
Watching Wikipedia's extinction event from a distance - maxerickson
http://boingboing.net/2017/02/14/watching-wikipedias-extincti.html
======
tlow
In October 2010, I authored my first Wikipedia entry[1] and it was immediately
tagged for speedy deletion by an admin named Academic Challenger[2], a person
who proudly proclaims "I have deleted over 10000 pages from Wikipedia that
meet Wikipedia's criteria for speedy deletion." The problem is that he
indiscriminately tags most articles for speedy deletion. As my article met the
Wikipedia standard for "noteworthiness" I was determined to fight this abuse
of power, which I did and through the help of another admin (who
unsurprisingly was familiar with Academic Challenger) and restored the page,
which is still up today and has been edited by many people who are not me.

Wikipedia clearly struggles with content review and creation, but it overall
has been highly successful. The question seems to be, moving forward, how
might maintain the ethos of Wikipedia in a changing world?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanwell)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Academic_Challenger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Academic_Challenger)
Looking at the revision history, I do not see Academic Challenger's action in
the logs of the talk page. Anyone know why?

~~~
The_ed17
Wikipedia admin here. Re your question, that's because you've accused the
wrong editor.[1] :-)

Looking at the article at the time it was nominated,[2] there isn't much of an
explicit claim to being notable under Wikipedia's policies.[3] However, it was
nominated for speedy deletion all of seven minutes after you created it—pretty
quick, something I never like to see for articles that fall into a grey area.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&diff=38...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&diff=388029379&oldid=388028975)
\- the actual editor was
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Terrillja](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Terrillja).

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&oldid=3...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cleanwell&oldid=388028975)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)
\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credible_claim_of_si...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Credible_claim_of_significance)

~~~
tlow
Perhaps I have remembered incorrectly. I am far out of my depth of knowledge,
so I defer to your information. Also please excuse my conflation of notability
and "noteworthiness". As you can see and I think we can understand, as my
first entry, I didn't know exactly how and what to do.

In spite of this, I have this distinct memory of AC being a problem, I will
look through my change log (Tlow03) and see if perhaps the article was moved
or renamed from my original attempt.

Also thank you for this clarification and you're right I think it probably was
a grey area, but I do think the compound in question is a novel hand sanitizer
that is the only of it's kind I know of.

DISCLAIMER: I have no affiliation with the company at this time, a friend once
worked there, but I do not and never have had any financial interest.

Update: Yes the "boom your contribution is gone and doesn't belong here"
almost the moment you write it feels very hostile.

~~~
aaronchall
That post didn't look particularly noteworthy to me, but I remember creating a
similar page regarding a casual wear company (called "Lost..." if I recall)
that I got distracted with one time. I saw their logos in my local mall in
every department store. I spent a lot of time researching and writing up an
article on the company. Then it got deleted. Probably not particularly
noteworthy either, even if at one time it was a national brand.

I also wrote up a thorough discussion of various kinds of permanent life
insurance contracts (I was a financial advisor at the time, and I had spent a
lot of time studying them, and wanted others to have that information). I
think the bulk of my contribution managed to get redacted at some point, but
it lives on in the version control, forever.

There's a lot of stakeholders to Wikipedia: the subjects of articles and their
followers, hawkish community members who try to control new and changed
content, and consultants who charge money to change the framing of subjects on
the site.

As a result, pages tend to be flattering of their subjects, unless the
subjects don't have a lot of followers who speak the language that the page is
written in. And new pages are likely to be deleted unless you have the
cooperation of community members who will advocate for it when you start
focusing on something else.

Now I mostly write up Python on Stack Overflow, where I get credit for my
answers in terms of valuable internet points, which reflects my reputation in
the community.

Perhaps Wikipedia could learn something from Stack Overflow. But
unfortunately, it looks like they have incentivized deleting content and
creating value for subjects over creating value for readers.

------
seagreen
If anyone's interested I've got thoughts on how to improve wikis here:
[https://housejeffries.com/page/4](https://housejeffries.com/page/4)

My main issue with current wikis is that if you make a contribution and it's
deleted, it's gone from the web. I think that if you're making heavy
contributions to a page they should start on a personal wiki and then be
pulled into the main wiki "pull request" style.

That way if some over-aggressive editor deletes your work it stays on the
internet, just on your personal wiki instead of the main site.

~~~
Balgair
I think this is not going to work on any large scale. Say you are a domain
expert in some tiny little plant on some tiny island. Like, you wrote your PhD
thesis on that plant. Sure, this is not very 'big', but it merits inclusion
into the Wiki. Telling people that want to contribute, that are the domain
experts, that have read and debated all the sources of which they may be the
definitive source, that they have to go figure out how to set up their own
wiki somewhere and then try to figure how to 'pull' and 'push' things to
Wikipedia on a semi-regular basis because of some bot's deletion bias is the
best way to make certain that Wikipedia is only written by insane people.

~~~
aleksei
The point is that the article is likely to be deleted, so if anyone sets up
their own wiki it's a net win, since the information won't be deleted
altogether.

~~~
Balgair
I understand the point, what I am saying is that most of the contributors will
have no idea how to implement this idea nor the technical chops to do it.

------
guaka
[http://deletionpedia.org/](http://deletionpedia.org/) is a small project to
cope with this in a positive way. A couple of years ago, when I was frustrated
by deletionism once again, I wrote a bot that automatically copies articles
that are about to be deleted.

~~~
adekok
My experience was that the prime criteria for deletion was that the Wikipedia
editors be unfamiliar with the material.

1000 pages on Pokemon? Great!

2 pages on obscure technical subjects, of interest to tens of thousands of IT
admins world-wide? Nah... get rid of it.

I stopped contributing to Wikipedia when my edits were nuked as often as they
were made. When spammers and people making _negative_ contributions had their
changes last longer than people making positive changes... well... Wikipedia
is no longer of interest.

~~~
Frqy3
Wikipedia (with it's current edit culture) is an example of what bikeshedding
looks like when scaled up.

------
jordigh
Hm, I've been patrolling my only big contribution to Wikipedia, another niche
article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medcouple)

Woohoo, someone just made a nontrivial edit to it!

But other than that, it seems to be mostly flying under everyone's radar. I
hope it doesn't get deleted, but it might for being too niche. If it does, I
guess I'll have to find a statistics wiki to move it to. Most of Wikipedia's
deleted niche content ends up migrating to wikia or similar.

~~~
The_ed17
It shouldn't get deleted—on a quick read, it looks like it meets Wikipedia's
notability policy.[1] :-)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)

~~~
Bartweiss
Historically, that's not much protection for a short article. The Deletionists
largely won the war, and plenty of acceptably-notable articles get tagged with
"en-encyclopedic" or other bases.

~~~
pmoriarty
If you think the deletionists won, you should try hitting Wikipedia's "Random
Article"[1] link a few times.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)

~~~
ubernostrum
This is like saying "well, our side lost 90,000 out of our 100,000 soldiers,
but the fact that you can still find 10,000 soldiers on our side means the
enemy didn't win!"

~~~
yellowapple
Depending on the objectives of the military engagement in question, the
casualty count is not necessarily the determining factor when it comes to who
"won" said engagement.

------
yread
The article has since been restored. Look at the history and the copy-paste
from a book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&oldid=764679803)

How does an experienced user (he has 14k edits!) make an edit like that?

EDIT: TIL article history page is not necessarily accurate on deleted articles

~~~
The_ed17
Wikipedia admin here. The edits that added the copyrighted material have been
deleted, so this diff[1] isn't exactly accurate.

That said, I've just fixed the history page so that the deleted edits actually
appear, even if you can't read the material in them.[2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&diff=...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&diff=764679803&oldid=740559466)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&action=history)

~~~
ubernostrum
And yet this probably only happened because it was getting coverage.

I did my time as a Wikipedia editor. I've watched others do it, too. It's
exhausting. You end up obsessively checking your watchlist multiple times a
day, then every hour, then multiple times per hour, because you never know
when someone will get you in their sights. And then you have to be prepared to
obsessively watch talk pages and project pages and noticeboards 24/7 to be
ready to come back in and copy/paste sources and arguments and the appropriate
WP:IMEMORIZEDWIKISPEAK links over and over and over again to try to defend
something. And even then you probably won't succeed.

Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it. The effort involved in
creating and preserving a piece of worthwhile content is orders of magnitude
higher than the effort involved in deleting it, and people who get stuff
deleted also get rewarded for doing so, while people who create and maintain
get comparatively very little recognition. Eventually Wikipedia will have only
two articles, someone will propose merging them, and them someone else will
speedy-delete the last one for breaking various rules. And that'll be the end
of it.

~~~
Lazare
Yep. I too tried to edit wikipedia, and then gave up. The experience was
unpleasant and exhausting.

> Wikipedia is eating itself and is smugly proud of it.

Oh yes. The smugness cannot be underestimated, and in some ways is the worst
part of the whole process.

------
dredmorbius
A few points, as a sometime Wikipedian.

1\. Yes, Wikipedia has its challenges, there are flaws in the underlying
assumptions of its originators, and it's not perfect. _But it is better, in
general, than any other resource to date_ , and is widely transparent to boot.

2\. Conflicts over editorial content are nothing new, nor are they distinct to
open collaborative projects. A few months back I turned up an instance from
1874, in which the British publishers, and American printers, of _Chamber 's
Encyclopaedia_ had significant differences of opinion on a number of topics,
including on the topics of free trade, (economic) protection, slavery, and
biographical details of Elizabeth I and heirs. It's a rare in sight to the
process.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chambers_encyclopaedia_editorial_statement/)

Another set of conflicts of which I'm recently aware concern Joseph Needham,
biochemist and sinologist, whose research and writing were emperiled by his
naive participation in what turned out to be a Chinese- and Soviet-led
propaganda campaign. Documented in Simon Winchester's _The Man who Loved
China_.

3\. I've authored or contributed to a number of Wikipedia articles myself. In
some cases, particularly in noting the blatant disinformation campaigns of
Koch Industries and Libertarian partisans in particular, especially on global
climate change, I've been rather frustrated. I've originated a couple of
articles. One, on the present NPR president Jarl Mohn, was slated for deletion
on numerous grounds when I first submitted it. The result of working with
other more experienced editors was a substantially improved and strengthened
article which still stands. I'd created the article after being surprised to
find it didn't exist at all.

Yes, camping out on and watching articles may be useful to avoid more serious
disruption, particularly on contentious topics. And Wikipedia _does_ have a
problem, _as does all media_ , on ideologically-tainted topics. No, the truth
doesn't always win out.

But it does pretty well, all told.

~~~
TuringTest
> But it does pretty well, all told

The main problem IMHO is that it stands largely on inertia from a bygone era,
the pre-2007 period where most of the existing basic content was put in place
by a swarm of highly motivated volunteers with a few loose rules.

This is completely different from the current situation, where the bureaucracy
has been ossified into a neverending rulebook designed to protect the precious
content from vandals and good-willed naive newcomers, in the hands of a
shrinking and overworked zealous user base.

The original drive that got the whole thing up is gone. The only regulars are
equally split among inclusionists and deletionists, but by its very nature
deletionism will prevail in the long term - it only takes succeeding once to
get rid of an article forever, while people defending interesting content from
removal need to keep an active watch and regularly spend effort in fighting
for its survival.

------
ChuckMcM
I think the periodic outreach for donations on Wikipedia would be more
successful if they earmarked some portion of the funds to identify and remove
harmful volunteers.

~~~
seqastian
.. and didn't fight net neutrality in 3rd world countries.

~~~
exception_e
source?

~~~
saurik
Seriously? In addition to having been fairly big news, and having been covered
and talked about on this website numerous times, it took me all of three
seconds with a single generic Google search to get a high-profile news result
that focusses on the issue. Knee-jerk challenges to source things should be
limited to things that are at least slightly difficult to find sources for and
which are also difficult to believe.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2014/11/25...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
switch/wp/2014/11/25/wikipedias-complicated-relationship-with-net-neutrality/)

~~~
yellowapple
Not the GP, but while I'd give you credit for the "at least slightly difficult
to find sources for" part of that, "difficult to believe" definitely applies
(at least for the average person) when it comes to a claim that Wikipedia, of
all organizations, acts deliberately to undermine net neutrality.

Not that you're wrong, of course; only that asking for a source for such a
claim is by no means unreasonable.

------
petee
I watch topics that interest me, especially if i know nearly nobody else cares
about them:

\- takes 2 seconds every day to check the list (on speed-dial, next to HN) \-
30 seconds to read a diff \- and 1 second to click 'undo' (or a couple minutes
of research/learning for an edit)

What's nice, is that there is a dispute process that the community takes
pretty seriously, and you can always ask for assistance. As another user
pointed out, the article has already been restored :)

~~~
cpncrunch
I find it ironic that the author of this article bemoans the incompetent
wikipedia admin who deleted the article, yet she didn't bother spending the 30
seconds necessary to post a comment on the talk page.

Wikipedia works through volunteers, and if you don't bother giving up a little
bit of your time to improve it, you don't really have any right to complain.

I see regular articles on HN prophesying the death of wikipedia, but it
doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

~~~
JdeBP
Presumably, then, someone who bothered quite a lot and _gave up a lot of time
to research and write the beginnings of an article_ very much _does_ have the
right to complain.

~~~
cpncrunch
Not if they didn't expend the 30 seconds of time necessary to prevent the
deletion. It really doesn't take much effort...

~~~
TuringTest
The whole point of the article is that those 30 seconds (for reviewing the
deletion request and possibly oppose it) need to be multiplied by the several
thousands of stubs that are proposed for deletion every day.

------
redsummer
Wikipedia was the original fake news. For instance, someone might edit an
article to say that a person was a known political extremist. Someone else
might write an article (not on Wikipedia) saying the same thing (after having
read the Wikipedia article). Years later, if the information is questioned on
Wikipedia, then editors will add a reference to the off-wiki article, and
everyone will be happy. Circular fake news, with truth going down the
plughole. The entropic heat death of information.

I've looked at large articles I contributed to a few years ago and they are
now disasters. Full of bowdlerisation, inconsistent style, and false snippets
of information. I think the abusive nature of many Wikipedia admins, and the
hostility of Wikipedia itself to knowledge, will eventually just make it a
4chan with pretentions.

~~~
MaxfordAndSons
Since the election I've seen pretty much every major news and reference
information source disparaged as "fake news" by comments like this. It begs
the question: if every major source is untrustworthy, if it's all a chain of
lies all the way down, how does anyone know anything? Can those who have seen
the light please point the rest of us to the untainted source of pure truth
you've cross referenced against to confirm this?

It seems like there are plenty of people in the world who manage to act
productively on the information they have, but maybe it's all just a big
conspiracy - nobody has ever known a single fact.

~~~
gukov
Everything becomes much clearer once you realize that everyone is for
themselves, and that includes mass media who report stuff in a way that
increases the clicks and the views.

The majority of us have been conditioned to worry, actually worry, about stuff
that we have absolutely no control nor expert knowledge. The majority of our
time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our immediate circle of
people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that order. Turn on the TV
or open your facebook and you'll that the hierarchy is completely reversed.

~~~
quanticle

        The majority of our time should be spent on worrying about ourselves, our 
        immediate circle of people, our neighborhood, city, country, planet. In that 
        order.
    

In response, I'm just going to quote Martin Niemoller:

    
    
        First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
        Because I was not a Socialist.
    
        Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— 
        Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
    
        Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— 
        Because I was not a Jew.
    
        Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
    

Your approach rules out collective action on any kind of scale that can change
the direction of a nation. There are always concerns at the family and local
levels. What we need to understand is that sometimes concerns at the larger
levels (country, planet) that outweigh our local concerns.

------
cjslep
I'm far removed from Wikipedia's social/cultural realm and yet I've only ever
heard negative things about the deletionist culture there. Is the deletionist
rationale that fewer articles == fewer spots for vandalism to occur?

~~~
jordigh
I think people had a hard time taking Wikipedia seriously when there were more
articles about Wookie culture and light sabre colours than there were about
chickens or water. So, the deletionist culture seems to be about pride, focus
on the serious business so that Wikipedia can be taken seriously and have a
better reputation.

~~~
jonathankoren
Perhaps, but it's also a database and it doesn't really hurt anything. We can
point at pretty much any article and find a strange influence of geek male
culture all over the encyclopedia. "In Popular Culture" (which I think is now
supposed to be removed from articles) all too often simply contained links to
video games and obscure anime.

Personally, I find the shift to wikia troubling. Mainly because it came down
from Jimbo to purge the articles and move them to wikia, which _ahem_ Jimbo
runs and profits from.

~~~
emodendroket
"In popular culture" sections almost never add anything, yeah.

------
alexandercrohde
Uh, I really disagree with this article's premise. The author identifies a
page he added that was deleted, and his contribution was lost (on more than
one occasion), and cites this as evidence of wikipedia's inevitable demise.

Though such inefficiencies are unfortunate, and discouraging, I think they
only slow progress. I think evenutally an article on Hemovidin will be written
and not deleted, and I wouldn't be surprised if most encyclopedias don't even
have such an entry.

There is some clunkiness around wikipedia, but compared to academia (which
almost everybody without journal access and fluency in english is restricted
from reading) it's by far superior. In fact, I can't think of another better
source of reliable information that is freely and widely accessible.

~~~
nickpsecurity
It's part of a larger trend described here that turn the site into what's
essentially maintenance mode vs thriving with new content:

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-
wik...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/)

It might survive but not the way intended.

~~~
vacri
I've been reading "Wikipedia is about to die! Everyone is about to leave!"
articles for almost a decade. It's still there. Similarly, the low-hanging
fruit has already been done. Maintenance-mode was always going to be on the
cards.

The centrepiece in TFA is about a two-paragraph, four-sentence article. It's a
_terrible_ article, and should be rolled into another one. Any article that
could be given in two tweets is a trivia-night factoid, not an article - I
fundamentally disagree with TFA that it's "articles like this that make
Wikipedia great". These kind of brief factoids are the type of content that
shitty clickfarms have.

TFA even uses Britannica as a defense, saying that it has an article... but
click on the link, and "Britannica does not currently have an article on this
topic". Hemovanadin has, however, been rolled into another article - 'cell
pigmentation'. Not exactly a sterling defense for the author.

\---

I always see this happen with these bitter predictions of WP's death. People
are either complaining about disagreement on an obviously subjective topic
(like a politician's bio), or their chain-of-evidence is suspect, like in this
case.

Here are the stats:
[https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_...](https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm#editor_activity_levels)

Look at the blue columns - number of editors per month/quarter with 5 and 100
edits - and it's been pretty consistent since 2010. Yeah, the heady days of
2007/08 are gone, but again, low-hanging fruit.

~~~
TuringTest
> Similarly, the low-hanging fruit has already been done

That's a popular reply to criticism of the poor status of the Wikipedia
community, but it's largely false for anything that is not an US-centric
vision of popular topics on Western culture.

As I've written elsewhere, the toxic culture and ossified rules would make it
impossible nowadays to bootstrap the collaboration efforts needed to fix the
well-known biases in coverage. The same policies that keep the current content
to crumble from bots and advertisers prevent us from regaining the original
drive of the original writing effort.

> It's a terrible article,

That's how all articles in Wikipedia started.

> and should be rolled into another one. That's a non-sequitur. If it's a
> notable independent topic, it should exist on its own, unless there are good
> reasons why it should be included only as part of a larger article where
> it's a natural fit.

Most often that not, there is no other place where that content would make
sense as a section of a larger topic, so that mindset will ultimately lead to
deletion of notable and well-referenced content.

------
wainstead
> Wikipedia went from people writing an encyclopedia to people writing rules
> about writing an encyclopedia, or writing bots to defend an encyclopedia,
> but without enough safeguards to save content from deletionists.

Sounds like another example of "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."

[http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...](http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html)

------
joshuak
This reminds me of the very insightful article "Geeks, MOPs, and
sociopaths"[1] posted on hn a couple of years ago.

I'm not sure to what degree it can be mitigated, but it sure seems like
something to account for when engineering social content communities.

[1] [https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-
sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

------
swang
i may have posted this before.

when i use to be active on wikipedia editing mainly video game and sports
articles, i stumbled upon a large sockpuppet that was constantly adding
incorrect pieces of information to articles pertaining mainly to video games,
espn, wrestling. this sockpuppet had a very clear M.O. and did the same
actions, and even if you made changes, the person would go about and revert
them.

getting all these accounts for this one sockpuppeter was a huge pain in the
ass though, and finally i was exhausted dealing with it, so the next best
thing for me was to reduce the surface area he could troll around. so i began
looking at articles he had created, there was an article about a nintendo ds
bratz game. he had created the article, filled it with random information and
had left it. so i nominated it for deletion since it wasn't really a notable
video game.

now this was before deletionists were a huge thing on wikipedia. i myself am
not a huge deletionist but at best this game is a small mention in an article
about bratz merchandising.

but almost immediately a huge flood of people came in to say that it was a
notable game, with links from ign.. they weren't actual articles about the
game, just literally the computer generated page they had for the game.

i think i made a couple comments arguing why it didn't deserve to have its own
page but in the end i just gave up. not worth my time when i was honestly
trying to improve the quality of the site.

so i guess my whole point writing this is the problem isn't with deletionists,
it's the entire bureaucracy of wikipedia. i remember going through arbcom so
many times because people disagreed with me about how a video game article
should be written. or how alicia keys birthday is incorrect (she was born in
1980, not 1981) but because _everyone_ references wikipedia and cites it as
the ultimate source, you can never get it changed because people ACTUALLY
monitor and turfwar her wikipedia page.

~~~
bjourne
How would deleting an article he had created "reduce the surface area he could
troll around?"

------
narrator
Deletionist culture is also a big problem in the Gnome UI. For a long time
they were deleting features like crazy. Same goes for Systemd.

I think people like deleting features because it's easy and seems like
progress. It's a bikeshedding phenomenon.

The solution to this is to have a flexible module system so people can have
their almost nothing "non-bloated" system and other people can have features.
Same could work for wikipedia. You could have the core wikipedia and the alt
hierarchy. It could work like usenet.

~~~
digi_owl
Its rampant across FOSS these days. People should from the hilltops how many
lines of "old" code they have eradicated.

------
Qcombinator
Wikipedia should never have existed.

Encyclopedias exist to provide (a) access to information, (b) organisation,
and (c) some guarantee of expertise. It's easy to take for granted how amazing
it is to have a world of information at our fingertips, but the Internet
itself provides greater access to more information than any encyclopedia ever
could. (And of course Wikipedia deliberately eschews original content anyway.)
We already have tools to organise and find information on the Internet: it's
called Google. Or DuckDuckGo. Or etc. How much authority an encyclopedia has
depends on how much you trust its editors to be, or be able to find, experts
in the relevant subject matter. A search engine doesn't provide any guarantee
of accuracy in its results, but then neither does Wikipedia — most people
point out that it's up to you to follow the references and evaluate them. The
things Wikipedia is good at are the things that the Internet itself is good
at; and the things that the Internet on its own is bad at (e.g. vetting
accuracy) is not something that can really be fixed short of turning into
Britannica Online.

It's not quite that simple, of course. In theory, anyone can throw up a
webpage on hemovanadin for the world to see, and it is relatively easy to do
so, but it could be easier. What isn't so easy is collaborating — Wikipedia's
greatest strength is also its Achilles' heel: anyone from anywhere in the
world can contribute, constructively or destructively. But easier
collaboration is a technical issue. There's no reason in principle that a
centralised body should be required to manage all that. It's just that the
availability and user-friendliness of the necessary software currently provide
too much friction to ignore.

~~~
exception_e
The thing that makes Wikipedia so special is the fact that the community
strives to follow the guidelines they have set forth:

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article)

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability)

\-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold)

I'm not saying that every Wikipedia article adheres to them, but generally
speaking, the quality is good and bias is severely frowned upon. "Random" web
pages on any given topic miss out on these guidelines and are generally non-
collaborative.

Full disclosure: I'm a big fan/consumer of Wikipedia... absolutely love the
philosophy behind it.

------
M_Grey
Wikipedia is a very useful resource for some things, especially as a starting
point for a number of scientific and technical topics. I would never rely on
it though, as a sole source of information.

~~~
sgt101
what would,

you rely upon,

as your sole source of information?

~~~
eridius
Hacker news comments.

~~~
M_Grey
Truly not a bad answer, if you had to pick one source. This is a contentious
crowd that likes to cite sources and present fully fledged arguments. At the
very least I like to use the comments to quickly assess the article, and
whether it's a dud or not. Beyond that, sometimes the comments here on good
articles still manage to exceed even the articles they're commenting on.

------
the_watcher
It seems that several of the WikiProjects that are currently being worked on
are aimed at improving stub articles ("an article deemed too short to provide
encyclopedic coverage of a subject"). From the screenshot of the article the
author references, his article was a stub. My guess is that someone tried to
improve it, thinking that a book's coverage would be deemed encyclopedic, then
when it was deleted, the person who deleted saw that it had previously been a
stub and didn't look further into it.

~~~
guard-of-terra
It seems that copy paste from book and the insertion of copyright violation
banner were made in the same edit. Why on earth?

~~~
The_ed17
I've just fixed the article history to make the sequence of events clear.[1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hemovanadin&action=history)

------
dorianm
He could post his deleted articles on his blog too meanwhile.

------
leovonl
In 2004, I wrote the first article about a well-known but not very popular
brazilian singer in the portuguese Wikipedia. I spent the whole weekend on it,
citing references, finding dates, listing albums, etc.

A few years ago I went back to find the article much bigger... but it was
utter crap. The text was nowhere near unbiased, barely touched facts and
seemed more like a bedtime story about flying saucers than a wikipedia article
per se. There was more content indeed, but most data was obscured by something
that didn't looked at all like an encyclopedia article.

------
rurban
For exactly this reason I stopped contributing there. Flagrant admin abuse all
over with their new speedy deletion tool.

