
The Closed, Unfriendly World of Wikipedia - InfinityX0
http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853
======
wpietri
For those wondering about the backstory, I went and looked at the history of
the deleted page.

The article for Jessie Stricchiola was created by account "Stricchiola" in
November 2009. The commit message: "Added article for search industry pioneer
Jessie Stricchiola". That account made only one other significant edit, which
was to link the Jessie Stricchiola article into the first paragraph of "Search
Engine Marketing".

Within 15 minutes, Wikipedians marked the article as insufficiently
referenced, a probable conflict of interest, and possibly lacking notability.
Stricchiola edited the article for the next few days, ignored the warnings,
and eventually stopped editing. Other than minor fixes from Wikipedians, the
article was basically untouched until September 2009, when user Cantaloupe2
nominated it for deletion discussion.

So as far as I can tell, a search engine marketing person wrote a self-
promotional article about herself. Wikipedians immediately warned that the
article had a number of issues, all of which she (and everybody else in the
world) ignored for nearly 2 years. Somebody eventually noticed; Wikipedians
discussed it and decided the article was unsalvageable.

~~~
_delirium
That's what makes this particular discussion strange. Of all the problems
Wikipedia does actually have, this isn't one of them: the system worked ok
here, in a pretty straightforward way. It also lacks any evidence that the
person in question was even interested in contributing to Wikipedia in the
first place, _except for the sole purpose of inserting a backlink to herself_.
Those aren't the kinds of contributions Wikipedia is most direly lacking, so
when it comes to improving the community, I'd focus effort on not scaring away
the people who are actually attempting to contribute things (other than self-
promotion).

I did sort of chuckle when I realized this was about an SEO/SEM person,
though, as I've run into this kind of angry reaction outside Wikipedia as
well. If you run a private wiki/forum/whatever, it's not uncommon to run into
people attempting to "organically" contribute links to themselves, who seem to
think they're being very clever and incognito when in fact their contributions
look spammy from a mile away, and then get extremely indignant and try to
raise an internet-stink when you delete their contributions.

------
pessimizer
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 hate the tone of this. He knows what should be in Wikipedia, and what they
should consider notable under their standards, yet feels put upon by having to
know what a "talk page" or "deletion review" is, and assaulted by being
informed of a talk page being created for him. In turn, he assaults the random
person who tried to help him with his goal by saving his work and giving him
directions with more than a half dozen paragraphs of angry, condescending
tl;dr like he was reading his list of grievances to the King of Wikipedia.

~~~
pessimizer
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.

\---

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.

~~~
tptacek
_I seem to be dropping like a stone here, so let me go on forever about this_

You are my new favorite commenter.

~~~
1point2
Yeah - Both of you got my up. I too like Wikipedia - and its chock a block
full of good stuff - so it seems some folk have taken the time to learn the
rules and add to collective knowledge contained within.

------
javert
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 too hard to find the
right place to go and complain. The author even managed to _complain_ when
someone helpfully pointed out that he went to the wrong place to revise a
_pointless and already settled argument_.

Seriously, this is a Wikipedia success story. If this person had been allowed
to just barge in and trample Wikipedia's policies on who is notable, despite
having zero knowledge of how Wikipedia works, that would have been a Wikipedia
failure.

If the author had just been willing to spend half an hour learning about
Wikipedia's policies instead of bitching on a blog, and figured out how to
revive an already-settled issue, he could have successfully managed to waste
people's time on this. But no. "I demand to be listened to NOW, and if I'm
not, Wikipedia is Closed and Unfriendly."

~~~
sullivandanny
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 uncontroversial reasons.

Yes, I think that Wikipedia would welcome having subject expert barge right in
when editors who are not subject experts are having a debate and looking for
expert advice. I think they'd welcome that very much.

If you actually read the debate on the page I've written about, you'll see the
editors don't understand the space that well, cannot find citations to prove
or disprove what they're arguing about and in the end someone declares that
the lack of an agreement is a consensus.

When I get alerted to this, and I'm trying to share detailed reference based
on both first-hand knowledge as well as third-hand resources to actually help
them make a decision, there is simply no easy way to do this, not unless I
want to spend hours figuring out the insider mechanism to Wikipedia.

That's simply not how it should work. That is a massive Wikipedia failure,
that actual expect on a subject cannot easily contribute.

If Wikipedia is designed only to have experts on Wikipedia contribute, then it
will continue to succeed as a successful summary of non-expert guesswork.

I think, however, it is more than reasonable that those who are involved in
the system take a hard look at how many barriers they've erected and whether
the bureaucratic system that has come up couldn't be made more user friendly.

But hey, the next time you register a car at the DMV, and you've got to go
from one window to the next, maybe you'll think no, it's your fault for being
upset -- that's just the way the DMV works, and you're to blame for not having
studied the bureaucracy better.

~~~
bigiain
I'd be curious to know if this resistance to input from "subject matter
experts" is the same for, say, notable physicists or notable cardiac surgeons?
It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that because the subject matter in
question is "SEO" that there are a lot of prejudices and suspicion of ulterior
motives from the wikipedia end. In one sense, I'm of the opinion that if
you're promoting yourself as "an SEO expert" your contributions to wikipedia
should be treated with significant additional scrutiny due to the possibility
of conflict of interest.

~~~
wpietri
I don't know that this is specifically _resistance_ to contribution by subject
matter experts. I think Wikipedia is more precisely _indifferent_ to their
subject matter expertise when it comes to considering _direct_ contributions.
If Danny Sullivan wants to edit Wikipedia, he's welcome to, but nobody's going
to treat him with more deference than any other editor.

What they do make great use of is _indirect_ contributions. If a physicist or
a cardiac surgeon writes and publishes a paper on the topic of their
expertise, that is fantastic raw material for Wikipedia. Which is precisely
the relationship that most subject matter experts have with any other
encyclopedia, so it seems reasonable to me.

------
aeontech
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. It's sad.

[1] <http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808>

[2] <http://www.cow.net/transcript.txt>

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)

~~~
philwelch
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 the minimum number of
rules necessary to make that successful, but ultimately, the rules and red
tape turned into the fun part of the game, and the encyclopedia-writing is
just the grinding bit.

If all you wanted was a huge encyclopedia unlimited by the constraints of
physical book size, you'd have a deletion policy like this: "each statement of
fact has to be cited from a reliable source, every article has to be composed
entirely of statements of fact, any other content should be deleted". So if
there are no reliably-sourced statements of fact about a given subject, you
don't get an article about them. If I started a Wikipedia article about my
neighbor's cat and wrote a lot of outrageous claims, they would all be deleted
and we'd be left with a blank article, which would probably be deleted as a
relatively boring matter of procedure.

But what fun is that, when we can have a concept like "notability"? Ah!
Suddenly, instead of all that boring shit about citing facts and removing
uncited content, and just keeping whatever reliable information we have about
something, we can have a massive PvE game where you get to find articles about
subjects you don't care about and declare "this isn't notable!", and then you
can lawyer a "consensus" of other players into agreeing with you. Or if
another player disagrees, suddenly you have a massive PvP battle! Fun! Well,
at least for a certain type of person who enjoys lawyering and gets off on
will-to-power stuff that motivates one to try and delete articles from an
encyclopedia, which is exactly the type of person that gravitates towards the
project. And--believe it or not--these kinds of highly-social games, and one's
success in them on Wikipedia, are a major factor in getting elected
"administrator", at which point your duties now entail _judging_ these
lawyering games and _actually deleting the articles_!

~~~
sethg
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.

~~~
philwelch
That's the crazy part! I completely agree with you--it's a massively gamified
process and ideally, I'd like to believe that just letting people get to work
without too much crap in their way would produce good results just as well as
the status quo does, but maybe that's too idealistic and this is just how you
make the sausage.

Still, there are some useful usability critiques to be made. Even an ugly
sausage-making process should let you ramp up into it at the very least, and
at the most, should have useful methods of collecting and processing input
from novice users rather than rejecting it unseen or outright discouraging it
in the first place.

~~~
zbowling
_sigh_

It doesn't work like that.

~~~
philwelch
I spent years in that particular sausage factory. They even let me work some
of the levers not everyone gets to work. My time there didn't work out well in
the long run. Sorry, but it's pretty ugly and political in there.

------
wpietri
There's a lot of Wikipedia I think should be more transparent or more
approachable. But deletion discussions aren't really one of them.

Deciding what really fits in an encyclopedia isn't simple. Wikipedia has spent
literally a decade working out a set of rules that balances utility, fairness,
quality, and maintainability. Those rules will inevitably seem bureaucratic
and opaque to people who haven't worked on a number of articles and then
really considered the problem.

Deletion discussions are perennial magnets for non-participants who believe
that they or their (friend|band|ancestor|website) belong in Wikipedia. They
are inevitably upset. Worse, in Pauli's phrase, they aren't even wrong: they
start with the premise the article should be kept and then say whatever they
think will let them win.

In this case, the bloggy ranter doesn't get basic Wikipedia fundamentals. E.g.
that Wikipedia isn't about what's _true_ , it's about what's _verifiable_ [1].
Suppose he thinks that his pal is the most important person ever. He might be
right, but what matters is what can be proven from reliable sources[2].

Making deletion review more approachable to the personally outraged would
certainly increase the number of reviews, but it wouldn't materially change
the number of articles kept. What it would do is waste a lot of valuable
editor and admin time.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:V> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS>

~~~
gergles
You have deliberately ignored the most contentious part of the Wikipedia
policy regarding articles, which is the "Notability" rule. Why an _Internet-
based_ encyclopedia with no editors, printed version, or quality control feels
the need to limit articles to "notable subjects" is beyond me - it isn't like
we're going to run out of electrons any time soon.

In this particular case, it was quite clear this person existed and that she
worked in SEM. There were plenty of sources to back that up. That should be
the relevant criterion for whether an article can exist in an Internet-based
encyclopedia. There was no reason to delete this article other than "Ha ha, I
know the rules of this bizarre system and will throw W:PDQXYZ links at you
until you go away".

~~~
njw45
Why hasn't anyone taken wikipedia's content and put in it another mediawiki
setup run without a deletionist policy?

~~~
wpietri
It is frequently proposed (e.g, this from 2008:
[http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/wackypedia-wikipedia-
for...](http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/wackypedia-wikipedia-fork)) but I
don't know of any that are even mildly successful. There are plenty of mirrors
and forks, though. Naturally, Wikipedia has a list of them:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/All>

------
daenz
"Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: forget it. They
are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy. Not actually evil, but
bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn't even lift a
finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of
Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost,
found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft
peat for three months and recycled as firelighters."

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

~~~
angersock
Flagged for removal. Notability?

------
tptacek
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_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Log/2011_September_23)

Deletions include:

* The "vice editor in chief" of a Japanese anime magazine

* A list of episodes for a TV show that never aired

* Articles about a no-name iPhone game, and also a no-name video editing tool, presumably both written by the authors of the programs

* A promo for a not-yet-released book

* An article about "Rickstar", a musical artist who had apparently self-released one song

* A strategy guide for The Sims 3

* A bio of a junior league hockey player (albeit one with an awesome name)

* An article about a youth football team

... and it just keeps going on like that.

This particular article was motivated by the deletion of "Jessie_Stricchiola".
Let's look at her AfD:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola)

Where we learn:

* This is an article about an SEO consultant.

* It contained a promotional link to the SEO consultant's book.

* That SEO consultant had been quoted in a number of stories, but never written _about_ in any of those stories; the only reliable information to be gleaned from any source about her was "once gave a quote about click fraud to a trade press journalist" (or in one case a reporter at WaPo).

It took _two weeks_ for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be
deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent
notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing
people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable
source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read
DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article --- the guy found out _how
many libraries carried her book_.

Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event.
Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week,
alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3
members of non-professional football clubs. _In every one of those retarded
articles_ , someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources,
and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia
contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. _Every
time_.

Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is
betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference
project in the history of the Internet actually works.

Something I don't get about people on HN and their attitude towards Wikipedia.
None of you, not a one, expects Linus Torvalds to accept arbitrary
contributions to the Linux kernel simply because that code could be disabled
by default and wasn't going to bother anyone (unlike a bogus Wikipedia
article, which taints the encyclopedia and also Google search results). People
with experimental or long-shot Linux contributions (at least, people besides
ESR) tend to set up Github pages instead of writing long-winded rants about
the "deletionism" rampant in the world's most successful open source project.
But Wikipedia kills an article about an SEO consultant, and you're up in arms.

 _Mostly, this comment I'm writing is just bitching_. So, to repay you the
kindness of reading my own windbag rant, I offer you this gift: THE VERY FEW
SIMPLE RULES OF THUMB YOU WILL EVER NEED TO AVOID FRUSTRATION OVER THE
"Deletionism" OF WIKIPEDIA:

 _RULE NUMBER ONE: DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT YOURSELF, YOUR
COMPANY, PROGRAMS THAT YOU WROTE, OR YOUR UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL._

 _RULE NUMBER TWO: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK, DO NOT WRITE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLES ABOUT
YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR FRIENDS' COMPANIES, PROGRAMS THAT YOUR FRIENDS WROTE, OR
YOUR FRIENDS UNPUBLISHED SCI-FI NOVEL._

They should just put those two rules on the edit box on the site, I agree;
would make everyone's life easier.

~~~
knowtheory
The two rules you've outline are the primary reason i contribute very little
to wikipedia.

I can put together a well-sourced piece outlining the importance of a variety
of subjects which i am indirectly involved in, and give a dispassionate
description of its relevance to the community it serves and the world at
large.

Wikipedians, instead of saying "do that and have neutral 3rd parties check
over your work", instead say "we do not value your contribution, and will
delete your work".

As such, wikipedia isn't a place where knowledgeable people can contribute
matters of expertise. And that really freaking annoys me.

Concrete example: The Knight Foundation's wikipedia page is incredibly sparse,
and contains little or no information about the efforts they fund, or the
substance of the work they do. This is unfortunate, because the foundation has
been around for decades, is an integral piece of newspaper and journalism
history, and currently funds a massive amount of the innovation taking place
in journalism, including the project i work on, DocumentCloud (which the
Knight Foundation entirely funded).

But, by the rules of Wikipedia, i shouldn't contribute to the subject.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of startups and essentially irrelevant companies
that already disregard the rules and write their own freaking wikipedia pages
anyway. That's ultimately the real problem. Wikipedia is so capricious in the
enforcement of the rules, and there's so little stopping people from breaking
the rules, that deletions do seem arbitrarily and inconsistently enforced. I'm
entirely unsurprised that there are so many cries of "injustice!" so often.

~~~
_delirium
Even though there are cases where it works, I think those two rules are good
heuristics that are fairly predictive of article quality/bias. _Most_ articles
written by academics and businessmen on themselves, their own research
projects, or their companies are just not good articles. On the other hand,
articles written by someone on an area they know about but _not_ directly
their work tend to be much better.

Part of it is intent, I think. I mostly talk to academics about it, and of
those who don't regularly edit Wikipedia, some, when they hear that I edit
Wikipedia, _do_ want to learn how to use it to promote their work, or a
research agenda they're closely involved in. If you come at it with that
mindset, it's less likely that a neutral article will result. On the other
hand, if you think of an area you know a lot about but is _not_ directly tied
to your work---i.e. is not the work of yourself, your supervisor, your
specific sub-sub-field, or university---then it's much more likely that you
might write a not-self-interested article genuinely intended to neutrally
inform people.

That shouldn't be hard for most people to do. For example, there are such wide
swaths of theoretical CS not yet covered well that, if your area is
theoretical CS, there's no need to start with your own research or your
advisor's research or the particular corner of the world in which you're
personally involved in acrimonious within-field debates. Better to start with
some important foundational work that you're closely familiar with but don't
have strong personal investment in promoting. When I tell that to people, many
lose interest, because to them, the self-promotion was why they were
interested in the first place, while writing good articles about Theoretical
Computing 101 (or 201) is just work. In which case, they may not have been
coming with the right intentions...

~~~
paufernandez
Thanks for this comment... many thanks.

------
jaylevitt
While this is the typical story about online "cabals", this is also the story
of how Wikipedia's alleged success as a platform - no meta-functionality,
everything is accomplished through the Wiki itself - is also its failure.

MediaWiki is great software for collaboratively editing documents. It is lousy
software for workflow management. All the Kafkaesque dead-ends he describes
are wiki pages that try to use other wiki pages as a medium for controlling
the process of creating wiki pages.

~~~
jaylevitt
Corollary: How well would the fundraising go if you could only make
contributions by following a MediaWiki-based editorial process?

------
kstenerud
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 snowball into a frustrated
response, which only aggravates and frustrates the editors who receive such
responses. This, in turn, further snowballs things until everyone is
aggravated, nobody wants to contribute, and Wikipedia stagnates.

So, fix Wikipedia's UI. It's in everyone's long term interests to do so.

~~~
wpietri
> 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.

That assumes that it would be beneficial to have people who don't understand
anything about what makes an article worth keeping making requests like that.

It also assumes that requesting deletion review is Wikipedia's most valuable
place to spend developer and designer time.

Neither is true.

~~~
kstenerud
No, it assumes that user task design should follow the tenets of good UI
design.

What I'm hearing you say is that usability barriers are a good thing because
they stop people who don't understand the system from using the system, which
is the refrain of all defenders of bad UI design. We've seen plenty of
disruption in the area of software UI design in recent years that disprove
such a theory.

~~~
wpietri
UI design is not a religion whose tenets are to be followed for their own
sakes. It's a practical art. Good UI makes easy things that should be easy,
and hard that which should be hard. (E.g.:
[http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien%20Page%206/Ian%20Wingro...](http://www.zen171398.zen.co.uk/Alien%20Page%206/Ian%20Wingrove-
auto%20destruct02.jpg)) Your mistake is naive optimization of one part of the
process.

In this case, the right system would be one that makes it very easy for
deletion review to process requests. It would also make sure that only well-
formed, well-thought-out deletion requests make it to the deletion reviewers.
The UI of that submission process could be made easy, but it's an essentially
hard problem. You're supposed to think carefully, come to grips with the
careful balance that Wikipedia has struck around deletion, and then submit a
reasoned argument.

It's not possible that someone will do that in 1 minute of reading. This is
like a submission to an appellate court: you have to know what you're doing or
there's no point.

~~~
kstenerud
I haven't made myself clear. I'm not saying that someone should understand
what the CONTENTS of their submission should be with only 1 minute's worth of
reading, but rather the ACTIONS the user must take from a UI perspective in
order to go through the process should not take more than 1 minute's worth of
reading.

If the content of the user submission should be carefully thought out prior to
taking the action, that's fine, but you shouldn't be deliberately throwing
obstacles in the way just for the sake of slowing them down. What ends up
happening when you do this is that knowledgeable people (who generally happen
to be busy) won't bother contributing. I've seen this sort of situation occur
countless times on Wikipedia (in general, not just with the deletion process).

~~~
pessimizer
Maybe I'm a fast reader, so try timing yourself reading this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Steps...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Steps_to_list_a_new_deletion_review)
. I don't find it to be much more than a minute.

------
IsaacL
From the action deletion discussion:

"The result was delete. As far as I can tell, the numbers are split about 7-6
in favour of delete. That's not normally going to lead to a consensus to
delete unless there are unusual circumstances, such as one side having
significantly stronger arguments than the other, so much as that can be
ascertained objectively. In this case, the final three unchallenged delete
!votes—DGG, ItsZippy and Metropolitan90—demonstrate such strength.

DGG and Metropolitan90 highlight a number of fundamental misconceptions behind
a number of the keep !votes, such as the inaccuracy of the assertions that the
subject's work was covered significantly in The Google story and that The
Google story is a Pulitzer prize-winning book. DGG also demonstrates with
clear evidence that the subject's own book is not as prominent as asserted,
without any evidence, by some on the keep side. ItsZippy is the only editor in
the debate, on either side, to comprehensively discuss the sources on offer as
opposed to making generalised assertions about the sufficiency of the
sourcing.

That those delete !votes have stood for between 7 and 13 days without any
challenge leads me to conclude that there is a consensus to delete"

More here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jessie_Stricchiola).

Two thoughts: yes, the back pages of Wikipedia are tricky to navigate for non-
experts, it took me a while to find that link. No, Wikipedians are not all
unfriendly deletionists.

------
csmt
I had similar experiences with Wikipedia. First time, I added some references
and definitions related to a theoretical computer science concept and it was
deleted for no reason.

Since then I stopped making edits unless something is incorrect.

~~~
yuhong
I think a lot of the problem is that measuring editors by edit count is like
measuring programmers by lines of code.

------
ciscoriordan
A more extreme example is the Amanda Knox article on Wikipedia. For years it
was kept deleted by a cabal of British English speaking administrators and
editors (Knox's murdered roommate was British). A deletion review finally
overturned the deletion a couple weeks after Knox's conviction was overturned.

[http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_kn...](http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2011/03/amanda_knox_wikipedia_info_scr.php)

~~~
mikeleeorg
I didn't know about the Wikipedia issues around that tragedy, but found it
interesting from a sociological standpoint. So I tried looking for similar
cases of the line between fact & opinion blurring on battleground Wikipedia,
and found this, in case anyone else is interested:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia>

(And it's on Wikipedia itself, natch.)

------
nethsix
Perhaps nothing can be truly 'open' to contribution given that everybody has a
different opinion and everybody often believes that they are right. Probably a
huge number of newbies who tried posting something on Hacker News, will also
feel that HN is closed and unfriendly as well. Is it really unfriendly or just
a resource-management issue; it may be better not be perfect but can satisfy a
large audience.

~~~
redthrowaway
>Is it really unfriendly or just a resource-management issue; it may be better
not be perfect but can satisfy a large audience.

It's both. HN _is_ unfriendly to new users who are used to the kind of
interactions that predominate elsewhere. It is in many ways a close reddit
analogue, and yet even veteran redditors will find themselves downvoted to
oblivion here. I certainly did, when I first signed up.

Like HN, Wikipedia requires getting used to. There is a "Wikipedia Way", which
is very different from how people interact on other parts of the Internet. It
can seem bureaucratic and neurotic, and it is, but it keeps things running
relatively smoothly for the regulars, which is the important part. The people
who take the time to learn the ropes are the ones who end up ensuring that the
content is useful and informative. Yes, some people will be put off by the
fact that only reliable secondary sources can be considered when determining
the notability of a subject, but the restriction is there for a reason: it
keeps the crap out.

None of this means that Wikipedia is not open. If you waltzed into the Linux
dev channel and insisted that something be done a certain way, you'd be
banned. Linux is similarly complex, and there is a "Linux Way" of doing
things. Take the time to learn that way and contribute, and you'll be
welcomed. Insist they're wrong and write blog posts about how wrong they are,
and you'll be ignored.

------
mmahemoff
Slight 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.

~~~
gwern
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.

------
nilchameleons
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 "anyone can edit" Wikipedia
- obviously, this is not true. Anyone can hypothetically write for Britannica,
but only those that pass a certain muster actually do.

~~~
billpatrianakos
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 it's a total class act and it has a lot to
do with these policies.

I'm sure you know that Wikipedia has to constantly police itself for large
companies trying to mess with competitor's pages and how there are armies of
political operatives out there trying to rewrite history through Wikipedia.
This is why even experts like the OP are so scrutinized.

~~~
saalweachter
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.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Well that same thing also wouldn't hurt me either but I'm not Coca Cola.
That's what I'm talking about. No one cares about small businesses or startups
at all. If you're a company that no one even searches for on Google Places
this doesn't apply to you.

It is a fact that these things happen and whether it's harmful or not it isn't
right and it's the reason for these policies.

------
BasDirks
" _I’m a notable person on Wikipedia, as well as an expert in search
marketing. So for what it’s worth, you’re seriously questioning whether Jessie
should have her own page? That’s just crazy.

The page should be restored, and immediately. She’s clearly notable._"

These lines make it clear enough what kind of clown we're dealing with.

------
true_religion
The 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.

~~~
andreyvit
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).

------
whazzmaster
I 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 source and started randomly changing entries.

His first (and in my mind best) work was when another friend who is very into
music mentioned a jazz musician that he really liked. The professor friend
said, "Oh yeah, he's the one that composed the background track to I Wanna Sex
You Up". Then he rushed off to update that artist's wikipedia page to reflect
that statement. My musically-inclined friend called back the next day and
said, "Wow, I never would have guessed that!"

Is this a good thing? Absolutely not. However, seeing the unquestioned
acceptance of Wikipedia content has opened my eyes to the way that the system
can be gamed or used to support lies or propaganda. Because a musician was
wronged? No, its the principle. I now take everything I read on wikipedia with
a colossal grain of salt. You should too.

~~~
scarmig
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.

~~~
whazzmaster
That is true, understanding what makes Wikipedia susceptible to biased
thinking, scamming, or propaganda widens your view to understand that
newspaper articles, government press releases, and technology journalism (to
name only a few) are also to be taken with a grain of salt.

------
rospaya
The bigger issue with Wikipedia is the bad UI and tons of bureaucracy that
make everybody except hardcore users beware of editing.

~~~
zbowling
We go out of our way on Wikipedia to make everyone feel welcome to edit
anything. If someone makes a good faith mistake, more often or not, you are
sent a welcome message fairly quickly by either a vandal patroller or an
admin. New users will get hit up after their 2nd or 3rd edit with a Welcome
message too.

I have tools that help me help new users out quick in my dashboard. It's part
of what I do. No body should feel afraid to edit Wikipedia. Ever. It's a
public resource.

~~~
iFire
If it fails once, why aren't we fixing it?

------
ioquatix
Yeah, I've had similar experiences with Wikipedia. In the end I just gave up
trying to contribute. Some user even has a bot that now chases me around when
I make edits...

------
Chirael
I can't agree with this post strongly enough. It's an amazing small insular
community of bureaucracy.

I've tried to make a few minor edits and had my edits undone and squashed in a
pretty unfriendly way, and encountered the same things that the author of this
article did.

Bravo for calling it out and posting about it.

------
spullara
Looks like Danny's article on wikipedia has now come under scrutiny:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Sullivan_(technologist)>

"The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability
guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary
sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is
likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. (November 2011)"

Personally, I think the notability guidelines are pretty outrageous and wildly
out of date. I mean, how long before there aren't any "legitimate
publications" by their standard?

~~~
yuvipanda
Quoting from the talk page:

> Given the extensive list of sources covering this individual above, please
> explain exactly how the subject does not meet Wikipedia's notability
> criteria. If others agree, the tag can be restored - but you cannot tag an
> article that meets the criteria simply because you don't like them.
> --Jezebel'sPonyo

And the tag has been removed.

------
pithic
I made this site awhile back, partly to address some of Wikipedia's conceptual
peccadillos (notability, navigability, less than full openness). It didn't get
traction, and I found it hard to market a knowledge-sharing site, in part
because almost nobody is actively searching for knowledge-sharing solutions.

The core idea was a bidirectionally weighted graph where users could set the
weightings using slider controls. I've since moved on to another project.
Anyhoo, the site is mobwa.com. Sooner or later I'll get around to taking it
down.

------
Flibbler
I love Wikipedia, both the idea behind it and the site it's self, and have
contributed plenty of time and cash over the years. However I have to agree
that the processes have become far too labyrinthine and unfriendly for the
uninitiated.

We (the existing Wikipedia community) need to have a rethink of how we lay out
our rules and guides and the process for navigating them, we also need to
start being a smidge more consistent about how we enforce the rules.

Mostly though, we need to be a little more tolerant of the N00Bs. I get it's
tricky, you're busy, hundred things at once and some muppet comes in asking
the same question we've been asked 16million times before; it's easy to be a
bit terse, but if we want Wikipedia to continue to succeed we need to take a
deep breath in those moments and remember to that person, at that moment, we
are Wikipedia. A bad impression that turns them away from the site means
they're unlikely to ever come back and that's the last thing we want.

I get why everyone's being defensive, and yes, the article was written in a
very combative style, but we also need to face up to it landing a few fair
points, lets take those and get working on that instead of wasting time rowing
about who's in the right.

How can we clarify the deletion process for someone looking from the outside
in? How can we make it clearer who to contact in those sort of circumstances?
Is there any way we can make talking to people easier?

------
greenyoda
"About two weeks ago, Jessie Stricchiola let me know that her Wikipedia page
had been deleted. Apparently, she wasn’t notable enough."

Apparently, every fictional character from every forgotten TV show seems to
merit their own page (see, for example, the amount of space that Wikipedia
devotes to "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and its cast of characters). It's hard
to imagine why any real person wouldn't be "notable enough" by these
standards.

~~~
corin_
Because a far higher number of people know about and have an interest in Buffy
The Vampire Slayer than this Jessie person?

------
chalst
The reason why Wikipedia has these pages is because people push fringe science
theories, jingoist distortions of history, and inflated product claims if you
do not.

Even so, Wikipedia is effectively used to promote just these things. For
example, the editor FT2 got promoted to ArbCom while underming efforts to
eliminate pseudoscience. His philsophy he summed up "Writing for an
encyclopedia is not the same as writing for an academic paper. It's more like
writing the bibliography for an academic paper. We aren't trying to decide
what is "true" and what isn't. To be honest, we don't care what "the truth"
is, in that sense, because it's not what an encyclopedia is. An encyclopedia
is a collation of multiple perspectives and views. It's more like the
bibliography of a paper (listing all kinds of sources so long as they bear on
the topic) than the paper and its conclusion itself. Every view of note is in
there, represented neutrally. Theres no decision to make, few opinions to
form, other than to observe which views seem to be more or less common views
of note, and to understand each (and its sources) well enough to document. We
care that we document each view fully and with understanding. That is the
"truth" we work to here. "

[http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_Vi...](http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:The_Wikipedia_Point_of_View/Flavius_Vanillus#Dialogue_with_FT2)

If making WP more unfriendly would combat this kind of anti-scientific
bullshit, I would be in favour of it. I don't, though. A decent external
infrastructure for criticising Wikiedpia articles and groups of articles might
be more effective, which is why I have hopes for
<http://hypothes.is/index.html>

------
trotsky
If this guy had discovered the Internet in the early 90's I have confidence
that he would have been single handedly responsible for inventing top posting.

------
therandomguy
I'm sorry about your case and the frustration that you had to face. However,
they must be doing something right since Wikipedia has millions of user
contributed pages? Also it might not be easy to administer a website of that
size where anyone is free to go ahead and edit any of the hundreds of
thousands of pages. Maybe they are settling for 99% satisfaction? That said,
they do need our donations.

~~~
philwelch
Turns out if you throw together a few thousand neckbeards and convince them to
play status games around building an encyclopedia, you get an encyclopedia.

You also get a whole lot of stupid politics, wasted energy, process wanking,
flamewars, and acronym-laden cryptic discourses where words like "arbitration"
have strange, Orwellian connotations. ("Arbitration" is Wikipedia's name for
the process governing, among other things, removing administrator privileges
and banning contributors for long periods of time.) Contributing to Wikipedia
is a usability disaster because of all the red tape, process, policy, and
other crap the core group of contributors has constructed.

But the project is big and popular enough, and the work is easy enough, that
people still throw themselves into it. You start by just making a few small
edits to something, or adding some sources and information to an article. Then
it goes on a bit, and you learn some of the terminology and process, and you
start feeling personally invested in it. I mean, it's Wikipedia! It has lots
of information about everything! It's free! The human race needs something
like this! Before you know it, you're in a "community" of core contributors.
There are people with impressive titles like "arbitrator", "administrator",
"bureaucrat". You start playing status games. You worry about your edit count.
You try to get an article up to "featured article" status. You network. You
try not to make enemies. You try to sound wise on "Articles for Deletion", or
the "Administrator's Noticeboard", or a million different talk pages.
Eventually someone nominates you for administrator. You answer a few questions
and other contributors vote for you. Let's assume you played politics well
enough leading up to this point. You win! Now in addition to all the crap you
were doing before, you get to play with your administrator tools as well. Fun,
eh? Well, for some people it is. But at that level, Wikipedia is 90% politics.
There's an awesome encyclopedia there for sure, but man, you don't want to see
how the sausage is made.

~~~
arctangent
With a few changes this excellent description of Wikipedia politics and
bureaucracy could accurately describe my social life.

~~~
philwelch
I am so sorry.

------
lincolnwebs
My experiences are identical. Their notion of community is tragic.

------
budley
What most amuses me about all this is that it is the most famous Jessie
Stricchiola has ever been.

------
viraptor
I 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?

~~~
mindcrime
Many (most? all?) of the Stackexchange sites are already overwhelmingly
bureaucratic. The difference between Wikipedia and SE is that on SE, the
problem isn't "deletionism" it's "closequestionitis." That and a generally
unwelcoming / unfriendly attitude expressed towards n00bs. But, ya know, it's
working for them (for now at least) so what can ya do?

------
bdrocco
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

~~~
prodigal_erik
We have an entire web full of whatever unverifiable stuff anyone felt like
writing. Why should Wikimedia beg for more resources to expend mirroring
content that isn't reliable enough to contribute to their goals?

------
SeanLuke
Don't get me started about the time I engaged in a revision war with the
crazies over the Serial (Oxford) Comma. The Wikipedia page _still_ has an
"example" of where the Serial Comma "leads to ambiguity", but which is
grammatically incorrect. All I was asking for was a single grammatically
proper example to back up the extraordinary claim that the anti-serial-comma
folks were making. They couldn't provide it but why does that matter when the
revert button is so easy to press?

------
mrbill
Can be summed up pretty easily:

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/butthurt>

------
njharman
Wikipedia is a clique. But, the author is kind of a "clueless as to how to
work with strangers, esp voluntary strangers" idiot.

The key to getting your way (in anything) is to work the system. Learn it's
idiosyncrasies, etc. Complaining that it doesn't work the way you want it to
is fail.

~~~
waqf
I love how you spelled "idiosyncrasies" correctly but failed with "its".

------
kondro
Who's with me for providing a version of Wikipedia (there data is open right)
that contains all pages that were ever deleted for notability reasons.

I fail to see how whether something is notable makes it more or less a fact
that should be categorized.

~~~
rospaya
It already exists and is called Deletionpedia.

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page>

------
nachteilig
It seems like one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is the admin class.
They often adopt this "us vs them" bunker mentality like one discovers with a
few bad police apples. This especially true with new and unregistered users.

------
Aramgutang
I'm unable to view the article; on Firefox, it never loads, and on Chrome,
there are two scrollbars, but none of them actually scroll, so I can't get
past the first page. Anyone care to provide a working copy?

------
test5625
<http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853> doesn't work in
Opera web browser.

------
richardw
A few years back, the list page for "gtd software" was deleted, the data was
lifted, moved to a private web page, the "gtd" page was pointed at the latter
as a reference! I (strongly) suspected the private company of arranging it via
a wiki-fu but couldn't prove it. Perfect example of gaming the system.

------
giddas
First they came for "the woman who was the pioneer in fighting click fraud"

Then they came for me

------
polemic
bitter blogger is bitter.

~~~
coffeeaddicted
Getting stuff rejected hurts a lot. I also skipped 1-2 donation rounds after
that happened to me in the past. But then again I continued using Wikipedia so
in the end I got over it ;-)

------
billpatrianakos
Sounds like a lot of whining to me. The author's reaction to this made him
lose all credibility with me.

First off, you think you're an expert? Maybe you are, maybe not but even
experts aren't always right and just because _you_ think in your infinite
expert wisdom that so and so should have a Wikipedia page, the majority of us
obviously don't.

Secondly, so sorry the appeals process was so inconvenient for you. So far
Wikipedia is doing just fine and your rant doesn't seem to be hurting them
much. With all the garbage that people attempt to post on Wikipedia, there's a
good reason for all the walls.

In the end this comes off like a know-it-all's childish hissy fit for not
getting his way. The world doesn't have to accept your point of view. Your
response to this whole thing probably played a large role in you not getting
what you wanted.

Next time try to up think about _why_ some of these things are in place, know
that you can't jump ahead of someone else in charge just because you think
you're better qualified (it's first volunteer, first served on Wikipedia) and
just approach the issue with a lot more tact and less childish kicking and
screaming next time.

Some people love to talk about ideals like freedom, democracy, fairness, and
all that but as soon as it inconveniences them they take the position that
somehow those rules are for everyone else and they're somehow special. This
guy doesn't fall in with the ideals thing I was talking about but he somehow
managed to convince himself that everyone should just see thing _his_ way.

How dare a free, worldwide, not for profit, website with a 99% democratic
submission and editing process not bend to your will! The audacity!

Welcome to Wikipedia on the WWW where majority rules (even if you think
they're all stupid-heads). I hope Jimmy Wales sends you a personal apology.
Now let's all go edit the Wikipedia pages for "Cry Baby", "Brat", and "Temper
Tantrum" and cite the author as a living example.

~~~
eykanal
What's with all the hate? The author has a lot of valid points.

1) If it's supposed to be the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit", then it
should be easy to use. If the "anyone can edit" is marred by insane levels of
bureaucracy, making it so that, _technically_ anyone can edit, but
_realistically_ , only those who know how to game the system can edit, than
the system as a whole is a partial failure.

2) Who are you to judge whether he's an expert? Given that he at least claims
to work in the field, that makes him more of an expert than almost all of the
wikipedia editors combined. They just know their own bureaucratic guidelines,
he actually knows something about the article in discussion. In the interest
of journalistic integrity, they should at least attempt to listen to his
points.

3) His points about how difficult it is to contest something is completely
spot-on. There's no good reason why all the "contest this" or "discuss that"
pages are simply huge text pages, other than because no one gave them a proper
UI. For new users, it's confusing as heck. Given the status wikipedia has
nowadays, and how widely it's used, they simply can't expect every user to
know or care about their arcane systems. The system needs a proper UI for
these sorts of things, making it easy to (a) file a complaint, (b) find a
previously filed complaint, (c) discuss the complaint, and (d) find the
resolution. His story about wading through talk pages isn't unusual, and it's
kind of shameful for wikipedia that they haven't made it easier to use since
their inception.

~~~
vacri
It is easy to use. It's just not mindless to use. It's easy to drive a car,
but that doesn't mean there's no initial learning. Also, where you say 'game
the system', you really mean 'follow the system'.

I've made tons of correctional edits and vandal reversions on Wikipedia, and a
small number of new info edits. Only one of them has ever caused a problem -
that was a revert done by a bot that didn't recognise I was fixing vandalism
(some previous errant edit had blown the page of a seagoing vessel out to the
longest page on wikipedia by far, with ctrl+c ctrl+V). The bot that wouldn't
let me revert also wouldn't let anyone comment on the talk page, and the
feedback link for it was broken.

But apart from that one experience, I've made probably somewhere between
100-200 successful edits. I don't even have an account, I edit anonymously.

~~~
Flibbler
Just because you find it easy doesn't mean others do, agreed there's an
initial learning curve to everything in life but we (current Wikipedia
contributors) could be doing a lot more to smooth that curve for less
technically minded people who want to contribute.

We could also be doing more to make the basics of the rules clearer.

------
suivix
I changed 'tyre' to 'tire' in an article and got a vandalism notice on my talk
page. That's when I stopped contributing.

~~~
swang
DO NOT move Orange (colour) to Orange (color).

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.

The problem with Wikipedia is its a very large bureaucracy, and the culture of
Wikipedia seems to weigh heavier on confirming from 3rd party sources that a
person is "notable"

What's confusing is that Wikipedia also wants to "welcome" anonymous edits,
which leads to huge problems with vandalism, but editing Wikipedia has a high
learning curve.

~~~
quanticle
>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.

------
HnNoPassMailer
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction>

> Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, written collaboratively by the people who
> use it.

There's the problem. Wikipedia should stop being an encyclopedia and start
being Wikipedia.

~~~
Tsagadai
I completely agree. I think Wikipedia should stop trying to be an
encyclopaedia and start being a source of encyclopaedic information. The whole
notability blame game detracts from it overall. Sure some elementary school in
North-East Canada might seem useless now but in 500 years that entire area
might be a huge city. History tells us that sometimes inane details from the
past become our keys to understanding the past and our world. I think it is
unfortunate that Wikipedia tries to assess what is important in the future by
a clique's definition of what is important to them now.

~~~
mangodrunk
It is a question of verifiability and maintainability. Why you would think
that having broken windows would help is beyond me.

------
zotz
Someone at Wikipedia recently requested speedy deletion for the article on
Ilya Zhitomirskiy, two days AFTER he died. The vote was to keep:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Ilya_Zhitomirskiy)

I was an early user and editor of Wikipedia. I greatly dislike cliquishness
and clannishness so I didn't last. The above treatment of a dead young coder
only solidifies my decision to cease my association with the place.

~~~
slyall
The article wasn't created until after he had died as is made clear by the
discussion and the edit history.

People create articles all the time about their recently deceased grandfather
who was an ordinary soldier in WW2. These usually get deleted unless the
person was otherwise noteable.

If I request that such a "grandfather" article is deleted it is not cause I
hate your grandfather or want to hurt you. It is just that there were millions
of other ordinary soldiers in WW2 so your granddad wasn't anybody special in
history even if he was special to you.

~~~
zotz
Wisely, the vote was to keep.

------
SaltwaterC
The Wikipedia's definition of "notable" is a heap of crap. Maybe somebody
should donate Jimmy a dictionary, besides the cash he's looking for.

------
vacri
Reading a lot of these and previous comments on HN, it seems:

Steve Jobs, harsh policies, shiny product: Good!

Jim Wales, harsh policies, shiny product: Bad!

------
nomdeplume
... and they want $20 million for our work that they don't want. poor
Wikipedia

