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A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

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Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#101

Post by derefr »

logicalmonster wrote: post #78
derefr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? Think of it like code in an active open-source project. Someone needs to maintain the article: update it when house style changes, evaluate any new contributions to it as being valid or not, etc. Like code experiencing code-rot, a Wikipedia article rots if editors don't give it active attention. This has exactly the implications you'd expect: it means tha…

It feels like you described what the plausible deniability is; or the ostensible excuse that could be used. But does that actually describe reality? Given how corrupt and petty Wikipedia's editors have become, the more complete and realistic reason might be that having a complex set of rules that allows some humans to pick and choose who makes it on Wikipedia gives people who would otherwise have little of it, some r…

I mean, I wasn't trying to define notability; the question asked was "why does Wikipedia have notability requirements" — i.e. what stops them from just getting rid of the concept altogether, and keeping everything — and the answer to that is to look at the marginal OpEx of keeping a page around.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#102

Post by _aavaa_ »

powera wrote: post #36
_aavaa_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but "is this musician notable" literally is a popularity contest.

Two different objections. First, while the most written-about musicians are also generally the most popular, there isn't a strict correlation. Second, there is a vast difference between a decision-process of "if the sources provided show that this person is popular, they are notable" and "if three of the four Wikipedia editors surveyed like this person's music, they are notable".

1. You are both correct and incorrect. The most well written about musicians are the most popular by definition within the group of people who write about musicians. A) This does not mean that those musicians are popular within some sizeable portion of the general population. B) The preferences of the people writing about musicians (that wikipedia will accept as a source) are not guaranteed to be representative of the population at large, in fact I'd wager that essentially guaranteed to be not true at different points in time and for different genres.

Wikipedia is choosing to conflate the popularity of an artist amongst the writing group and the popularity in the broader public. And when the two groups disagree, they are choosing to go with those who write rather than with the broader public.

2. This isn't about "the sources provided shot that he's popular", it's do we acknowledge that their contribution is defined as popular. Dragon Ball Z is/was an incredibly popular and influential anime.

I guess all it takes now is for someone at WIRED who loved Dragon Ball Z to publish an article or two about them and they suddenly become notable.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#103

Post by derefr »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #86
sanqui wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulbapedia was launched in February 2005[1], while Wikipedia reached the consensus that "not all Pokémon are notable" in mid-2007[2]. [1] https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Main_Page [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pok%C3%A9mon_test

Which brings us to, should wikipedia have more domain specific wikis? Why does everyone end up on fandom or some other random wiki site when wikipedia is already ad free, hosted worldwide and ain't going anywhere. Wikipedia doesn't _have_ to be just a encyclopedic overview of topics, it should have dive ins as deep as you want if there are people willing to write it.

A wiki "is" its maintainers. Separate editors — separate wiki. Wikipedia stops where the interest of Wikipedia's editors in maintaining pages stops; which is usually where the interest of another, distinct group of editors in maintaining those pages starts.

That other set of editors could all just be Wikipedia editors, but then they'd have to play by Wikipedia's rules. They'd rather play by their own set of rules, and more importantly, have the ability to define their own rules. Autonomy. Sovereignty.

Now, in theory, there could be some "hierarchy of wikis" all maintained within one system, where different namespaces are maintained by different groups of editors (similar to e.g. Reddit with subreddit moderators) — but, because the goal would remain the creation of a single cohesively-presented encyclopedia, this would result in terrible inter-group conflicts about things that don't fall crisply into the magisterial domain of one group of editors or the other — e.g. rules for when a wiki page in one namespace, should link a topic of a wiki page in another namespace, and how that citation should be done.

(Imagine if editors in namespace A believed that a page in namespace B really should exist, and so kept linking to it, despite the editors of namespace B disagreeing; and the system hosting all of these constantly bubbling up the non-existent page to the attention of the editors in namespace B because it received new external links.)

The solution to this is decentralization. No hierarchy, no shared system, just reusable open-source software and federation through hypertext linkage entirely controlled by the origin. Which is exactly what you get when each wiki is its own website.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#104

Post by barnabee »

glasshug wrote: post #17

Please read the discussion that deleted this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio... It's a hard problem. Volunteer editors are spread thinly over millions of articles, some of which (like "Bruce Faulconer") are about living people that are really important to get right.[1] The project has settled on the guideline of _notability_, meaning that articles are kept only if they have signi…

> It's worth thinking about alternate policies you could set up

A reasonable alternative would be for the notability requirement simply to be that the general public may run into the topic/person (and presumably therefore be interested to know more) OR may ask a question to which the article would contain the answer.

Anyone who’s creative work is published or included in a movie or whatever should automatically be included under such a rule.

It would also be sensible for the default in the case of dispute to be to keep the article unless the actual content itself is completely unverifiable, as long as there is some half way plausible argument for doing so.

There should be no sense of achievement for or gratitude towards anyone removing facts from an encyclopaedia.

Any editor who makes removing articles on notability grounds their raison d’etre demonstrates only arrogance and smugness.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#105

Post by _aavaa_ »

adamrezich wrote: post #100
_aavaa_ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they do care how popular the musician is. It's just that instead of setting the threshold themselves they choose to pass the buck and defer to journalists and other groups.

exactly. this also leads to e.g. "Controversy" sections of articles with sentences that make uncharitable statements about people or groups, sometimes outstripping the rest of the article in terms of length, and ending with [11][12][13][14][17][24][27] so you know it's a super accurate true statement instead of politically- and/or ideologically-slanted analysis from multiple sources (potentially all referencing a sin…

Yes, I am very familiar with that phenomenon.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#106

Post by jtbayly »

dwringer wrote: post #48
jtbayly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I thought Wikipedia was supposed to be a public resource. I wasn't aware certain people were supposed to stay off the site.

I once tried to edit an article about a scientist who had developed a bit of surrounding controversy over his studies in parapsychology. Having no real knowledge of the debate, I didn't add or remove any information; I just felt the introduction had been written in an overtly non-neutral way by a past editor. So, I removed a couple of words like "hoax" and trimmed one or two sentences so that they didn't come off as…

That's editing. I mean, I can understand that certain people might not be great at editing.

But I'm shocked that they would say there are people they don't even want on the site.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#107

Post by derefr »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #79
derefr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia serves the public, and its notability heuristic is demand-driven. It doesn't matter how famous someone is within their own domain, if a member of the public outside of that domain would never have reason to look that person up, and therefore would get no marginal value out of Wikipedia having that page. Personally, I don't know the name of a single advertising voice actor. Nor would anyone even three steps…

I disagree. Information today is a unified field across all domains - wikipedia has done better than most at addressing that - you may search for something thinking of it in one domain only to find it relevant in another domain. A domain-specific wiki would not deliver that. The first thought that comes to mind is millions of (public) entrepreneurs who in search of a business / domain / trademark name invariably incl…

> While that is true, the opposite is equally true. Advertisers pay top dollar for instantly recognized voices, which are countless in number.

People recognize the voice, but they don't put a name to it. And that's the thing about Wikipedia, or the Internet in general: you need a textual handle onto something to be able to find it. Even if I recognize a voice actor, I can't search them "by their voice"; I have to figure out how to name something they appeared in, and then search for that.

And advertisements don't have (viewer-visible) names either! So how do I even search for the ad, other than by struggling to describe what happened in it? (This is much of why commercials are "lost media": there's no explicit name to use as a Schelling point to gather people onto the same forum post looking for it.)

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#108

Post by thrdbndndn »

barnabee wrote: post #94
thrdbndndn wrote: post #65

I probably will side with Wikipedia this time. As mentioned in the discussion page [1], there doesn't seem to have any coverage from mass media about him, the only opponent in the discussion lists a bunch of sources/references that are either database-type websites, attendance lists, or product credit. These unfortunately don't really count, any professionals would have such things to a degree. Also it looks like he…

The idea of an encyclopaedia that only includes topics with significant mass media coverage is both incredibly crass and extremely depressing. If that is the primary standard for inclusion (or “notability”) it is a huge shame and a wasted opportunity.

> an encyclopaedia that ..

Wikipedia has the loosest standard of inclusion among any encyclopedia ever existed, not sure why that's depressing.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#109

Post by chiph »

From what I've seen, the key to keeping pages up on Wikipedia is to have a lot of verifiable references & citations. If you do this like you're writing a college paper, rogue editors have much less power. Challenges to their reverts & deletions are also more likely to succeed.

A good example of this is the article for the unloved Honda Ridgeline pickup. Jalopnik did an article about how the Wikipedia page for it is astonishingly detailed and (exhaustively) referenced.

https://jalopnik.com/the-story-behind-the-honda-ridgelines-w...

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#110

Post by unixbane »

causi wrote: post #26
unixbane wrote: post #24

> A few days ago, composer Bruce Faulconer found that his Wikipedia entry had suddenly disappeared. This was surprising because his music is known and beloved all over the world—in fact, it has been heard in more than 80 countries. Hmmm how do I already know from the first paragraph this article is bogus? Let me search this person I've never heard of. Oh, there's nothing. He's literally not noteable. "Heard in more t…

Dude he's the guy that did the music for Dragonball, a thirty billion dollar franchise. I'm shocked he was removed from Wikipedia.

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