My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
141–150 of 353 posts
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons…
It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted.
I'm actually not convinced of that. That is, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing that people have to learn policy and acronyms in order to participate in a discussion. Wikipedia is - like any large, distributed group effort - entirely dependent on its processes. Without those processes, I don't think it could function. Your argument, as I understand it, is that people shouldn't have to become familiar with the processes that enable Wikipedia to function in order to be a part of how it functions. That seems contradictory to me.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#143You 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…
The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little to wikipedia.
I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at large.
Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check over your work", instead say "we do not value your contribution, and will delete your work".
As such, wikipedia isn't a place where knowledgeable people can contribute matters of expertise. And that really freaking annoys me.
Concrete example: The Knight Foundation's wikipedia page is incredibly sparse, and contains little or no information about the efforts they fund, or the substance of the work they do. This is unfortunate, because the foundation has been around for decades, is an integral piece of newspaper and journalism history, and currently funds a massive amount of the innovation taking place in journalism, including the project i work on, DocumentCloud (which the Knight Foundation entirely funded).
But, by the rules of Wikipedia, i shouldn't contribute to the subject. Meanwhile, there are plenty of startups and essentially irrelevant companies that already disregard the rules and write their own freaking wikipedia pages anyway. That's ultimately the real problem. Wikipedia is so capricious in the enforcement of the rules, and there's so little stopping people from breaking the rules, that deletions do seem arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced. I'm entirely unsurprised that there are so many cries of "injustice!" so often.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this: 1. Danny Sullivan hears that his friend Jessie Stricchiola, a pioneer in fighting click fraud, has been deleted from Wikipedia. 2. He somehow gets to a discussion about the deletion of her page on Wikipedia. On it is a debate between 13 people about whether her page should be deleted, and at the top of that page is a detailed explanation by…
I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this You are my new favorite commenter.
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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why you're demanding that I explain a claim I never made and don't agree with.
I'm not communicating well. I'm saying, "sure, Wikipedia's UX is clunky, but it obviously does work". You should read downthread; other people have taken a closer look at Danny Sullivan's real experience working with Wikipedia's processes. This isn't a good case study to make a stand on. Give it a few weeks; Wikipedia will inevitably do something genuinely dumb we can get outraged about. It appears not to have here.
That's just the old "success forgives everything" argument. It's a tempting argument, but that's also the primary mechanism by which success leads to failure. Wikipedia works, and is completely usable, by committed and dedicated nerds. Maybe even the dumb ones that work at the gas station.
Yeah, this guy was probably wrong, and this particular subject probably isn't notable. Wikipedia still could have given this guy a better experience in the process of figuring this out, and writing this guy off as worthless and not worth listening to is just arrogant and unproductive.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#146For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of the deleted page.
The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search Engine Marketing".
Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability. Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings, and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2 nominated it for deletion discussion.
So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. But why? If there's an article about your company in a legitimate publication, I don't see why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia article about it. How would it make Wikipedia a less useful or lower-quality resource? Are you saying it would get in…
If there's an article about his company in a legitimate publication, then he can put a page up for his company in Wikipedia. It'd pass the notability requirement and the requirement for verifiable sources. The problem is that getting rid of the notability requirement would lead to lots of people putting up pages with nothing more than opinion. It wouldn't be spam. It'd be more dangerous than that. It'd be unsourced o…
> If there's an article about his company in a legitimate publication, then he can put a page up for his company in Wikipedia. It'd pass the notability requirement and the requirement for verifiable sources.
It seemed like the person the blog post was referencing passed that requirement as well, but was deleted.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 articl…
That day will probably never arrive, because the stakes are so high that any simple, trivially navigable process would immediately be gamed.
I refuse to believe that logic. We have to decide if we're the people who believe that information is best dealt with by elites, or whether we are the ones who believe that every single person has something to contribute.
When I put it this way to other Wikipedians it usually shuts them up. ;)
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#149Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion... I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the pl…
The article wasn't created until after he had died as is made clear by the discussion and the edit history.
People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the person was otherwise noteable.
If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in history even if he was special to you.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons…
It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons of policy and dozens of acronyms before you're deemed qualified to discuss whether an article should be deleted. I'm actually not convinced of that. That is, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing that people have to learn policy and acronyms in order to participate in a discussion. Wikipedia is - like any large, distributed group effort - entirely dependent on its pro…
I think the complaint is not that there are processes - clearly there must be - but that the processes are opaquely documented, poorly tracked, not transparent to start with, and arbitrarily and often capriciously enforced.