271–280 of 353 posts
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…
What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…
If a lengthy discussion has already reached conclusion on a matter, having someone jump through a few hoops and provide a good reason to reopen that debate doesn't seem unreasonable.
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…
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…
What is AfD, please?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is backwards. I'm not an admin on wikipedia (but I do have admin revert and reviewer flags) but I do help "run" wikipedia only because I participate in it. I been vandal patroller for years. I follow the AfDs and other actions and contribute to actions in different wikiprojects. I can say for a fact that there is no clear line between any of the two camps. Admins don't have the time to push agendas. They are way…
It's not about agendas or conspiracies, it's about a disconnect between the people who make the big decisions and the people who are building wikipedia. Different perceptions and motivations can lead quite easily to people making decisions that are deleterious to the community and the wikipedia project, even if at every step they are acting in what they perceive to be good faith.
You draw a false distinction between: " the people who make the big decisions and the people who are building wikipedia." Both the "people who make the big decisions" and the people who contribute content are "the people who are building wikipedia". They are two complementary, but seldom complimentary parts of the machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none. Time and time again technical references have played out in personal and professional endeavours. They're clear and concise. You've got to accept that some topics, biographies for example, are inherently subjective and can't be purely objective. Wikipedia is the most rigorous source of 'truth' available to the masses, and the complaints of bias are ab…
>The quality of technical articles on Wikipedia are second to none Academic articles maybe, other articles, not so much. I run a website / forum in a niche area of animal husbandry, and one part of the site links to useful descriptions / information on different breeds. We've had no choice but to ban links to Wikipedia articles on individual breeds because they are simply factually incorrect, to the extent that even…
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…
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 other part of the article - the critique of the usability of the site looks much more useful and contains issues that could be addressed.
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…
>If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching... Half an hour? You cannot be serious?
Then the user experience designers came along and said that anything that requires more than a modicum of brainpower was a "bad user experience". And everyone bends over and listens to them rather than considering the point that actually requiring people to learn the culture they are going into is a good thing.
What Wikipedia really needs is for a UI expert to step in and fix what is essentially a broken UI. Requesting a reinstatement of a deleted page in a properly designed UI should take no more than a couple of clicks and 1 minute of reading, tops. Navigating a twisted web of broken or confusing or incorrect links with walls of text at every step does not a good UI make. All of the UI frustrations the op experiences snow…
There are simply way to many forms and inputs we have to deal with on Wikipedia to make it a one off for every case. We eat our dog food all over wikipedia for that reason. Personal user styles and javascripts are even stored as wiki-pages. We use Wikipages as IPC for bots and users. We use Wikipages for user messaging. I mean it's everywhere. User's get used to it and can figure out wikisyntax through the site and i…
And that's actually a big part of the problem. You're extending a paradigm far beyond what it's good at. When you're researching, you're looking for all of those deep nuggets of information that you'll get from poring over reams of data. Those tangental links are a joy to discover.
For a user trying to accomplish something quickly, however, it doesn't work. Reporting an issue, contributing to discussions or even FINDING them, navigating a voting page... Basically everything PROCESS related is a place where a wall of text is the most unwelcome thing you can be presented with.
It's great that you dogfood; just remember that the old unix hacks ate their own dogfood too. But rather than make things friendlier for people, it just made the unix hacks more defensive about their unfriendly system.