The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#61

Post by felipemnoa » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:32 AM UTC

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #45

[deleted] wrote: post #40

[deleted]

Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).

>>Everyone should have a wikipedia page

Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#62

Post by zbowling » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:33 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

I joined this discussion at 32 comments and the all down-voted comments ones were people with the same sentiment. I really don't understand the anti-wikipedia sentiment hackernews is having in general around this.

I've been through the AfD process 30 to 40 times myself. I normally don't see it because I spend most of my time on vandal patrol where I've contributed code and countless hours to that effort over the last 5 years. Most of my deletes are speedy deletes for vandalism and not notability except where it's clear and someone is trying to make wikipedia their personal homepage. It's a massive multi-gigabyte site and it takes a lot work to maintain it. That's why admin's have an icon of a broom.

I've seen this same type blog post all over the place. Someone burt hurt around an AfD. I've seen full campaigns to try and tarnish Wikipedia as having some kind of secret underground conspiracy against another group. It really doesn't work like that. You see that quickly if you get really involved in the site.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#63

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:35 AM UTC

billpatrianakos wrote: post #35

nilchameleons wrote: post #11

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…

You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far…

[deleted]

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#64

Post by Codayus » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:36 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #51

You can tell someone hasn't spent much time at AfD, the section of Wikipedia where people (anyone in the world, really) discuss whether articles should be deleted, by the outrage they express at the "arbitrariness" of Wikipedia's notability rules. Have you spent any time at AfD? Let me help you out: here's the AfD log for the week they killed "Jessie_Stricchiola": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_d…

Uh huh. Interesting argument, but I'm afraid that the Linux kernel is fundamentally not like an encyclopaedia.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#65

Post by zbowling » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:37 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #57

zbowling wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not bureaucratic as much you think. There is a system that is very easy to follow. 1. First they missed the delete review that normally waits about 7 days before taking action. 2. Upon discovering that their page was deleted found the archive delete review discussion. 3. Didn't understand what they were looking at and with disregard to the notes posted at the top saying that it's archive and not to edit it, edit…

re. 3, he was given instructions: don't change this, follow that process instead. Is the process is incorrect, how do you proceed? re. 3,5 - there's a lot of confusion here, coming from an experienced web user. If he can't figure out what's going on, is it a user problem, or instructions issue?

It's an archived discussion under Articles for Deletion (AfD).

At the top of the page is a bread crumb back to the deletion process. (Someone should probably update the template for the archive notice to have a link maybe for those that stumble on to it).

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#66

Post by HnNoPassMailer » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:38 AM UTC

felipemnoa wrote: post #61

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).

>>Everyone should have a wikipedia page Isn't that what Facebook, MySpace, Google+ is for? Wikipedia is trying to collect all of human knowledge. They are trying to hold themselves to a higher standard than a site like Facebook.

I'm not arguing to suddenly put irrelevant info onto WP. The high standard can still be achieved, the level of detail is just higher. Turing might get its own set of pages, while my kindergarten teacher maybe gets a few lines.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#67

Post by philwelch » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:46 AM UTC

arctangent wrote: post #59

philwelch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia. You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking, flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration" have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for the process governing, among oth…

With a few changes this excellent description of Wikipedia politics and bureaucracy could accurately describe my social life.

I am so sorry.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#68

Post by gojomo » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:46 AM UTC

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #38

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction > Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who use it. There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start being Wikipedia.

Indeed, the strict 'encyclopedic' standard that got Wikipedia this far, as a defense against lots of problems, is now itself a damaging constraint.

I'll soon be launching a reference site called Thunkpedia which loosens the 'encyclopedic' standard, but adds other constraints in its place.

There's a video about my motivations, and a sneak peek of its interface, at http://thunkpedia.org. More discussion is at the project blog, http://infinithree.org (from the original codename).

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#69

Post by Codayus » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:47 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #58

sullivandanny wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uncontrovers…

I'd be curious to know if this resistance to input from "subject matter experts" is the same for, say, notable physicists or notable cardiac surgeons? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that because the subject matter in question is "SEO" that there are a lot of prejudices and suspicion of ulterior motives from the wikipedia end. In one sense, I'm of the opinion that if you're promoting yourself as "an SEO expert…

I am aware of multiple cases where subject matter experts have tried to fix errors relating to their area of expertise, had the changes reverted, and given up. The phenomenon is by no means limited to "SEO experts", but extends to, for example, law professors, including law professors widely regarded as the foremost experts in their speciality, trying to fix obvious non-controversial errors in an article relating to their speciality.

All it takes is one editor deciding that this is a good opportunity to play a status game. And it doesn't take long hanging around Wikipedia to learn that for a significant fraction of the active user base, every opportunity is a good opportunity for a status game.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#70

Post by kstenerud » Thu, Nov 24, 2011, 2:52 AM UTC

What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI.

Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make.

All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snowball into a frustrated response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates.

So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.