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A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

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Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#121

Post by dwringer »

jtbayly wrote: post #106
dwringer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't tell if you're suggesting that my edits were simply bad, and typically I would accept that is a possibility; but, even then, it was the fact that I was threatened essentially with being swatted. There was no feedback on the edits that I made. Just unfounded assertions that my IP address was involved in something "unsavory" and that I would face severe consequences if I continued such edits. It made me feel very unwelcome and I assume many other people have the same experience on Wikipedia.

I realize the futility of trying to convince you that my edits were warranted, I guess. The article has since been updated, however, and the non-neutral tone that I'd tried to fix has been removed, so apparently somebody else ultimately did succeed.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#122

Post by lucideer »

chiph wrote: post #109

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 a…

> rogue editors [...] power

The problem is that this takes SO MUCH time and energy. Most give up.

Taking time out of your day to voluntarily improve a free resource is already energy intensive without also expending that energy battling with zealots.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying providing proper references takes too much time, I'm saying that having to fight with people to be permitted to keep content while building references takes much more energy again.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#123

Post by Viliam1234 »

echelon wrote: post #90
oezi wrote: post #11

Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway couldn't Wikipedia relax their notability requirements? I understood why they didn't want anybody to create a marketing page for themselves ten years ago, but I don't understand the rational now. The long term goal for Wikipedia should be to collect information on anything that is of interest to one or more person.

> Now that Google is down-ranking Wikipedia anyway Can you expand on this? I wasn't aware Google penalized Wikipedia now. Why?

Just a guess, but probably because Wikipedia does not contain AdSense, so there is no money in putting it to the search results.

No one would officially admit this, of course, but whenever I see that Google prioritizes X over Y, X is usually a type of thing more likely to contain AdSense than Y.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#124

Post by justincormack »

ghaff wrote: post #66
solardev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia's notability requirements are enforced very haphazardly. Broadly, editors and admins can be split into two camps: inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything. The life of your new article entirely depends on who happens to stumble upon it. I've had success appealing notability deletions in the past, but it was a pain in the ass, especially after I just spent hour…

>inclusionists who want to add everything and exclusionists who want to delete everything That's probably a bit B&W but a lot of people tend towards one side or the other. Part of it too also relates to the availability of secondary sources which are far more available for some domains than others. Even a fairly minor politician or entertainer has probably had quite a bit written about them by third parties. A senior…

Often its related to people not finding sources when they start articles, if you do detailed research first rather than posting a stub survival rates are higher. However thats often not how articles come about.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#125

Post by bpeebles »

lucideer wrote: post #64

Plenty of comments on here suggesting WP relaxing/removing notability requirements: the problem is deeper. WP could retain the exact notability requirements they currently have, as written, and still vastly improve the situation from the current mess. As it stands: - mentions of any thing or person without a pre-existing article (by extension meeting notability requirements) are quickly deleted by fans of the frequen…

I'd say its hard to start as a new Wikipedia editor if you only goal is to make article X or make huge changes to article Y that is somewhat controversial. On the other hand, if you start in Wikipedia by doing simple edits in non-controversial subjects (which does improve Wikipedia, and thus, the Internet given how many search engines just scrape Wikipedia for search results), start making making some new articles in notable things that are also not controversial, then you can start understanding how to get controversial (but correct) things added and changed. Yes, that takes longer and is more work, but at the same time, similar to open source software, you have to spend time learning how to code and how to make valuable and correct PRs to make major overhauls to heavily used software.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#126

Post by winternett »

derefr wrote: post #53
armchairhacker wrote: post #47

Honestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry? Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? There’s not a storage issue. Wikipedia can literally have billions of articles and still be easy to maintain. There’s not really a quality issue. Wikipedia is known for not being 100% reliable. But moreover, they have tons of ways to denote “this article needs citations” and “this isn’t a…

> 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…

The nature in which Wikipedia seeks to make access limited to many and to dictate the relevance of subjects it covers kind of diminishes it's credibility in my opinion. e.g. "Pokeymon" has not done anything as an individual being, it's a fictional being, but somehow it had an individual entry even though many other beings with publications and published work do not qualify somehow because of a constantly changing measure of "notoriety".

By this I'm saying sure, you can have a dictionary with select words in it without problems... But when you label it as an OFFICIAL INFORMATION RESOURCE, it becomes subject to a higher level of scrutiny and objectivity that can't just hand pick what words are in it, there has to be a solid democratic aspect involved to managing the resource.

Democracy seems to be failing in many ways right now on public resources.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#127

Post by shp0ngle »

onli wrote: post #118
shp0ngle wrote: post #99

As a wikipedia contributor, I disagree. You don’t automatically deserve Wikipedia article because you exist, or even because you did a good job your whole life. Even if you have tons of credits on IMDV. You don’t “deserve” wikipedia article. It’s not a collection of everything that exists ever. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are actually quite clear and documented. It’s not a badge for a job well done… And…

Thanks for this comment. It is the essence of why for me the Wikipedia project can't die soon enough. The criteria for notability on wikipedia are not clear and documented. They are a joke, with a camp of zealots deleting everything they can delete - maybe they see it as a hobby, maybe they need it to feel powerful. The criteria do not matter as long as such people are allowed to wield power. And the english Wikipedi…

Note, I don’t wield any power on Wikipedia, I am a small time contributor that nominate something for deletion, about 3 times per year.

The rules are here?

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

The humanity actually cannot meaningfully have an article about every person in human history, and have some standard for quality. There do need to be notability guidelines.

But. People are complaining about this stuff for decades now, and wikipedia is not going anywhere. So that’s good.

I do hate inscrutable wikipedia bureaucracy too though. It’s almost impossible to navigate the maze of projects and rules and committees. But that’s a different issue.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#128

Post by justincormack »

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 was also restored since then, with a note it still needs improving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Faulconer

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#129

Post by CharlesW »

BrainVirus wrote: post #13

Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale. It's broken on every conceivable level, and yet people stubbornly cling to the myth that was formed around it circa 2005. Instead of being surprised at things over and over again, I think it's time to adjust our collective expectations to match the reality.

> Wikipedia is a cautionary tale of what will inevitably happen if you try to hypercentralize information at the Internet scale.

"Decentralized" "unmoderated", "without content standards", or "without editors". Is there a more decentralized knowledge resource of general significance? Hosting happens to be centralized, only because nobody else cares enough to rehost it themselves (which the license allows you to do).

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#130

Post by SllX »

kps wrote: post #111
calvinmorrison wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Why does everyone end up on fandom Fandom dot com is a commercial venture started by Jimmy Wales. Inferences are left as an exercise for the reader.

When it was Wikia, it was alright. It has evolved into something atrocious that I actively avoid.
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