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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#111

Post by tptacek »

sullivandanny wrote: post #16
javert wrote: post #5

First 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 uncontrovers…

The way you want Wikipedia to work is exactly the problem Wikipedia does have: people write vanity/promo articles about themselves, and then get their friends to barge in and claim "subject matter expertise" to rebut the people doing Lexis/Nexis and University library periodical searches to verify that people are non-notable.

This happened all the time in my domain of expertise (information security), and it was exasperating trying to beat it back. Some jackass would write an article about himself and then tie up AfD for weeks claiming that the trade press quotes he got constituted reliable source coverage of his notability, while his friends and coworkers would jump on saying "I've worked in this field for 7 years and I can tell you that everyone in information security knows this guy is one of the most important" zzzzzzz Strong delete speedy delete delete with fire.

Whatever trouble you feel like you had with Wikipedia's interface: your friend got a very fair shake in the AfD debate. She wrote a non-notable book, and was quoted in passing in a couple articles, and that's basically it. People took real time out of their day to verify the pretty-obvious fact that your friend doesn't need to be in the encyclopedia. Stop being angry about that.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#112

Post by tptacek »

bane wrote: post #108
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…

Per the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

Thanks! Fixed!

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#113

Post by philwelch »

tptacek wrote: post #98
philwelch wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really shouldn't dignify your comment though You could try to comprehend my comment first, instead of interpreting it as an indirect ego-attack. Wikipedia's software and community aren't magically immune from criticism, especially from a usability standpoint, just because they produce a lot of useful content.

Wikipedia's current UX produced the optimal decision in this case. That's what I'm trying to say. It's goofy to deride it as "absolutely retarded" when your case study is one where the system appears to have worked rather well. But of course, I don't think this is actually a UX discussion at all; the participants here are: * An SEO consultant who may have written her own promotional article on Wikipedia * Her friend,…

I guess you can frame it however you want. My main takeaway is that Wikipedia is completely opaque to someone who has a specific concern about something, but isn't already a committed contributor and insider to the community.

If you're of the opinion that Wikipedia should be an insular community, than maybe they should be more honest about it, disable anonymous edits, and save everyone a lot of time. If you think Wikipedia should be accessible, well, it isn't, and that should be fixed, too. Either way, there's room for improvement.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#114

Post by neilk »

philwelch wrote: post #34
aeontech wrote: post #13

Just 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.…

The reason is because deletion is one of the single biggest areans for status games. See, from the outside, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. And there's a community there to write an encyclopedia. Sensible, no? Actually, the community comes first and the encyclopedia is a side-effect. The community functions very politically, and very much like a game as well. The original intention might have been an encyclopedia with…

Dude, have you read WP:Notability?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

In one sentence:

"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to satisfy the inclusion criteria for a stand-alone article or stand-alone list."

Notability isn't really that much of a judgment call.

Also, it doesn't necessarily apply to the creation of new articles. Stub articles are usually not well sourced at all.

The real story of the article is that Wikipedia's interface really does suck. It really is hard to figure out issues like this. It's even hard to monitor pages you want to protect, or have some interest in.

So, while the Wikipedians involved in the deletion process do have some grounds for their actions, it's left to the wiki-insiders to defend Wikipedia. That sucks. Until the day comes when a non-Wikipedian can arrive on the site, figure out what happened in the deletion process in 30 seconds, and then pronounce whether it was good or bad in some informed manner, we won't have an encyclopedia that truly anyone can edit.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#115

Post by rospaya »

kondro wrote: post #55

Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right) that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons. I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact that should be categorized.

It already exists and is called Deletionpedia.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#116

Post by tptacek »

sethg wrote: post #110
tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't blame you for not carefully reading my rant, but I addressed your point somewhere in the middle of it: when the article went up for deletion, there was a big link on the article itself saying how to vote on the deletion. The thing that this guy writing this post didn't do that any reasonable person could have been expected to do: click the name of the admin who deleted the article and ask him on his talk page…

The OP was not familiar with the Wikipedia convention that editors talk to one another by editing one another’s talk pages. Instead, he followed the instructions on the automated email that Wikipedia sent him , which said “To contact the editor, visit [the editor’s page]”. His reward for following those instructions was a box telling him that actually, that page isn’t the venue for sending a message. The box told him…

I just don't buy it. There are some dumb, dumb, dumb people thoroughly ensconced in Wikipedia and its processes; clearly it's not that hard to figure out that to talk to an admin, you can just edit their page.

I think Danny Sullivan is being disingenuous. Mediawiki is an obtuse piece of software; he knows that, and we know that, and he's using it as a fig leaf to conceal the fact that he wasn't able to push his friend's article onto the encyclopedia. I'm only able to say that because I don't know anything about Sullivan; he's just an abstraction to me. I certainly don't mean for him to take this personally. But I do not believe him.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#118

Post by Tsagadai »

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.

I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the past become our keys to understanding the past and our world. I think it is unfortunate that Wikipedia tries to assess what is important in the future by a clique's definition of what is important to them now.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#119

Post by bane »

tptacek wrote: post #112
bane wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized."

Thanks! Fixed!

Sure thing. When passions run high, we often need a different case to rise to the occasion.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#120

Post by tptacek »

philwelch wrote: post #113
tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's current UX produced the optimal decision in this case. That's what I'm trying to say. It's goofy to deride it as "absolutely retarded" when your case study is one where the system appears to have worked rather well. But of course, I don't think this is actually a UX discussion at all; the participants here are: * An SEO consultant who may have written her own promotional article on Wikipedia * Her friend,…

I guess you can frame it however you want. My main takeaway is that Wikipedia is completely opaque to someone who has a specific concern about something, but isn't already a committed contributor and insider to the community. If you're of the opinion that Wikipedia should be an insular community, than maybe they should be more honest about it, disable anonymous edits, and save everyone a lot of time. If you think Wik…

Explain how so many dumb people can become so adept at navigating Wikipedia's processes in between shifts at the gas station and 17 hour Farmville jags, and I'll concede that you have a point.

Mediawiki, and Wikipedia's incarnation of it in particular, is outmoded and obtuse. But it's not hard to do things on Wikipedia. If anything, it's too f'ing easy.

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