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A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

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Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#141

Post by dwringer »

jtbayly wrote: post #138
dwringer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

Wait a minute. I wasn’t questioning your editing at all. I was only pointing out that this guy is openly admitting not only that he doesn’t want some people editing, but that he doesn’t even want some people to have access to Wikipedia. That’s truly shocking to me.

I get you. I'm sorry that I got a bit defensive, and I didn't mean to detract from your point.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#142

Post by mhh__ »

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.

> It's broken on every conceivable level

And yet it's still really good.

People like Larry Sanger prattle on about how awful wikipedia is (and make multiple websites for collecting mistakes, which mostly seem to be blank), rarely with any concrete evidence. In fact Sanger in particular refuses to browse wikipedia at all - except that he does but through a proxy, because giving wikipedia.org traffic is "icky". I pointed out that this is childish behaviour and he blocked me, go figure.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#143

Post by dmitrygr »

Wikipedia is a joke nowadays. I made a small correction on the ARM Cortex-M page (the listed instructions available in ARMv8-M base were wrong), I cited the relevant ARM document in the change. Nope, got reverted back to the wrong thing... Pretty sure I know this architecture approximately 1000% better than the joker who reverted this, but OK, whatever, let everyone have the wrong info. I gave up.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#144

Post by psyc »

bpeebles wrote: post #125
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…

In other words, shithead humans took over, took control, and made sure it works like every other dull shithead archaic human organization in history. And the deletionists can say they aren't because there's no such thing, because WP was never "meant" to be that, it was always "meant" to be this, this way is the only one feasible, and we've always been at war with Eastasia.

Victors rewrite history, and now the article about it too.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#145

Post by meowface »

mynameishere wrote: post #69
causi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While I've never heard of Dragonball--and I'm sure it's really great--I'll make a wild guess that 100s or 1000s of people worked on it in one capacity or another and that doesn't really make them "Notable".

It's probably the #1 most well-known anime in the US.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#146

Post by lucideer »

bpeebles wrote: post #125
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…

This comment would've been mostly* the case a number of years ago - and describes a sane, measured approach to editorial control.

It has changed. There are users with scripts running to detect any additions that don't fit their model, no matter how uncontroversial. It's become difficult to contribute even on the most boring of topics.

* I say "mostly" because the funny thing about controversial topics is that it's often the contributors (rather than "deleters") that possess the greater amount of persistence in pushing the content they want added and kept. So very politically loaded subjects will suffer from the opposite problem, resulting in sprawling trees of linked articles on a subject, each a huge bulk of prose wrestled through numerous talk page threads of PoV objections.

It's the normal/mundane stuff that gets summarily deleted and forgotten about forever.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#147

Post by anfilt »

techdragon wrote: post #81
macspoofing wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why does Wikipedia even have “notable” requirements anyways? To prevent me having a Wikipedia page.

Pretty sure you have one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_spoofing ;-)

lol, not the person you responded to but very funny.

On serious note notable is relative in my opinion. There is also just the value for history wise. So being able to lookup a brief synopsis of someone who may only be notable in a small area or less well known niche still seems useful for an encyclopedia.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#148

Post by derbOac »

solardev wrote: post #33
stevenjgarner wrote: post #14

Wikipedia includes entries based on notability, but they have their own idea on notability. A friend of mine is a famous voice actor who has won not one but two CLIO awards. Wikipedia deleted the page I created for him on the basis that he was not notable. Another page I created was for the person who introduced deaf sign language to New Zealand. Deleted as she was not notable. There are more than 19,000 entries for…

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…

I think that's why I'm skeptical of the notability requirements. I know plenty of colleagues with Wikipedia pages where the notability aspect is sort of suspect, at least relative to many others I know. Sometimes it seems intuitive that someone would have a page, but other times it's just another form of marketing and SEO.

In my opinion, notability better be clearly defined with a high bar, akin to encyclopedias of old, or not be used as a criterion at all.

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#149

Post by cannabis_sam »

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…

>Honestly even if he isn’t famous why can’t Wikipedia keep his entry?

The answer is Deletionists, people who are unable to contribute with actual knowledge and information, so they have decided that their contribution is destruction of knowledge and information.

The Wikipedia bureaucracy, as it exists, is unfortunately not equipped to handle these types of book burners…

Re: A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page

#150

Post by Willish42 »

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…

That diff in [2] is pretty egregious, and given the timing seems to be exactly what sparked the controversy. I think regardless of one's opinion on the outcome here, it's very odd that the author doesn't mention that Bruce Faulconer made a large edit to his own Wikipedia 19 days ago.

FWIW I personally am in the camp that Bruce Faulconer is probably sufficiently recognizable that a small stub article is justified and better than the redirect they added. However, this article skips over a lot of the story, possible disingenuously so.

OTOH, similarly small articles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Godfree are all over wikipedia, the backlash seems completely unjustified.

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