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The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

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Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#81

Post by philwelch »

tptacek wrote: post #51

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…

The article is a usability study of a scenario where a committed but novice domain expert has something to contribute to the Wikipedia process. The deleted article itself is just a MacGuffin.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#82

Post by sethg »

philwelch wrote: post #34
aeontech wrote: post #13

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…

On the one hand, yes, yes, yes. On the other hand....

95% of the effort that goes into Wikipedia may be nothing more than primate status games among insiders, but those games motivate an extremely large number of people, and because so many people do get involved, the actually-useful work is 5% of a very large number. If some change in policy cut the political bullshit in half but drove away two-thirds of the people who, in between PvP battles, improved the quality of the encyclopedia, it would be a net loss.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#83

Post by quanticle »

FaceKicker wrote: post #52
billpatrianakos wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far…

> You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. But why? If there's an article about your company in a legitimate publication, I don't see why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia article about it. How would it make Wikipedia a less useful or lower-quality resource? Are you saying it would get in…

If there's an article about his company in a legitimate publication, then he can put a page up for his company in Wikipedia. It'd pass the notability requirement and the requirement for verifiable sources.

The problem is that getting rid of the notability requirement would lead to lots of people putting up pages with nothing more than opinion. It wouldn't be spam. It'd be more dangerous than that. It'd be unsourced opinion disguised as factual information.

There's also the fact that Wikipedia is much more of a finite resource than, say, Google. Google has millions of server and a data center staff of thousands, backed up by even more thousands of programmers dedicated to making things run smoothly. Wikipedia is 400-odd servers and a staff of less than a hundred. Opening things up like you say would quickly overload Wikipedia's infrastructure, degrading the encyclopedia for everyone.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#84

Post by saalweachter »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #35
nilchameleons wrote: post #11

It blows my mind that anything has to meet some arbitrary standard of notability in order to have a Wikipedia page. This is the Internet. Encyclopedia Britannica can't have a brief overview on every topic imaginable, because it's got to fit in a bound cover. The freedom to have information about absolutely every subject in existence seems to me the biggest benefit of putting an encyclopedia online, not the fact that…

You're wrong. If Wikipedia didn't have spthese standards then every idiot including myself would be creating pages that are just spam. You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected. Now, we all know a Wikipedia page doesn't have the weight of other sources and can be crap at times but so far…

The politics are so bad because the stakes are so low... I have a hard time believing that there's any grave risk to throwing open the doors on Wikipedia, simply because not all Wikipedia articles are equal.

I've been on the other end of this. The shitty little start-up I worked on for many years somehow managed to squeak past the finish line of notability and keep its shitty little Wikipedia entry from being deleted (despite the fact that it was mostly written by the marketing department). And you know what kind of difference it made? Absolutely none. To the best of my knowledge, precisely 0.0% of the site's traffic came from the 'external link' in the Wikipedia entry. We got precisely 0 phone calls or emails from potential customers who heard about us on Wikipedia. VCs did not magically dump piles of money on us because we were listed on Wikipedia. Engineering candidates -- even bad engineering candidates -- never spontaneously sent us their resume after reading our Wikipedia entry.

Conversely, given that my startup benefitted not one bit from having a Wikipedia entry, I'm quite confident that if a competitor had wasted 15 minutes of his time to deface our Wikipedia article, it would have hurt us as a business not one lick.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#85

Post by billpatrianakos »

pessimizer wrote: post #76
pessimizer wrote: post #28

His case for the notability of his friend doesn't seem to add anything that hadn't already been considered by the Wikipedians already, and his attitude was monstrously shitty. Especially his reaction to the guy/girl that removed his comments on the page that said not to leave comments on it, saving them on his "user page" with a helpful message about the process to get the debate, which was already over, reopened. I…

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…

I'm with you in this one! I heard the rage and entitlement too! The author is out of line. Instead of talking about this constructively he posts a temper tantrum and everyone sides with him. I got downvoteed to hell too with my initial reaction. I do admit though I was very sarcastic and snarky but I think it warranted it. I mean, this post really did come off as the equivalent of a digital temper tantrum. How do you respond to someone who behaves like? Surely with the way that post is written and the points you make you cannot take him seriously anymore.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#86

Post by mqqq »

tptacek wrote: post #51

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…

>>Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia.

You are overestimating your average hacker news reader.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#87

Post by Duff »

javert wrote: post #5

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…

I agree. The wikipedia people seem petty and bureaucratic at times, but their hearts are usually in the right place.

My coworkers all got together a few years ago to create a gag article about another coworker as a practical joke. We built a web of subtle edits to associate our friend with some German rock band, a type of haircut, and a bunch of other things.

We eventually got our article up, and there it sat for about a month. Some wikipedia person figured it out, though, and unraveled the whole network of references in a few hours.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#88

Post by omaranto »

tptacek wrote: post #51

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'm not sure how much of the article you read. You have a long angry rant (that makes good points) about people that get upset because a Wikipedia page they care about is deleted. The article is not about that, it is about how hard it is to figure out how to navigate the Wikipedia waters to give support to an article that has been deleted or is up for deletion, etc. It is about Wikipedia's usability in cases like this. (If you did read the article and knew this, but still felt like ranting on a tangential note, I apologize.)

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#89

Post by tptacek »

omaranto wrote: post #88
tptacek wrote: post #51

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'm not sure how much of the article you read. You have a long angry rant (that makes good points) about people that get upset because a Wikipedia page they care about is deleted. The article is not about that, it is about how hard it is to figure out how to navigate the Wikipedia waters to give support to an article that has been deleted or is up for deletion, etc. It is about Wikipedia's usability in cases like thi…

I don't blame you for not carefully reading my rant, but I addressed your point somewhere in the middle of it: when the article went up for deletion, there was a big link on the article itself saying how to vote on the deletion.

The thing that this guy writing this post didn't do that any reasonable person could have been expected to do: click the name of the admin who deleted the article and ask him on his talk page what to do about the deletion. The admin would have answered, because if he hadn't, one of several rival admin factions would note his failure to follow process and bankrolled it as ammunition in some upcoming admin war.

Re: The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia

#90

Post by lordlicorice »

philwelch wrote: post #77
zbowling wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 OP's complaint is 20% that they deleted an article they shouldn't have and 80% that the software and culture of Wikipedia is completely opaque and unusable to everyone except the most dedicated contributors. It's absolutely retarded that discussion pages are just wikipages where you have to handle comment threading and nesting yourself with indentation syntax. It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn tons…

It's absolutely retarded that you have to learn Wikipedia policy before debating whether an article conforms to Wikipedia policy?
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