I would suggest Wikipedia needs a 'second page' site to host these types of 'less than notable pages' and they be eligible to be promoted to the main site.
But really I would just classify this as a #FirstWorldProblem
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
41–50 of 353 posts
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#42I personally find Wikipedia semi-useful as an ultra-high level view of topics I want to refresh myself on or get interest in. I wouldn't cite it in any remotely academic or meaningful forum, but it's an amazingly broad repository of information. I hold this view mainly because a great friend of mine, a college associate professor, got sick of students explicitly violating his directive to avoid Wikipedia as a primary…
You should, and we should.
I would question, though, whether that's particular to Wikipedia. You should take everything you read with a colossal grain of salt. Even if it's written in a printed encyclopedia, a textbook, or an article.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#43First 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…
You are more right than you know; the purpose of Wikipedia is to provide an arena for exclusionary status games among core contributors, and so allowing outsiders to do anything without learning how to follow tons of red tape (and dozens of assorted acronyms) is indeed a failure.
Providing the sum of all human knowledge, for free, to the entire world, however, might be better served by making Wikipedia's software and editing processes more accessible and usable to others.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#44Slight tangent, but I can't understand why MediaWiki/Wikipedia is so resistant to a standard commenting/discussion system. Discussion pages are still just flat text anyone can edit.
I get the "simple is better" approach, but by now, there should be enough conventions, and there's certainly enough complexity, to warrant at least a basic structured forum.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#45[deleted]
Everyone should have a wikipedia page. Notability and value of information however should be clear: Turing's page should clearly be different then the page of my teacher in kindergarten. How? I don't know. We can go much finer in granularity. To be successfully usable, developments are needed to cope with the finer grained information (like having ~10M pages of teachers of kindergartens).
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#46The thrust of his arguement is that since he believes Jessica is more notable than he is, and wikipedia has an existing article about him then his opinion should count. However, an alternative conclusion could be that he isn't notable by wikipedia's standards and his article should also be deleted.
That's not the point he's making, please re-read the article. He included the specific reasons he believes Jessica to be notable (with proper references).
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#47First 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…
>Now, the author feels entitled to barge in without learning anything about how Wikipedia actually works that's kind of the point. the author tried to figure out how wikipedia works. they couldn't figure anything out because, as far as i can tell, all wikipedia documentation is designed to scare away anybody who isn't already an established wikipedia editor.
He doesn't even bother to read the original email correctly before going on a rant, he clicks the link that shows him the differences, then acts surprised when he gets a comparison page!
Not to mention that his attitude in the Talk page was reprehensible, I am glad he was not able to contribute to Wikipedia as the last thing it needs is more egotism and arrogance.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#48First 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…
I spent a half-hour just trying to find the right form to merely request that the page be reviewed for restoration. That form, as I explained in detail, doesn't actually work. There is no form for pages that have been deleted. There is a page only (as best I can tell) for pages that are under consideration for being deleted. Once they are gone, they're gone -- unless they were removed for the ill-defined uncontrovers…
You didn't even read your original email from Wikipedia, but yet you feel that the people who work on the site should obey your whims despite your inability to be in any way polite.
This is not a Wikipedia failure, the failure is on your behalf. You can easily contribute and in fact someone was nice enough to help you in the right direction.
Your response to this person was to arrogantly insult them and complain that they did not do more to help you.
Once again, the failure here is not Wikipedias.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#49First 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…
You missed the part where the author provided several citations of publications mentioning the unnotable person and books published by the said person. He also goes on to state, if the goal of Wikipedia is to encourage subject matter experts to contribute expertise it's not making it particularly easy to do so. Wikipedia policies exist to facilitate user contributions, not the other way around. Wikipedia itself says…
It's not bureaucratic as much you think. There is a system that is very easy to follow.
1. First they missed the delete review that normally waits about 7 days before taking action. 2. Upon discovering that their page was deleted found the archive delete review discussion. 3. Didn't understand what they were looking at and with disregard to the notes posted at the top saying that it's archive and not to edit it, edited it anyways. 4. A bot was triggered to an admin that someone edited a locked discussion and so he happily went to go help and left a message for the user on how to handle things and where to find delete review. 5. The user wanted to send a message to the editor and got confused at another point (the editor's talk page vs their user page). 6. etc etc etc...
It's sad the user is frustrated but lets stop the blame game here. I've been doing vandal patrol on wikipedia for 5 years. It's not some evil hive mind of control or something.
Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia
#50I wonder if the same thing will happen to stackoverflow? They have a number of levels of access, reviewing, meta-reviewing, administrators, etc. What level do you get to before becoming a bureaucratic place where everything is designed and decided by comitee?