The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

Wikipedia policy is that articles must meet certain criteria, of which "notability" is only one. Were there verifiable sources? Was the article promotional? Was there original research in the article?

Wikipedia has guidelines to ensure that the facts cited in articles are verifiable and accurate. These guidelines are overstrict by design. It's better to have some true information deleted than it is to allow false or promotional material into the encyclopedia.

You don't cry when your patch gets rejected for failing unit tests. Likewise, you shouldn't cry when your article gets deleted for violating Wikipedia guidelines. If you do have verifiable sources and a version of the article that is factual, then it shouldn't be difficult to recreate the article in a manner that allows it to avoid deletion.

It will not surprise you to learn that you are far from the first to complain about the flat discussion pages. They have a lot of advantages - they're just easier to work with for a lot of things like rearranging sections, creating new sections, etc. - all stuff that your random social news site (like Hacker News) simply does not let you do because it would be a UI and vandalism nightmare.

There was a nearly complete effort to rewrite talk pages: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads But it turned out to have atrocious performance, and the few times I used talk pages on wikis with it enabled, I wished they really hadn't enabled it.

I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this:

1. Danny Sullivan hears that his friend Jessie Stricchiola, a pioneer in fighting click fraud, has been deleted from Wikipedia.

2. He somehow gets to a discussion about the deletion of her page on Wikipedia. On it is a debate between 13 people about whether her page should be deleted, and at the top of that page is a detailed explanation by the editor that made the final decision why that decision was made.

3. At the top of this page is an explanation that this page is an archive, and that any comments should be added to the article's "talk page" or a "deletion review". The text for "deletion review" is a link to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review which explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

4. Author rages and instead writes on archive page. Summary: a. Stricchiola was a founding member of SEMPO, the largest trade group of the search marketing industry. b. Stricchiola was the earliest, and the largest stature person in the area of click fraud. c. Co-authored a popular book on click fraud.

5. Some time later, author gets an email from Wikipedia saying his "talk page" had been created and changed. When he clicks through, he is shown what changes were made, and they are a suggestion by one of the participants in the debate on deletion that his comments will not be read on the archive page, and yet another link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review which, again, explains Wikipedia's deletion review policies, and offers a pretty clear six step process for having a deletion reviewed.

6. Instead of following this link, he clicks through the link in the email that told him how to get in contact with the person that edited his "talk page."

7. It clicks him through to a page that it then tells him not to touch. That's really annoying, but it immediately gives him the link to the place to talk to him in the same place.

8. He rages at this user about being asked to go through "some arcane cryptic obscure Wikipedia deletion review process," and asks why this user didn't just do it for him. He tells this Wikipedia editor that the decision to delete Stricchiola's article came from "the insane closed little world of Wikipedia editors, where non-specialist editors pretend to be experts on what’s notable[...]", and refers to his general feeling that "contributing anything to Wikipedia is a big giant waste of time[...]"

I don't know much about Wikipedia, and don't care whether Stricchiola is notable or not, or included or not, except in the general sense that I support the mission of Wikipedia and find it useful, and I hope that they at least keep it as useful as it has been, or make it even more useful. I want friction in my crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and know that it is far less friction than would occur in the World Book, where the appeal process would be far more obscure, and far less democratic. The deletion review process seemed pretty clear and quick to me. There was a lot of copying and pasting involved, it would be nice to have a button for that, but I'm not sure that the free form nature of the debate on the deletion page lends itself well to one. I consider this a flaw in the deletion page, not a reason not to simplify the process, but there is something to say in having a bit of friction in a process to reopen a debate that had already been concluded.

The sense of entitlement in this blog entry astounds me. I'm really surprised that so many people sympathize.

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edit: I did skip the conclusion. In the end, he does go to the "deletion review" page. Instead of following the six step process (and notably not including a screenshot of that in his blog entry), he decides that it's the wrong page, and instead finds another page with a banner on top that begins: "Please note that this page is NOT for challenging the outcome of deletion discussions[...]"

More righteous condemnation ensues.

>The problem with Wikipedia is rather than consistency they go with, "who got here first and what is a large majority of the article written in? (British?, American?). All the other pages on color all use American English but apparently someone using British English got to Orange first. It's a huge mess but I suppose it doesn't matter since no one types in disambiguated names.

That's a problem? That's exactly the policy I use with the legacy codebase I manage. If you're making a change to an existing file, you should make the changes according to the file's existing style, regardless of whether you agree with it or not. It prevents files from becoming impossible to read when different people edit it over a period of months, or even years. Wikipedia enforces this policy for the same reason. It's pointless and distracting to have an article that changes from tyre to tire every paragraph.

bitter blogger is bitter.