had a discussion on whether the person meets Wikipedia's standards and decided that they do not. Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works, and complain that it's…
You missed the part where the author provided several citations of publications mentioning the unnotable person and books published by the said person. He also goes on to state, if the goal of Wikipedia is to encourage subject matter experts to contribute expertise it's not making it particularly easy to do so.
Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says as much: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
This is not about entitlement. This is about Wikipedia raising ridiculous bureaucratic barriers to people making good faith contributions of knowledge. In so doing, it undermines its basic mission.